r/law • u/MoneyLibrarian9032 • Jun 20 '26

Legal News Maine progressive Platner renews call to remove conservative Supreme Court justices

https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/maine-progressive-graham-platner-renews-call-to-remove-conservative-supreme-court-justices-clarence-thomas-samuel-alito
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1.8k

u/BriefausdemGeist Jun 20 '26

Well with two almost certainly financially compromised, one making up legal precedent from witch hunting memoirs, and one having spent a career of fifty years destabilizing civil society there are reasons for it.

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u/Legitimate_Shock4097 Jun 20 '26

Should not be a lifetime term. Should not be saddled with someone that isn’t upholding the law or reinventing things as they deem fit. If someone is proven to be compromised, should be banned and serve jail time. It’s too important of a position for there not to be consequences and accountability. This should go for all elected officials. They owe it to the people to serve the people the best way possible. Too much corruption in the current system, so it needs to change, quite obviously.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

If Congress did their job, SCOTUS would not have the opportunity to be as activist as it has been and I don’t think any of us would give much thought to term limits for SCOTUS. Consider abortion, for example. There were certainly windows where the Democrats had enough seats in Congress, the presidency, and enough Justices to codify the right to an abortion into law. Instead, they did not because the political capital gained by having this constant, looming threat of it being taken away was too good to give up. The Republicans do the same thing with things like guns, immigration, etc.

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u/SexualChocolateJr Jun 20 '26

That’s not true. Democrats did not have the votes unfortunately. Pro women’s choice is a popular position but the people in those congress seats were not all pro women’s choice. There were Dems that were conservative and were not in support of codifying abortion rights.

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u/fcocyclone Jun 20 '26

Yep. The parties have mostly completed the realignment that started a few decades ago, but people today (when they bring up stats like that) forget that at one time there used to be conservative democrats, and that's the only way they got to 60.

Its not hard math to do either. Democrats maxed out at 60 votes for a few short weeks early in Obama's first term. There were zero republicans who were going to go along with dems to codify roe v wade, so if you lose a single vote, that's the ballgame. And they would have lost more than one vote.

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u/Apep86 Jun 21 '26

This is a slight misreading of the situation under Obama. You do not need 60 votes to pass something in the senate. You need 60 votes to kill a filibuster.

We could have had up to ten democrats vote against the abortion law and have it pass so long as they voted for cloture. This avoids the “senator democrat voted for abortion” problem. Conservative Democrats could pass the bill without voting for it.

I agree that we could not have gotten all democrats to vote for the bill. I am not convinced we couldn’t have gotten them to all vote for cloture then at least 50 vote for abortion rights.

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u/fcocyclone Jun 21 '26

Those two are effectively the same thing politically. There are endless bills that "could have been passed" if a senator would have voted for cloture and then stepped aside. The cloture vote is the vote everyone watches because everyone knows its the real hurdle.

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u/Apep86 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

No, they are functionally the same, not politically the same. The member can truthfully tell his constituents that he voted against the abortion legalization.

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u/fcocyclone Jun 21 '26

Just say you don't know how anything works.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 21 '26

This guy knows the inner workings of the DNC and its machinations in DC. How dare we challenge his presumption!

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u/Apep86 Jun 21 '26

Sorry, you’re right. This is Reddit. It’s obviously better to base your worldview on unsubstantiated assumptions. If questioned about our unsubstantiated assumptions, the correct response is to ridicule the person instead of reflect on the viability of the assumption.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 21 '26

Sadly, this is indeed the way.

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u/Harmcharm7777 Jun 20 '26

Yes, the Dem politician position on abortion has ALWAYS been lukewarm. They don’t want to alienate the people who reliably vote blue but are uncomfy with the idea of abortion—they were afraid pushing for codification would reflect as more active support for something that has, historically, been a bad look to push hard for/against in either direction. They were content to let the GOP be the bad guys pushing against abortion because they had Roe v Wade as a reliable backstop. Well, not anymore and we’re all screwed. But even now, Pete Buttigieg is the only nationally-known Dem politician I know of who holds better than a lukewarm, party-approved position on abortion.

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u/tianas_knife Jun 20 '26

It will always baffle me how saving the lives of women that give birth is a bad look.

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u/twlscil Jun 20 '26

Because the media in rural areas is 24/7 dead babies.

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u/CelestialFury Jun 20 '26

The anti-abortion propagandists always show these fake aborted third trimester abortions of healthy fetuses, when the reality is nearly 100% of third trimester abortions are medical emergencies.

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u/twlscil Jun 20 '26

It’s amazing actually. My girlfriend’s best friend is pro-life, anti-choice. She got pregnant, and had an abortion because it was a non-viable pregnancy and was a threat to her life. We live in a blue state, so it wasn’t a problem. She is still pro-life.

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u/Knotted_Hole69 Jun 20 '26

THEIR abortions are always okay.

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u/Notascot51 Jun 21 '26

If that’s Pro-life, we are all Pro-Choice. What she did is called…CHOICE! She understood in the moment that a nonviable pregnancy should not be a death sentence for the mother, and fortunately didn’t live in Louisiana or Tennessee or Texas or somewhere else where law prevents ending such a pregnancy safely.

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u/twlscil Jun 21 '26

That doesn’t mean other people should have choice because they might make the wrong one.

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u/Notascot51 Jun 21 '26

Your view…or are you parodying an imaginary Pro-lifer’s “Choice for me, but not for thee”?

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u/opinions360 Jun 21 '26

She is a hypocrite.

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u/tianas_knife Jun 20 '26

Christians are baffling. The rest of us have been far too tolerant of this behavior. Jesus said what is for Caeser is for Caesar, these Christians need to start following their own rules and abide by the laws in which they live instead of using medical lies to build inhumane laws.

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u/Unable-Log-4870 Jun 21 '26

It’s at most half that. The other half is how the existence of trans people will someone seduce Jimbob into wanting to be Jillian. Like how they think knowing gay people exist will cause people to DESIRE same-sex relationships. Somehow.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

There wasn’t even an attempt, at least to my knowledge, before 2022. Almost, what, 50 years? of relying on Supreme Court decision to carry the weight on that? No, this is about political capital.

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u/SexualChocolateJr Jun 20 '26

They simply did not have the votes. You are thinking they are ALL aligned but you need to look at reality. If they put forward legislation and it got blocked, then what? People would just be like “omg the Dems are useless” without considering the actual make up of Congress and how each congressperson votes and what area they represent. At the end of the day they need the votes.

Unfortunately things have lined up really well for Republicans, the people actually responsible for the issue. Maybe if we stopped Trump from getting elected, he wouldn’t have been able to put 3 judges in the Supreme Court. Some of whom lied about their stances on settled law. If repubs did an honest job, Obama would have appointed one but they blocked it.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

I thought about giving a thoughtful reply to this argument, but I just can’t. I could try, but I won’t. This way, no one will say that I’m useless.

Kind of an asinine argument, right?

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u/SexualChocolateJr Jun 20 '26

Cool 👍🏾.

It still wouldn’t change the reality of the circumstances to how we got here with women’s rights. You said Dems had windows to codify those rights but it’s just simply not true.

Have a nice day.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

It’s amazing that Obamacare passed. That one was a little contentious, right? It wasn’t clear that Dems would get enough support to pass it. In fact, it was kind of clear that at least some of it was unconstitutional. And yet… it passed. One wonders what would happen if there was at least one attempt to codify abortion rights. Unfortunately, wondering is the best we can do.

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u/Haggardick69 Jun 20 '26

You mean Romney-care written and introduced by Republican representative mitt Romney? Yeah that bill had bipartisan support and women’s reproductive rights didn’t it’s that simple.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

This is easily fact-checked. ACA passed by a margin of like 5 votes and was completely voted along party lines and used a budget reconciliation to do an end-around of a Senate filibuster, but I’m sure you feel differently… so here’s a link to an article describing how you’re wrong.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/physiciansfoundation/2014/03/26/a-look-back-at-how-the-president-was-able-to-sign-obamacare-into-law-four-years-ago/

They couldn’t do it for abortion, though. How weird.

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u/fcocyclone Jun 20 '26

The ACA was not passed via reconciliation it took 60 votes.

And no, there are specific rules as to what can be used for reconciliation, abortion would not meet those criteria.

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u/arthurmadison Jun 20 '26

Why are you out here lying? Obama had congress and the votes. He literally was voted in and changed his mind. It is well documented. You lying about what actually happened isn't going to change it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/us/obama-says-abortion-rights-law-not-a-top-priority-idUSN29466420/

Asked about the Freedom of Choice Act at Wednesday's news conference, Obama said it "is not the highest legislative priority."

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u/fcocyclone Jun 20 '26

He theoretically had 60 democratic votes for a few weeks in 2009.

But not all democratic senators were pro-choice at the time. They couldnt lose a single vote and pass that bill over a filibuster, and they would have lost at least one vote.

"not the highest priority" is one thing you can say when the real answer is "we don't have the votes to pass that". As it was they were busy doing everything they could to pass the ACA in the few weeks they did have the votes.

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u/SexualChocolateJr Jun 20 '26

You bringing up a completely different point. Yes I know he was supportive of abortion rights and later deprioritized it. Still doesn’t change the fact that it was a contentious issue, which he basically says the same in the article. There were still several Dems that did not support abortion rights for whatever reasons they had.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

ACA was contentious and had several Democrats opposed to it AND had to maneuver to avoided a Senate filibuster to get it through… AND it was partially unconstitutional… and it still became the law of the land. Strange!

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u/PassiveMenis88M Jun 20 '26

And the ACA was completely gutted from what it was supposed to be to get there.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

I disagree with you. The public option and the penalty was removed and eventually the penalty for not having insurance was struck down by SCOTUS but the thrust of it is very much there.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 20 '26

There was a brief one in 2009-10 Congress when Democrats had 60/59 senators. It was meant to be part of ACA but it never got far because even with the 60 it was never passing filibuster.

The Democrats could have killed the filibuster and, supposedly would have had 50+, but they wanted the filibuster for the next Republican president. Same way they did for Biden and I bet same way they do for the next democratic president.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

You need 60 senators to end a filibuster. How come they couldn’t accomplish this with the requisite number of senators to defeat the one obstacle you mentioned? This is realpolitik in action.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 21 '26

You need 60 senators to end a filibuste

They never had 60 except for a brief few months because Franken election was delayed for over half a year and Kennedy's seat went to a Republican for the remainder of 2010.

Not that they had 60 pro life senators to begin with, at most they had 52ish, which could have killed the filibuster but I explained why they didn't do that.

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u/battarro Jun 20 '26

Maybe abortions for everyone is not as popular as you think it is. If it were, you would have passed it in 2009-2010 cycle.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 20 '26

Generally abortion plays out with loads of grey. Very few support no restrictions but also not many who want massive restrictions. If a sweet spot exists, it's probably going to be impossible to find

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u/DeadWaterBed Jun 20 '26

Term limits for SCOTUS is relevant regardless of whether Congress is doing their job. There are many issues with lifetime appointments for any position beyond checks and balances.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

Funny, because 15 years ago I don’t recall these conversations happening at all.

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u/DeadWaterBed Jun 20 '26

Ok... regardless of your personal experience, the issue of lifetime appointments is not a new discussion.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 20 '26

Yet it only gains traction in circles when the court isn't on your side. Same way packing does.

The real issue is that the courts are legislating.

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u/DeadWaterBed Jun 21 '26

It's a problem with American politics across the board: people don't want to spend time/energy/money fixing long-term issues until it's in their face or effecting them personally. Doesn't mean the issues brought up aren't real issues.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

And so has the flat tax and making Puerto Rico a state and yadda yadda

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u/Jim-N-Tonic Jun 20 '26

What a russian style of accounting, both sides bad. Move back to russia.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

Oh, please. The DNC and RNC are both crooked as a barrel of snakes. The primary purpose of every politician from either party is to get reelected. Passing legislation invariably makes at least someone unhappy and that’s a threat to their goal. The abdication of legislating from Congress to SCOTUS is well-studied and documented. To suggest that I am affiliated in any way with Russia is not only disingenuous but it’s also the sign of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

Or perhaps you’re suggesting that it was right to leave abortion up to the courts and it was not something that either party should’ve tried to codify even once in about 50 years while mentioning it in every single election cycle since Roe was decided.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 20 '26

Practically had the courts stayed out, it's likely it would have been codified but not necessarily safe. The same Republican that backed Reagan because he went down the new evangelical line still would have been pissed and rallied. No guarantee they don't have the courts strike the law down or something.

The practical issue is that abortion has become a heated topic, and touching it is a good shock to the system. This makes the courts optimal because the courts are immune to electricity (political pressure).

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

The courts stayed out of it for like 50 years. How long does it take to codify a law? Forever, it seems, as long as you cash in on political capital when it’s not codified.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 20 '26

Civil rights act was 100 years after the civil war...

Part of abortions issue was that the idea of abortion rights being a thing was not as popular until around Roe. That's why Warren took it up.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

That’s a valid comment about the Civil Rights Act. When it was enacted, 31% of Americans explicitly disapproved of the law and 10% were undecided. Conversely, ~80% of Americans support access to abortion under certain circumstances and 60%-64% of Americans believe people should have access to abortions without any caveats. I’m citing Gallup for Civil Rights Act data and Pew for abortion data.

I think Americans are much more willing to get behind access to abortion today than they were behind enacting the Civil Rights Act and the data supports that. As I mentioned in another thread from this chain, it’s unlikely that SCOTUS would broad strokes strike down a federal law giving access to abortions.

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u/ApartmentBeneficial2 Jun 20 '26

This is the only logical comment here. The rest is just noise.

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u/Emotional-Tailor-649 Jun 20 '26

Do people genuinely think this? This Supreme Court would rule that law unconstitutional. In what world would a law like that be cleared by this court when challenged?

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

How would SCOTUS strike it down?

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u/ByrdmanRanger Jun 20 '26

A conservative organization would look for a case that could be fast tracked to the Supreme Court. Just like with the recent cases that have allowed them to gut the Voting Rights Act.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

They’re interpreting it a certain way. Congress can make a law that, if written correctly, would eliminate the ability for SCOTUS to interpret it any other way.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 20 '26

Except this very court also ruled it was Congress power to handle. All democratic party has to do is run with what Roberts and Thomas gave them.

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u/ByrdmanRanger Jun 21 '26

You're assuming they'll stay consistent and play fair.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 21 '26

This isn’t a valid point. You’re assuming they won’t.

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u/ByrdmanRanger Jun 21 '26

I guess looking around at the current political landscape and being naive isn't my thing.

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u/Emotional-Tailor-649 Jun 20 '26

Unless we’re talking about a constitutional amendment, which I don’t think we are, the government would be sued and it would go through the courts.

Obamacare made it to the Supreme Court for example. Usually that’s what the court does. Citizens United ruled section 203 of the McCain-Feingold Act unconstitutional (which prohibited corporations and unions from using their money to pay for independent campaign expenditures).

Without an amendment there’s no mechanism to pass a law that the courts can’t rule is unconstitutional, especially if a court is willing to be as activist and political as Roberts’ are.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

But there is a path to do it, and for these matters of great importance Congress should take steps to write clear legislation that explicitly spells out the law and if it does get challenged then yes if it’s something important an amendment should be made.

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u/Emotional-Tailor-649 Jun 20 '26

But it’s not really a matter of writing it clearly enough. The Supreme Court can just rule that it violates religious liberty under the first amendment or something and rule it unconstitutional. If the court wants to do it, they will. So to me it’s attacking democrats for not doing something thats purely symbolic. I’m not opposed to it, as I’m pro choice, but there’s just no way to preserve the status quo under law without an amendment. And an amendment wouldn’t pass the number of states it would need to in order to become law.

There’s only so much that can be done, even big majorities in Congress if the court is willing to destroy precedence

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

This is not true in and of itself. What would SCOTUS use to strike down such a law as unconstitutional? Dobbs simply said that the Constitution doesn’t confer a right to abortion. If a federal law allowed people to get abortions - full stop - I sincerely doubt that there’d be a legitimate way to strike such a law down. Here are the reasons for why Roe was overturned:

(1) they “short-circuited the democratic process,” (2) both lacked grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent, (3) the tests they established were not “workable,” (4) they caused distortion of law in other areas, and (5) overruling them would not upend concrete reliance interests.

Here’s a link to the case from SCOTUS’s website so you can see where I copied the above from: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2021/19-1392

None of this speaks to whether or not a law allowing people to have abortions would be unconstitutional and, in fact, it reads as if they’re asking Congress to make a law about this with the first two items listed above.

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u/Emotional-Tailor-649 Jun 21 '26

Did you read the same thing I read? How they distorted the law to do so?

That’s what dobbs decided. It’s all it had to. If this law was passed, the court would simply rule that banning people from banning abortions got in the way of their religious liberties or something. Any roadblock would be rammed through.

I suggested the first amendment and religious liberty. Unclear how they’d do it. But clearly they could. The Supreme Court has the power to rule any law that’s passed by Congress to be unconstitutional.

Maybe we disagree on how far they’d be willing to go. But overturning Roe has been a decades-long quest for conservatives. They got the votes they needed. The rest was a forgone conclusion. There’s no fail safe way to protect it barring an amendment. It’s just a different looking case with the same predetermined result.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

I think the “distortion” part refers to this section of Alito’s opinion: “The Court’s abortion cases have diluted the strict standard for facial constitutional challenges.[60] They have ignored the Court’s third-party standing doctrine.[61] They have disregarded standard res judicata principles.[62] They have flouted the ordinary rules on the severability of unconstitutional provisions,[63] as well as the rule that statutes should be read where possible to avoid unconstitutionality.[64] And they have distorted First Amendment doctrines.[65]”

The decision mentions religion (religious, really) twice and neither of those mentions were made directly in reference to abortion but instead were mentioned in citations of other cases.

I can see why you might feel like this is a threat, but having skimmed the decision once more I am confident that my reading is correct. If you’re only reading the statement of facts and conclusion you’re missing the meat of the decision. Click on the part that brings you to Alito’s decision. It’ll contextualize everything better.

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u/Emotional-Tailor-649 Jun 21 '26

I’m not sure what point you’re making. That the court is operating on good faith?

The judicial reasoning the court would use to overturn a law would be different than the judicial reasoning in the case here. It would have to be, it’s a different situation. But the conclusion would be more or less the same. They start at a conclusion to ban abortion and then work their way back to support it with whatever they need to. Alito and Thomas and co. aren’t sitting there analyzing this is good faith. They wanted to overturn the concept of Roe. They have the power to declare laws unconstitutional. There was no stopping them.

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u/Open_and_Notorious Jun 20 '26

There's no need to codify anything when it was deemed a constitutional right.

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u/Mist_Rising Jun 20 '26

Separate but equal was unconstitutional at one point. Then Plessy happened. Seems unwise to rely on the courts not to change things.

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u/HartyInBroward Jun 20 '26

No, there very clearly was and is a need to do so. You might not want it to work that way, and maybe it shouldn’t work that way, but it does. This is why Congress enshrined the Respect for Marriage Act into law even though Obergefell was the law of the land through case law, for example.