Only 35% of Americans trust the US judicial system. This is catastrophic

[Lonestarblue]

Not much in this article will be new to most of us, but I post it here as a reference for what Democrats need to do going forward. Presenting the case to the US public for court reform will be even more important as Trump appoints more of his loyalists to the federal courts.


“What is deeply frustrating is that Democrats refuse to make the case for reforming a captured court even given its widespread unpopularity and even during a close and bitterly contested race for the White House that probably sealed rightwing dominance of the supreme court into the 2060s, if not beyond.

Snip

The Democratic party’s failure here goes well beyond this most recent campaign. Democrats had a trifecta in Washington after the 2020 election and made no serious effort on judicial reform. The judiciary committee, under the toothless leadership of Senator Dick Durbin, botched every opportunity to hold hearings and demand accountability after the revelations of vacations and other gifts awarded to the conservative justices. In 2016, Democrats nominated the milquetoast Merrick Garland to fill an opening presented by the death of Antonin Scalia, then barely bothered to fight for their nominee in the face of Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented blockade.

And while conservatives spent five decades building their own alternative legal establishment – complete with the Federalist Society as its credentialing factory, and presidents who agreed to outsource supreme court and other judicial appointments to extreme rightwing activists – Democrats trusted blindly and foolishly in the rule of law and the strength of institutional norms. They built little of their own. They failed to sound the alarm. They never bothered to build a mandate for popular fixes.“

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/21/americans-trust-supreme-court