POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[ReluctantSamurai]

As a follow up to the previous several posts...

Court packing has already been happening at the state level, with increasing attempts to do so in recent years. Case in point, Arizona:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...ppening-428601

Arizona’s Supreme Court had five judges for 56 years. But on December 19, 2016, thanks to a GOP-authored bill that was opposed by every Democrat in the state Legislature, Republican Governor Doug Ducey held a ceremony in the Old Capitol building to swear in a sixth justice, and then a seventh.

In all, Ducey has appointed five of the seven justices on the state court, taking a personal interest in vetting candidates with questions designed to ferret out a fidelity to textualism and an inclination to uphold, rather than overturn or tinker with, the law. His appointments, including the addition of the two new justices, have eliminated the court’s progressive caucus and swung it from a more moderate conservative tilt to one that emphasizes libertarianism, populism, and law and order, in line with Ducey’s own views. And the ages of its younger members mean the court likely will stay that way for years.

While Ducey consistently has said he was not packing the court for political purposes, Republicans acknowledge they wouldn’t have proposed the change if it would have meant handing over two seats for a Democratic governor to fill.

If at first you don't succeed, just change the playing field:

After the commission rejected his application for Ducey's fourth vacancy in 2019, Ducey simply replaced the three commissioners who had voted against Montgomery. Soon enough, his name made it to the governor’s desk, and he was seated on the court as Ducey's fifth and likely final appointee.

A body that had four conservatives and one liberal when Ducey took office now consisted of seven conservatives and zero liberals.

Contradiction at its' finest:

Mesnard, the lawmaker who sponsored the expansion bill, maintains that the effort was nothing like the “packing” that Democrats in Washington are considering now. Unlike national Democrats, he says, his motivation wasn’t to change the court’s ideological composition.

“I wasn’t trying to achieve a specific end,” he says. “It wasn’t like, ‘I don’t like the rulings coming out, so I want to add more to tilt it a certain way.’”

Still, he acknowledges that he wouldn’t have pushed the legislation if he were handing over two seats on the high court to a Democratic governor. “It’s impossible to separate the politics from that type of decision,” he said in a recent interview. “I wasn’t going to dance around it or pretend that there weren’t serious political implications.”

While the short-term changes to Arizona law haven't been as drastic as the Dems were forecasting, there's this warning to Arizona's future:

Despite this ruling, Democratic state Senator Martin Quezada, a lawyer who led the fight against the bill in 2016, says Democrats’ fears about the political implications have proved to be “a little overblown,” at least in the short term. Quezada now thinks Republicans were engaged in more of a long-game strategy designed to keep Democrats from enacting progressive policies for another generation, as a bulwark against the voters who are electing Democrats in increasing numbers.

Ducey’s five Supreme Court appointments in his six years in office have cemented a conservative legacy that will long outlive his governorship and, likely, the Republican majorities that have dominated the state capitol for more than 50 years. Three of the five conservative men Ducey has appointed are younger than the 56-year-old governor.

“As we turn blue, I think there’s a belief that we will do radically leftist policies, and those will be challenged and that court will be the backstop,” Quezada says. “And I can’t say it’s a bad strategy on their part. The state is turning blue, and that is a good way to maintain a backstop through the judicial system.”

In addition to the successful court-packing in Arizona, Georgia also succeeded in packing their State Supreme Court:

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery...026105&EXT=pdf

Specifically, in 2016, the Republican-controlled Georgia General Assembly considered a sweeping reform bill, intended not only to expand the supreme court from seven to nine justices, but also to restructure the appellate jurisdiction and procedures for the high court and the court of appeals. There was considerable speculation that the Republican governor was interested in expanding the court purely for political reasons; at the time, Georgia had four Democratic appointees and only three Republican ones. And in Georgia,the governor has full autonomy in selecting justices. Over accusations of court packing, the General Assembly passed the bill in the spring of 2016, and the governor promptly signed it. By the next calendar year, the governor had filled the two new seats, resulting in a “more conservative-leaning court."

Other states have tried to pack/unpack their courts, but have so far failed. Florida, Iowa, South Carolina, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Washington, and Alabama. Beginning to see a pattern here? All states with Republican controlled government, except for Washington. However, even in Washington the proposed reduction in the number of state supreme court justices was initiated by Republicans.

Of further note:

The preceding analysis documents how there have been numerous attempts in the last decade to both increase and decrease the size of state supreme courts for what appears to be political gain. One question that naturally follows is whether anything of a more generalized nature can be said about this set of attempts (and successes)and the state environments in which they arose.

First, one can begin with potential commonalities among the proposed bills and/or states that saw attempts to alter their state supreme courts. The most discernible pattern is also the one that should be least surprising: it appears that various elected officials pushed for changes to their state supreme court when doing so was in their political interest. Specifically, several of the states in which there were proposals to expand or contract the court had the following features: a legislature that was of the same party as the governor; a selection method for justices that hinged on appointment by the governor; and a closely divided supreme court. To be sure, not all of the examples here fit this pattern. To wit, the proposal to expand the Louisiana State Supreme Court would have done so by adding districts for popular election. And the Arizona State Supreme Court was not “ideologically balanced” before its recent expansion; four of the five justices in 2016 were Republican appointees (although the court arguably became more conservative after the change). Notwithstanding these exceptions, the larger point holds: the proposed attempts to alter the courts were often done in ways that would guarantee adding justices from a political party to shift the ideological makeup of the court in a considerable way.

Though elected officials tended to push for judicial change when it appeared to suit them politically, the ultimate proposals took many forms across many states. The final question is what these findings might mean for the larger discourse around court packing.

Finally:

In short, the past decade has seen a significant number of attempts to alter state supreme courts—both through proposed packing and unpacking. Indeed, a few of those attempts have been successful, leading to fundamentally altered state courts of last resort. To be sure, further research is needed to gain a better understanding of why these proposals were made in these states at this time, why some were successful, and why some states saw no such proposals at all. But the preceding analysis does bring to light the variation among proposals and at least some of the circumstances that led to them. Though elected officials tended to push for judicial change when it appeared to suit them politically, the ultimate proposals took many forms across many states.The final question is what these findings might mean for the larger discourse around court packing. While scholars and politicians continue to debate whether Republicans unpacked the Supreme Court in 2016, and whether Democrats should pack the Court if they take the Oval Office and the Senate in 2020, they should not overlook the clear instances of court packing that have recently taken place. As Part II discusses, there were attempts in more than 20 percent of all states in the last decade to alter the size of the state supreme court, with two of them successful. What could this state of play mean for the federal courts? There are different ways to interpret the data from Part II. The most straightforward interpretation, it would seem, is that the norm against court packing might be more vulnerable than some have thought—at least as it concerns the state courts. After all, if court packing and unpacking were considered strictly verboten, one would not expect to see over twenty different bills to pack and unpack the highest court in eleven different states.

So all of this talk of potential court-packing by the Dems being 'scandalous' is BS at its' best. Republicans have repeatedly attempted (and succeeded twice) the very same thing in state supreme courts.