Oh geeze, I read that headline to mean a liberal judge suddenly decided they weren’t anymore, like that POS North Carolina congresswoman who flipped to give Republicans a supermajority so abortion could be restricted.
Why are judges in america politically aligned? Can anyone tell me about the election process of judges? In my country, we have the collegium system, which causes a lot of nepotism but keeps the government out of courts.
I don’t know that much but I know it’s not much different than the regular election process. Judges have to “campaign” and get elected by voters in certain states. This did not used to be an issue as much in the past as judges would indeed be biased but they wouldn’t exercise it as much. (Still not a great system at all imo)
Recently though, judges have been way more political as certain historical rulings have moved out of fact-based territory to religious/politically based entirely like abortion or gay marriage.
Amending a constitution is actually pretty hard so the courts have massive leeway to decide on issues like abortion despite it being more of a policy thing than a law thing.
I don’t necessarily agree with this. I think any process to appoint justices is going to be vulnerable to politicization. Even the best case scenario, an independent body appointing them, is vulnerable to political capture or pressure from a polarized public. No, I think the reason America’s courts have become political is merely a byproduct of extreme polarization. Politicians don’t need to be polarized. In our country since the 80’s this has been the case, but there was a time when opposing views were able to cooperate and find more common ground. This polarization is new and it bleeding over into the courts was all but inevitable.
I had a long, researched response to that was ruined by the back button.
The gist of it was Republicans do need polarization to be politically effective.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses#/media/File:Combined--Control_of_the_U.S._House_of_Representatives_-_Control_of_the_U.S._Senate.png. But before that, it was 4 decades since they’d been in control of the House. The story is kinda similar for the Senate, as you’ll see.
I think Republicans only “need” polarization because they decided they needed it. There’s a world out there where Republicans took a more sincere path since the 80’s and didn’t create the “culture wars” and divisive rhetorical approach to politics that people like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh invented. I don’t believe that they would in fact need to feed on polarization to succeed if they actually chose to address issues by suggesting actual solutions to problems instead of scaring their base on non-issues with hate and fear.
There’s a world out there where Republicans took a more sincere path since the 80’s and didn’t create the “culture wars” and divisive rhetorical approach to politics that people like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh invented.
Then why didn’t they take it?
I know that’s an easy question to ask and hard to answer, but this was the time when Democrats and the working class were solid. What issues do you think Republicans could have been sincere about in that political climate and gained political power on a less divisive platform? That’s mostly a rhetorical question.
The problem with cooperating and finding ground is that, in a lot of cases now, the two sides either have views that aren’t just reflective of different values, but different beliefs about what is and isn’t objective reality. (For example, abortion. The people who want to ban it claim that they believe fetuses are people, and therefore that abortion is murder, meanwhile, a pro-choice position would generally hold that this is not the case, and since pregnancy can be quite dangerous and complications can kill, a ban or restriction on it is effectively condemning people to death, plus of course the ethical problems of forcing people to have children they do not want or cannot afford when the technology to avoid that exists. A “compromise” position there, say, some incomplete restrictions that make it illegal in roughly half of circumstances, would be one where both sides would see a lot of people die needlessly with a significant loss of human rights on top of that, which obviously would be acceptable to neither. Fundamentally, the issue there is a question of when personhood starts, which is a question about the nature of reality more than of values.)
In some cases, issues revolve around matters where the stakes are too high to compromise (for example, LGBTQ people cannot reasonably be expected to compromise with homophobic people, when ultimately, the desire of the latter is for the former to simply not exist, and for that matter, it would be unreasonable for anyone else to support restricting human rights for those people simply because it’s some kind of “middle ground”)
Finally, on some issues, one side will simply take the position of “All I want is the opposite of whatever the other guys want”, which obviously leads to a middle ground being simply logically impossible to construct.
In a case where you have two sides with views this different, where each often views the other as not just having a different view, but as evil, or at least fundamentally wrong about matters that are sometimes life and feath, satisfactory compromise is usually not possible. The only remaining option is to try to defeat the other side, to try to render them politically irrelevant. And if both sides are trying to do that, then every source of political power logically must become polarized, because neither can afford to pass up any sort of political power that might be used to restrict the agenda of the other.
To be clear, I blame Republicans for our polarization completely. Democrats have been compromising to their detriment for decades while Republicans have taken advantage of every loophole they’ve been able to leverage in their favor. Republicans have also doubled down on the politics of hate and fear to motivate their base instead of using anything actually based in reality that might genuinely help people.
In 2012, when Romney lost, the Republican party created a committee to investigate what steps their party needed to take in order to succeed. The answer the committee came back with was “we need to stop being racist and sexist and focus on more inclusive policies”. Trump was a sound rejection of that direction. I still believe that once Republicans have lost another election or two, they’re going to be forced to face reality finally and listen to that committee.
Because the majority of them are elected by the community that they serve. The rest are assigned by the current sitting state government. While this does result in politically aligned judges, in theory it ensures that the judges align with the current desires of the population. In practice, the whole thing is so twisted, convoluted and corrupted that it's just a nightmare.
Local judges tend to be elected from the district they are in and while they're not part of a political party per se they run on a platform of being tough on crime or light on drug infractions or that kind of thing. Seeing how the political parties in America are so polarized ideologically that essentially leads to conservative judges being elected in conservative districts.
For higher state courts and federal courts a judge is nominated by the executive branch, and then confirmed or denied by the legislative branch. What started as an attempt at balance between the arms of government has just lead to more tribalism to further agendas.
America’s original intentions were to keep the courts apolitical. And for most of our history that worked just fine. The recent politicization of the courts is more an inevitability that comes out of such a highly polarized environment than anything else. It’s very difficult to create a system where the courts aren’t politicized in this environment. I don’t think it’s a fundamental problem with how judges are appointed. As far as I’m concerned, the systems to appoint judges will always be vulnerable to politicization. Whether that’s by politicians, an independent body, or elections by the people, judge appointments can always be politicized in such a divided country. So I think the biggest question we should be asking is why America is so divided right now and that’s a MUCH larger and more complicated question.
Conservatives started forcing a talking point in the 80s and 90s that all the courts are liberal activists, despite that not being remotely true. So they spend 30 to 40 years building a strategy to stack the courts and hyper politicize them so they can force through undemocratic measures. I watched it happen and how it was constantly talked about, I grew up in a very politically active conservative family.
So they successfully stacked the courts, even outright lying to the American public to hold up Garlands nomination to the Supreme Court. As a result democrats have scrambled the past 4 years to confirm their own slew of judges, in order to prevent the courts from becoming a political wing of the republican party. So now we have hyper polarized courts. Judges have always had political biases, but this new wave of judges have well outlined partisan goals, like a politician running for office. It’s had a hugely negative effect on American law, like the conservative Supreme Court ignoring SB. 8 in Texas. An obviously corrupt and illegal use of the law that ignores a couple hundred years of jurisprudence.
Because Republicans long ago stopped campaigning on normal political issues and began fighting a culture war instead. The result is that a whole ton of things that shouldn’t be political issues at all somehow are.
They did the same with the so-called “liberal media”.
They repeated that phrase so much that they were able to discredit any claims the media made against Republicans and Republican interests. It’s pretty easy to just yell “oh, they’re biased, the story is a lie”.
Along with that grew right wing news media as a powerful entity. It really was a brilliant strategy where they could completely discredit the mass media when they stated a Republican did something, and then on the flip side the conservative press would simply not report on those events. Or they’d play them down. Or similar spin.
In effect they created two realities.
This is one of the reasons why when you meet a really hard core Republican they seem to be from an alternate universe because for literally decades now, they’ve been fed one lie or half-truth.
It doesn’t help either that much of the mass media is indeed garbage, but most of it has a pro-corporate vibe than ever really being pro-liberal. Even amongst the mass media, few are legitimately left of center.
But there you go, that’s what you get when you politicize things…
It is incredibly frustrating though to see this shit happening and in all that time, Democrats have never been able to build a way to attack the Right.
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