While the USA is a relatively young country, it’s oddly one of the oldest democracies.
I believe most other democracies have better-written laws and better checks and balances because, in part, of mistakes the founders made when writing the US constitution (which was always a highly imperfect compromise, allowed for slavery, and had to be ammended several times just to patch it up).
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in. But I think the shitshow we call the SCOTUS is somewhat unique.
one of the oldest democracies.
The Greek cities want to have a word with you.
They are covered by the “one of” part of the sentence. And the current Greek democratic system is not old in the sense that the US system is old.
Greek democracy has also been far from continuous, if we want to take that into account.
far from continuous
lasted longer than the whole Usa LOL
In the case of Germany: a lot less, but it’s not impossible.
The German equivalent to the supreme court is the Bundesverfassungsgerichtshof (BVerG, federal Constitutional Court) and in stark contrast to the highest American court, it is not an appeals court. A lower court might refer a case to the BVerG, or ask it to clarify a constitutional question, that has come up during a trial but most case don’t even have a theoretical path to Karlsruhe. Political parties and NGOs may also go to directly in front of the Constitutional Court to protest the constitutionality of laws.
New justices are confirmed with a 2/3 majority which means that you need to convince roughly 30% of the opposition to vote for your candidate. That in turn leads to more moderate candidates put forward. Justices are also limited to one term of twelve years. Outside of that a justice may be removed from office by the German federal president* if 2/3 of BVerG justices vote to impeach their colleague.
So far so good. Unfortunately there are some weaknesses in the entire setup. The law responsible for needing a 2/3 majority to elect a justice can be changed with a simple majority. A right wing government could also expand the court by introducing a third senate and pack it with their appointees. But that requires them to get into power first.
German late night show Die Anstalt die a segment about that problem a while back: https://youtu.be/ljjZ6AZsmGk (Video in German)
Tldr: the highest German court is not going to stop a fascist government from doing fascism but it is also not working to put the fascists into power, the way the US supreme court is.
- Yes Germany has a president. The role is largely ceremonial though as he isn’t head of government
In the case of Colombia, there are independent investigation agencies that aren’t subject to any of the three branches, and specifically the judiciary branch has a committee that investigates disciplinary trespasses by judges. Also, there are three separate “Supreme Courts”: one handles typical everyday cases, another handles conflicts between citizens and the government, and another handles Constitutional violations. So there are several protections against a rogue Court.
Man, I had no idea that I would one day be deeply jealous of major aspects of the Columbian government.
And we still haven’t gotten to the part where government workers, all the way up to the president, are forbidden from making any public statements in favor of candidates or campaigns.
Here in Greece the supreme court is determining goverment actions as unconstitutional, recommending changes, and nothing is being done. It is essentially powerless.
In a non first past the post voting system, it’s less likely that 1 radical party remains in power long enough to screw up the high courts. But it can still happen, case in point Hungary and Poland.
Iirc, Orban had been in power for many years in Hungary and went for a gradual erosion of the independence of the courts. Death by a thousand cuts.
Pis in Poland only had a majority for 2 election cycles, but they needed only the first win to screw up the courts. Instead of a gradual (legalistic) takeover, they went for a bonkers hostile takeover of the supreme courts: https://freedomhouse.org/report/analytical-brief/2018/hostile-takeover-how-law-and-justice-captured-polands-courts
The eu should have kicked out both states out of the decision making process and implemented sanctions, but since that required unanimity, Poland and Hungary were essentially protecting each other from consequences. Now that pis lost in Poland, I hope that the eu takes action and prevents this from happening again.
In Switzerland we don’t really have a supreme court in the sense the US have one, parliament decides if they follow the constitution or not. The federal court only decides if the lower courts applied the law correctly. They don’t even take cases with plaintiffs and defendants.
much less than the US supreme court, which allows for corruption and has lifetime appointments.
It’s easy to think about the US supreme Court versus other high courts the same way that the US treats voting districts.
In almost every country with a similar voting system, gerrymandering, dividing up districts arbitrarily, is illegal because you can easily say well. I’m going to divide it like this so that only these people’s votes count and I’ll just ignore the voters that I don’t like.
That is illegal in most western countries.
Gerrymandering is perfectly legal in the US, resulting in a far weaker vote because entire counties can be disregarded by dividing the county up cleverly to benefit the Republicans, who take far greater advantage of this.
Same with the court systems, the US didn’t set up protections and hasn’t modifed or improved the court as time has gone on and problems have arisen like direct bribery or contradicting rulings or politically refusing justice appointments.
From what I can tell, gerrymandering only works due to the whole first past the post voting system you have for districts.
In a fair system where every vote is counted all the way up the chain, ditrict shapes and sizes doesn’t matter.
Getting rid of FPTP would also finally make new parties a realistic thing.
I don’t understand that since gerrymandering allows you to manipulate the results of the voting itself by diminishing the significance of the votes themselves.
Can you explain more how gerrymandering only works with fptp?
FPTP means that if candidate A gets a majority of the votes in a district they get to represent the district as a whole, meaning that effectively all votes for candidante B, C, D, and E are thrown away.
This means that there is a point to gerrymander districts so they will allways have the majority.
If I understand the voting system in the US correctly, votes are counted in the disctricts, districts are then counted further up.
In a fair voting system, districts does not matter for anything but statistics.
Your understanding of fptp and the US district voting system is correct, but I’m still not sure how any different voting system solves dividing districts into specific voting blocks.
I guess it would make a small but significant difference over time, but as long as gerrymandering is legal within the US framework, it’s still very easy to manipulate the results by district, ranked choice voting or not.
It’s s kind of like the structural problem of the electoral college. You can change the rules within the electoral college, but as long as you have those 200 people standing between the popular vote and the presidency, Donald Trump can get elected despite people not wanting him to be president.
Without FPTP, you would simply count the votes, and send the data to the election agency who will compile the final result.
There is no selecting a winner for each district and sending that on, mening there is no point to gerrymandering as it would not affect the result.
The electoral collage should also be scrapped, there is zero point to it.
Oh, for sure.
Any voting system within the current US structure won’t be affected that much by switching voting formats, but illegalizing gerrymandering will make a huge difference in their current structure.
For ranked-choice voting to have a big impact, the US would have to change its whole voting system first.
Which I agree, they should.
All of them.
It can happen here. It’s frighteningly easy to get to this point.
Okay, so, American here who has been telling fellow Americans “it can happen here” for years about various shit. Because I know it can. There’s no reason it can’t.
But seeing someone use that expression to say that something happening in the US could happen elsewhere just made that phrase click in a terrifying way.
It can happen here.
It has already happened
Oh God
It happened in Hungary when Orban decided to break bad and shoot for being president for life.
It happened in Russia when Putin orchestrated a series of false flag “terrorist” bombings to help seize the presidency which he hasn’t really ever relinquished control of (regardless of official position) at any point between then and now.
Different countries have a variety of very different approaches to appointing judges, and some of those methods are not nearly as easy to corrupt as the American system.
Americans are subject to a lot of cultural indoctrination about how their system is the “greatest democracy in the world,” “leader of the free world,” and other such platitudes. It’s really not the case, though. America’s system is one of the earliest that’s still around, and unfortunately that means it’s got a lot of problems that have been corrected in democracies that were founded later on but have remained embedded in America’s.
Doesn’t help that America has a somewhat problematic electorate as well.
I remember being taught in school all of those, and the fact that justices not being elected or having term limits meant that they were 100% not swayed by anything other than justice. A very noble idea I respect, but we see obviously that anyone is corruptable. I see very few judges now who aren’t electable. They don’t run under a platform, they have agendas and it’s not perfect - but it’s better than our system where we’re stuck until they die - and then we’re at the mercy of whoever the flavor of the month is.
Yeah… the older I’ve gotten, the more obvious it’s become that civics/social studies classes related to American government in high school were mostly just hilariously abstracted theoretical bullshit.
I very clearly remember thinking “I’m so glad America solved corruption”
If you were to design a government system from scrstch, knowing what you see now, where would you place a Supreme Court?
In prison?
The way the Supreme Court works in the US is not how it works in most other democratic countries. The combination of that system with Common Law is quite unique in fact.
So there are lots and lots of already existing alternatives as to how to place a Supreme Court differently.
