(1) Current Supreme Court building converted to legal history museum; justices return to hearing cases in the Capitol basement;
(2) Congress tells court it must consider every appeal; President Biden nominates the scores of additional justices needed to handle the increased caseload;
(3) Solicitors General barred from wearing traditional morning coat attire and must instead wear overalls like the real salt of the earth;
(4) Yes, obviously 18 year staggered terms (for the hundreds of justices) but also after the 18 years each has to live in the circumstances of the least advantaged party to appear before them.
(5) When ruling on the constitutionality of federal laws, Congress can overrule them with simple bicameral majorities, but only if they include the phrase "this is a democracy, not a judgocracy" in the text of the bill.
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I wanted to learn more about protests at judge's homes. Here are some examples of what I found: protesting a San Antonio federal judge for imprisoning a tax protestor, September, 1984. In a sign of how the world has changed, the paper helpfully published his address.
Hare Krishnas protesting at a San Francisco Superior Court's judge for placing a member under a temporary conservatorship requested by her mother. The story briefly gets into the coming legal wrangling.
So there has been much discussion, and mostly criticism of the NYT's editorial the other day about "free speech," especially its opening paragraph appealing earnestly to a right that has never before actually existed nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opi…
This terrific thread by @tzimmer_history looks at the roots of the present debate, such as it is, in white conservatives' sudden facing of criticism for things they had long taken for granted & the new pushback against "view from nowhere" journalism
@tzimmer_history Last night, I had shared several polls clearly showing that as long as there has been public opinion polling (and, I promise you, even before) Americans believed in various limits to free speech
At some level, I share the bewilderment, even as someone who has studied this history for over twenty years. But this claim isn’t ~exactly~ right. There were 19th century Americans who saw the collapse of various plant and animal species and called upon the government to act.
Brian Donahue has a wonderful book examining pre-industrial agriculture in Massachusetts and how it developed in a way that incorporated conservation for future use; this was ultimately disrupted by the market revolution amazon.com/dp/0300123698/…
My own book work now is looking at forest conservation, which the federal government took a hand in as early as the 1790s to preserve certain critical tree species for naval ship construction. It was a significant political issue in the 1820s and 1840s.
"Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned."