If Trump is found to have illegally won his election, do his SCOTUS picks remain?

Don't know, of course, and doubt anyone does, since this would be an unprecedented situation. Fascinating question, though.

Wordslinger wrote:I wonder, if Mueller's report leads to Trump's impeachment, and it has been[ proven his win was due to Russian interference and his and his campaign's collusion with them, do his SCOTUS picks remain on the Supreme Court Bench?  I mean, if it's found that Trump really wasn't really a legitimate president, do his supreme court picks remain as members of SCOTUS?  Anyone know?

Proven by whom?

The Supreme Court justices are life appointments and can only be removed by impeachment. The grounds for impeachment that the President who appointed you cheated, is not grounds for impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice.......if this concept of removal other than impeachment became legally accepted then there would never be continuity and consistency in the highest court if it simply was purged with each new political majority. Our founding fathers were pretty astute in their design and structure of our government.

I do not think so. American jurist have always evolved their positions. I think this sky is falling mentality is overblown. These nominees are the best of the best. Sure there will be a battle over Roe. However, what makes our system so frustrating and amazing at the same time is that change moves slowly through our courts. I have dreaded Trump's appointments, but his first two are well qualified and distinguished jurist. I was afraid he would be putting bozos on the court like Sessions, or other political or celebrity types..........sometimes people need to take a deep breath and hope that the logic and consistency of the law can override political agendas.

I also would like to see Thomas retire. His intellectual breadth and failure to do the work as a supreme court justice has been sad. If Trump appoints the same type of quality as his first two, it would be an immediate upgrade to the court. L

Racist..!! And no... there's no recourse to either obstruct or remove the justices except by impeachment.

You can thank Harry Reid that the dems are powerless to block the process. Congratulations comrades.

PkrBum wrote:Racist..!! And no... there's no recourse to either obstruct or remove the justices except by impeachment.

You can thank Harry Reid that the dems are powerless to block the process. Congratulations comrades.

BULLSHIT. McConnell doesn't get to change the rules to suit his agenda.

The 'McConnell Rule' is law, and Senate Democrats should sue to enforce it

This week, President Trump will announce his nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the United States Supreme Court. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised to schedule the nominee’s confirmation hearings for this fall, before the midterm elections.

If and when McConnell carries through on this promise, Senate Democrats should immediately file a federal lawsuit against him for violating the so-called McConnell Rule. (According to this rule, as McConnell himself stated on Feb. 13, 2016, “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.”) The issue — whether the McConnell Rule is now binding precedent — would not be political (and therefore “nonjusticiable”) but rather fundamentally legal (and therefore “justiciable”).


The minority party needs to have some remedy, some legal recourse, when the majority leader is completely immune to considerations of fairness and consistency in his exercise of the Senate’s substantial constitutional powers. Imagine, for example, that McConnell suddenly stipulated that only 40 instead of 51 votes were necessary to confirm a Supreme Court nominee. Clearly, the validity of this rule change would be a constitutional question, rather than a political question, because it implicates a fundamental democratic principle: majority rule.
McConnell’s imminent abandonment of the McConnell Rule implicates an equally fundamental democratic principle: due process for 49 percent of the Senate, which itself represents tens of millions of American citizens. Just as the judiciary would have the authority to intervene if McConnell changed the vote threshold from 51 to 40 (or, for that matter, if he refused to step aside as majority leader should the Democrats regain control of the Senate in November), so, too, the judiciary has the authority to intervene if McConnell violates his McConnell Rule.

Assuming that a court — preferably the Supreme Court — agrees with my analysis, McConnell (the defendant) would then have to argue either that the McConnell Rule is not law or that it is law but, as he claimed on June 28, applies only to “constitutionally lame-duck” presidents. Either way, however, he would lose.

Whether McConnell likes it or not, the McConnell Rule is law. When McConnell declared in 2016 that Supreme Court nominees are not allowed hearings in an election year, that decree carried legal force — the same legal force as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) reduction of the threshold to defeat filibusters for executive appointments and most judicial nominations from 60 to 51 senators.

As every lawyer knows, not all laws are statutes. Many laws come in different forms: court decisions, agency rules, general principles, customary practices and sometimes even widely accepted opinions by legal experts. Like these non-statutory propositions, parliamentary rules announced by Senate majority leaders constitute laws as well. As a result, they are binding on future legislators unless and until they are explicitly overturned.

Importantly, if McConnell still were to maintain that the McConnell Rule is not law, then the so-called Biden Rule was not law either. But if the Biden Rule was not law, then McConnell’s claim on March 16, 2016, to be bound by it — “The Senate will continue to observe the Biden Rule so that the American people have a voice in this momentous decision” — was a lie so monumental that the entire process by which Justice Neil Gorsuch ascended to the high court would have to be deemed constitutionally invalid and, therefore, subject to retraction. This is obviously too great a cost for McConnell to risk.

McConnell’s only real option, then, is to concede that the McConnell Rule is law and then argue, as he did on June 28, that it applies only to “constitutionally lame-duck” presidents. But there are three problems with this argument.

First, once again, McConnell in 2016 tried justifying the McConnell Rule by arguing that it really reduced to the Biden Rule. When Biden announced the supposed Biden Rule (on June 25, 1992), however, President George H.W. Bush was not a lame duck but, rather, a first-term president running for reelection. The McConnell Rule, then, must apply in the context of a first-term president as well.

Second, President Obama was not a lame duck when McConnell announced the McConnell Rule in mid-February 2016. On the contrary, he had 11 months remaining in his term, which is nine more than what is normally considered to be a lame-duck period.

Third, even if we concede that 11 months left in a presidency somehow constitutes a lame-duck period, then four months left for the current Senate certainly constitutes a lame-duck period. And it would be entirely arbitrary and unjustifiable to apply the McConnell Rule only to lame-duck presidents and not to lame-duck Senates.

Like the rest of the judiciary, the Supreme Court is supposed to be above politics, a nonpartisan check on the other two branches. So when McConnell officially schedules confirmation hearings for Trump’s nominee, Senate Democrats need to do more than complain. They need to take him to court. And the court needs to tell McConnell, at long last, that his power extends only to facilitating the Senate’s advice and consent role, not to forcibly converting the judiciary into a mere extension of the Republican Party.

Ken Levy is the Holt B. Harrison Professor of Law at Louisiana State University's Paul M. Hebert Law Center. Follow him on Twitter @tardigrade18.

http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/395696-the-mcconnell-rule-is-law-and-senate-democrats-should-sue-to-enforce-it

Floridatexan wrote:
BULLSHIT.  McConnell doesn't get to change the rules to suit his agenda.

Actually, as Senate Majority Leader, he does get to do exactly that--he sets the agenda and can "pocket" stuff he doesn't want to come up, which is what happened to Garland.

If you want to blame someone, try Obama. He's the best orator of this generation but he didn't lift a finger or go around making speeches about Garland--oh, no, he's too cool and detached and intellectual to actually get down in the mud and fight for his nominee, that's just beneath him.

FDR and LBJ are doing the dervish-dance in their graves. Do you think for a minute we'd have Social Security or the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts if those guys didn't play hardball politics to get their policies enacted?

But no-o-o-o, not Obama, he's not gonna dirty himself with that kind of cheap political wrangling.

Of course, Hillary deserves a good share of the blame. After all, SHE LOST TO DONALD TRUMP!

Thanks, Hillary. Thanks, Obama. Great job you guys!

Deus X wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:
BULLSHIT.  McConnell doesn't get to change the rules to suit his agenda.

Actually, as Senate Majority Leader, he does get to do exactly that--he sets the agenda and can "pocket" stuff he doesn't want to come up, which is what happened to Garland.

If you want to blame someone, try Obama. He's the best orator of this generation but he didn't lift a finger or go around making speeches about Garland--oh, no, he's too cool and detached and intellectual to actually get down in the mud and fight for his nominee, that's just beneath him.

FDR and LBJ are doing the dervish-dance in their graves. Do you think for a minute we'd have Social Security or the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts if those guys didn't play hardball politics to get their policies enacted?

But no-o-o-o, not Obama, he's not gonna dirty himself with that kind of cheap political wrangling.

Of course, Hillary deserves a good share of the blame. After all, SHE LOST TO DONALD TRUMP!

Thanks, Hillary. Thanks, Obama. Great job you guys!

You have lost your mind.

2seaoat wrote:Sure there will be a battle over Roe.

IF ONLY it were only Roe!

Wordslinger wrote:... and then pass legislation to add seats to the Supreme Court

What a great idea! How come no one ever tried that before?

Oh, wait...

There's always the NRA republican 2nd amendment solution which does not mean what you know it means but that is not what it means per trump.

Oh good... a court packing race. It's scary how short sighted some people can be.

Wordslinger wrote:It has been done before, in fact a few times.   

FDR? His Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, when Democrats had both houses and the country was much less divided?

How'd that work out?

SPOILER ALERT: It was a friggin' disaster.

Instead of adding more judges to the supreme court, they should do away with the "appointment for life" thing. Instead, give them a contract that can be reviewed and then perhaps renewed every ten years or so. There'd still likely be little turnover because few would oust a qualified judge who's performed well, even if there were partisan issues, just because it would look bad. But this would (A) create a possibility to freshen the court up now and then, and (B) inspire the judges to be less partisan because they wouldn't know if the people renewing their contract would be in their party or not. If I'm a Republican-appointed judge, but I know that the person who'll renew my contract might be a Democrat by the time it comes up, or vice-versa, then I'd be less likely to just "play to the base," and instead make sure I was judging things in a fair, defensible, non-partisan manner. As is, since they're pretty much bulletproof, they can all be partisan hacks, because whatchagon'do'boutit? That's not good for a country that's pretty evenly divided as per right and left, it's bad for both sides.

And I don't think anyone, Republican or Democrat, could complain about that idea much, since both would have an equal chance of it working out in their favor. Since the contract would be longer than a president's term and enough time to flip whatever congress was when the judge was hired, it levels the playing field.

Anyway, just an idea. Probably has flaws...

Leftist ethics: when you don't win the game... change the rules.

PkrBum wrote:Leftist ethics: when you don't win the game... change the rules.

You're either dumb as a post or a big fat stinkin' liar. Which is it?

Who voted in January, 2017 to gut the house ethics committee?

GOP ETHICS = NONEXISTENT

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/qo4pea/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-house-republicans-vote-to-gut-ethics-committee

zsomething wrote:Anyway, just an idea.  Probably has flaws...

Maybe, but I found it a thoughtful and creative solution.

Floridatexan wrote:GOP ETHICS = NONEXISTENT

Sadly, too, too true.

Maybe, but I found it a thoughtful and creative solution.

It is and is currently used all over America for retention of full Circuit Judges, all the way up to State Supreme Court Justices. Every ten years those Judges are put on a retention ballot where the citizens usually must vote 60% to not retain a judge. This allows lazy judges and corrupt judges to face the citizens who retain the power to boot a judge from office.

This method would give the courts a layer of protection from political interference as a ten year retention vote will be a slow and evolving method of changing judges while giving the court continuity and consistency.

This retention voting system is simply good government, and there should be bipartisan support to stop the political weaponizing of the court. Hopefully, people will review the success of retention votes in their own states as a good model for the Supreme Court. I think I will be writing my senators and congressman about introducing legislation to emulate the state systems of retention of judges. I believe this will require a constitutional amendment which will be very difficult, but bipartisan support has allowed the same in the states and it will require the same support to make this the law.

Illegally won election?  Don't make me laugh.   LOL.  (Oops!  There, I just did)

May I remind of the electoral vote count?   304 to 227.  Kind of says it all, I think.   America spoke, and it spoke loudly.   Corrupt Hillary Clinton and her corrupt Democrat Party was resoundingly rejected by true Americans.

Finally we are on the road to seeing the erroneous Roe V Wade decision overturned and the matter of abortion restrictions returned to the States where those decisions rightfully and constitutionally belong.