Comments by "" (@zachrodan7543) on "What's The Deal with \"Court Packing\" The Supreme Court?" video.

  1.  @iPuzzlePirate  I don't know about california, but I know that my home state of washington does a top-two primary, which might be the same thing as what you are talking about. doesn't do anything for the presidential elections, but at least for state and local positions, we do top-two primaries, which sometimes result in both candidates in the general being candidates from the same party.
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  2. I think that this would require a constitutional amendment, something that seems unlikely to happen here given the polarization of the country. this might be possible to work around if this was instead a method for appointing interim justices, who would then also probably have a better chance of being nominated for the post permanently. The constitution does state, after all, that the justices are to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate; it says nothing about the possibility of interim justices should the need arise.
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  3.  aaron guest  contact tracing is in no way unconstitutional. 3blue1brown did a video about a method of using our constant connection to our phones to help with contract tracing, but which involves no personal data whatsoever being collected from anyone. washington state has since put this method into practice. there is no need for contact tracing to infringe on any sort of privacy, given that the only thing relevant for contact tracing is the simple binary of whether you were in prolonged contact with someone who recently tested positive.
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  4. pretty sure that would run into some equal protections problems. how about "supreme court justices must be re-confirmed by congress every 5 years" let's not be ageist, after all. I do wonder if every 5 years is the best frequency though... and have no clue about the question of if it would fall under "good behavior"
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  5. In my opinion, while I do think the court needs to be expanded to restore balance, I believe that adding four justices, which would flip the balance of the court entirely, would be unpopular and may even be impossible to pass. I think a better option for court packing is to add two justices, as a way of restoring some semblance of balance to the court without blatantly flipping the ideological balance of the court. I have no problem with the ideology that I disagree with holding a majority in the courts, as that is the nature of politics. what I do have a problem with is them holding a majority so large that you need almost as many justices to break party lines as their are in the minority for anything that is ideologically heavy to be decided in favor of the minority opinion, especially when the supreme court has a tendency to be ideologically behind the rest of the country, with justices having life appointments. I do agree that imposing term limits would be problematic, but I almost wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to do away with having a fixed number of justices, in favor of having a fixed number of appointments for each president. one idea that I have heard proposed is to have each president get two supreme court appointments, and I think that this could be reasonably implemented without term limits. The only downside I see to this is the risk of them running into architectural problems, as I don't know what the physical capacity of the bench is or how much of an impact the related cost of increasing things might have on the situation. looking at a photo of the courtroom (posted on the supreme court's website) it looks like there is probably only enough room to comfortably add two more chairs... although I don't have the greatest sense of scale, with only one photograph to base this off of... in short, I do think that two more justices should be added to the court. I do not think that this should be presented as retaliation for merrick garland and amy coney barret. as ghandi put it: "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." this should be presented as restoring the court to some semblance of similarity to the makeup of the country. neither party is so outspoken as to hold a massive majority of the voters. there is a reason that neither party holds a supermajority in either house of congress, after all. and I do not believe that the supreme court should be so unballanced as to give one ideology a supermajority on the bench any more than i would be ok with living in an america where one party held a supermajority in the house or the senate. I may be a democratic voter, but I will freely admit to being terrified by the revelation a few videos ago on this channel that if texas becomes a democratic gimme in the electoral college, it would become virtually impossible for republicans to ever win another presidency. I don't believe such a small majority should be allowed to hold that much power, regardless of ideology
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  6. while it is true that the balanced bench approach is unfriendly to independants, the unfortunate reality is that our entire political system tends to ignore independents. given that supreme court justices still need to be appointed by the president, and independents have such a low probability of taking that post that it is often considered harmful to their voter-base's interests to run as a third party, because it takes away votes from the lesser of the two evils that are the democrats and republicans. it isn't a great system, but it is the system we (unfortuately) are stuck with.
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  7.  @iPuzzlePirate  true. on the other hand, have you considered that perhaps the reason why the two-party system is so prevalent (and it seems to be prevalent in most countries based on the news talking about other countries having a party in power and an opposition party), is that this system is comfortable given the human tendency to sort things into the binary of "us" and "not-us". The major parties also have the advantage of being well-known. If you were to name any of the third-parties I wouldn't be able to tell you the first thing about what they stand for, and I think the same could be said for most people in the country this isn't to say that I support the balanced bench proposal, as I see several other issues with the idea, such as it being overly complicated. I personally don't have a problem with there being a slight (as in, one justice either way) majority for one of the parties, regardless of which party, as long as there isn't a sense that justices are being forced through without support. Removing the need for bipartisanship in supreme court nomination hearings is probably the most damaging thing that has happened to the courts lately, and is part of why things are so dire: prior to mcconnel revoking the filibuster on supreme court nominees, a president needed to select appointees who were acceptable to both parties, but with it reduced to a simple majority the system now favors extreme ideologues, because there isn't any need to appeal to the minority party (even though they generally make up almost half the country)
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  8.  @iPuzzlePirate  agreed. I do think that it is ridiculous how the primaries in some states require you to register your party. At least here in the state of Washington, you don't have to register as a member of a party to participate in the primaries, you just have to only vote in one of them.
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  9. true, but we seem to be forever stuck with the two-party system. curse the human tendency towards binary categorizations
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  10.  @rockinrec22  fair. how do you propose we change the system we currently have to reach such a reality? because given that we have had a two-party system since part-way through washington's presidency, I think we might be far too entrenched in this binary for a simple change in the voting process to break the trend. from the very beginning, political parties have been more about ideology than anything else. and given that the majority of americans are aware of the ideologies and platforms of the non-major parties, part of the solution will likely require educating the populace about what these other groups represent. the self-harm you described is not the end result of the two-party system and the first-past-the-post voting structure of the country. It is a part of the logical explanation for why these smaller parties are doomed to be minorities in the first place. I suppose that particular issue could be somewhat addressed by ranked-choice voting, but it still leaves the other issues that stand in the way of the smaller parties, such as the way that the democratic and republican parties behave almost like opposing teams at times: the party affiliation serves to form a coalition of people with similar views who present a more imposing presence (as a blobulus mass of people) than the much smaller number of people affiliated with other parties. with these points in mind, I actually would like to hear your suggestion for putting third parties and independents on more even footing with the democrats and republicans
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  11. ​ @rockinrec22  ​ @Gavin Taylor so, you are suggesting that rather than having the house representatives and senators be elected by their states, they should be allocated based on party prefference within their states? I feel like this is a hard sell, given that every politician ultimately has their own platform that they are elected on. and the house of representatives is not meant to represent "community" interests. that is the job of state and local governments. the reason we have the two legislative bodies is because when the nation was founded, some (like representatives of the larger states) wanted states to have representation proportionate to population (which is the case in the house of representatives), while others (such as the smaller states) wanted all states to have equal political power (which is the case in the senate). house representation is then simply a way of representing the populace with approximately equal legislative representation per person (although I will admit this is somewhat corrupted by gerrymandering on both sides of the spectrum). I think the biggest issue with the house is that this supposedly proportional representation is not necessarily representative of the ideological positioning of the representative populace. The solution to this, then, would be to ensure that when districts are drawn up and approved based on the census data, they are not gerrymandered in either party's favor. how to make this happen is beyond my ability to contemplate, given that even experts have had a hard time tackling this issue, and I am just a guy in the comments of a youtube video.
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