LOS ANGELES – President Biden on Saturday night said he expects the winner of this year’s presidential election will likely have the chance to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court – a decision he warned would be “one of the scariest parts” if his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, is successful in his bid for a second term.
One, they haven’t had the votes since Biden became President. Two, that doesn’t fix anything. If we had 6 more liberal justices today they can’t just say, “Hey, let’s undo the bad decisions from the last 15 years.” They need to address the issues that come before them in regular fashion. If the Democrats had the votes they need to just start codifying everything we take for granted AND institute reforms (e.g. no more fucking filibuster, no stock trades for elected officials, and a SCOTUS code of ethics).
Adding justices does fix one thing: more justices mean that for billionaires to bribe them it requires bribing a lot more of them.
You clearly underestimate how much money a billion dollars is. There’s always enough money to bribe officials.
there’s only hundreds of billionaires and 52 weeks in a year. Even if they can pay them all a 100 million each year you still have to spend time with them and take them on your yacht to you private sex trafficking island. It takes a lot more work than just the money up front. The direct gifts and freebies are just the tip of the iceberg.
The entirety of gifts received by the justices over the past 2 decades is about $3 million. About $2.4 million of that went to Clarence Thomas.
Thomas was bought for $120,000/year.
Even if that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and the total monetary equivalent compensation were say, $1,000,000/yr… Over 20 years, that’s still only 2% of a billion dollars.
It’s only around $100,000 to bribe justices. One billion dollars could bribe 100,000 justices at that rate.
And that rate is only that high because Clarence Thomas skews the numbers with how vast the bribes he has accepted have been.
You added a zero somewhere.
Also, it seems like justices are charging on the order of 1 million, so a billion dollars gets 1000 judges. Still plenty for them to get whatever they want.
Judges aren’t charging anywhere even close to a million dollars. You might be thinking of Clarence Thomas, who I pointed out as an outlier.
And even if I was off on my math, we aren’t getting more than 10,000 justices. Ever. Never. And even if we did, my math was based off only 1 billion dollars. A few people have MUCH more than that. So with that in mind, you’re going to need about 100,000 justices anyway just to outweigh the influence of money.
Oh, wow, sorry. It’s just Thomas that’s throwing it way off. My bad.
Also, I wasn’t disagreeing with your point at all. You’re absolutely right. Just that somewhere you had an extra zero, but it doesn’t change your point at all: judges are cheap and a billionaire could easily buy them all for a small fraction of their wealth.