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Old 02-06-2019, 06:59 PM   #39
Sea Dangles
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F. View Post
You might be better off studying history than thinking just because an 85 year old person said something it's true.
To think the Supreme Court is apolitical is silly, though you can wish it.
When the Democrats win and increase the number of Supreme court justices to 15 and appoint them then you'll be whining.

Although that early Court did not hear nearly as many cases as would subsequent ones, those first decisions reflect its political make-up and perspective. In Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), for example, the court ruled 5-1 that federal courts had the power to supersede states’ “sovereign immunity” and hear disputes between citizens and the states.

The case and decision were so controversial that they led directly to the first post-Bill of Rights Constitutional Amendment, the 11th, which when ratified in early 1795 reasserted the states’ sovereign immunity to federal court decisions.

The Court’s first reorganization, less than a decade after Chisholm, was even more overtly tied to partisan and electoral politics. In the aftermath of the hotly contested presidential election of 1800, President John Adams and a lame duck Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, which reduced the number of Supreme Court Justices from 6 to 5 and instituted a number of other sweeping changes to the federal judiciary that would benefit the current President’s party, and disadvantage the incoming one. Although the act passed only 19 days before Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration, Adams and Congress filled as many open judgeships as possible, leading to the act’s popular nickname, the Midnight Judges Act.
Nonsensical meltdown
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