History is replete with examples of Congress using its powers to leverage, nudge, and even threaten the Supreme Court. A big part of how we got to where we are is that Congress has stopped doing so.
I did not know that Congress set the date for the start of a new term of the court. Why October?
And is the justices' 3 month vacation also set by Congress? Now that there is a/c in DC, & that they don't physically "ride circuit" anymore, it seems that they should work year-round like the Circuit Courts of Appeal. And if anyone says that's too much of a burden on the justices given the advanced age of many, they can always retire. And if a longer term means less time for the freebie trips, so much the better. Oh, & if they work 12 months, they can hear more cases.
October is a logical time -- summer off is standard, and they can prepare in September.
Their "vacation" (technically, if something comes up, they still will work) during that time arises from how Congress sets the schedule.
They do work "year around," as I said, with various things popping up during the summer. Circuit courts have a lot more cases.
Congress can force them to take more cases. The logic is that you have two sets of lower courts and the Supreme Court will now only take the most important cases, mostly to settle disputes. Taking some more cases can be useful.
Big picture, I'm unsure how much that will help address what many people care about.
As a compromise, we could have a rule that Supreme Court Justices still get three months off if Congress agrees to do something productive for at least three months.
Thank you for the excellent explanation of the various levers Congress has to exert power over the Court. That’s exactly what I was hoping to see in response to my earlier comment. My ignorance has been cured!
I am a former judge. I do not disagree with your persuasive arguments that once we had a relatively effective system of "checks and balances" and that we desperately need that back to stem the current tide waters. I would like to ask if you will write a piece about how, if we can, get back there without falling again into the polarized, massively partisan congressional acceptance of radical judicial decisions.
Congress should use the “good behavior” standard for life tenure to impose an enforceable ethics code on Supreme Court justices. It is highly doubtful several justices could meet a reasonable test and their termination would send a useful message to the rest and future occupants.
That's a good idea in principle, but it presupposes that Congress can be a reliable and impartial judge of ethics. Few people nowadays believe that's true.
If the rot pervades society, no formal structural changes will save us.
I think he has a pretty good list of ideas that track with some of these historical examples.
I know SCOTUS gave itself the right of last review on constitutional matters. The other branches sort of just accepted it, but what if they didn't? They all took the oath too. There would be nothing the court could do about it. SCOTUS has the right of last review as long as the more powerful branches allow them to. I am perfectly fine with an enfeebled court, as it's mostly done harm.
Part of the problem with using the levers "mildly" or "gently" is that a guilty Court would use the shadow docket to stay the effects of the leverage and then would wait out a change in Congressional control to issue a ruling on the merits.
And I was reading up on Evans v Gore and US v. Hatter. Why wouldn't "compensation" include "facilities" and other "penumbral expenses" (to dig at conservatives for non-enumerated items) like clerks, library, etc.? I've thought that they way to get a Supreme Court to agree to a binding Ethical Code, including Conflict of Interest disclosures and recusals, was to eliminate all aspects of a non-conforming Justice's budget. No clerks, no IT, no office, no parking, etc.
Love your articles. Saw you at UoC's Institute of Politics last year as well. Keep up the good work.
At this point: I've lost all hope that the SC can be reformed under any scenario in a sustainable way. I think the Founders messed up and the British had it right with their unitary parliamentary system.
If you had a magic wand that allowed you to change the constitution at will: would you even keep a supreme court and not revert to some version of parliamentary supremacy? Let the peoples representatives (Congress) interpret their own laws if split districts cause problems.
If you throw out a branch of government because it’s flawed, we are in trouble. We would be throwing out the presidency, the Congress and the judiciary. We’re never gonna get something that has no flaws. But a group of judges who have stopped grounding their arguments in existing laws and are blind to their prejudices, should not be allowed to stand.
Hooray! Norm Ornstein also said ths today. AT LAST people of weight are saying: Use the Constitution! The Supreme Court's reckless over-reach destroys legitimate democratic norms by expanding court review recklessly. Congress can curb the Court. Just give us the majority to pass and re-pass democratic legislation governing elections, and exclude Court appellate review! Thank you Norm & Steve. Lets get 21st-century oriented Democrats behind this effort and in 8 months the new Congress can save our electoral democracy.
Thank you for this most welcome and informative post on the history of relationships between Congress and the Supreme Court. My understanding of checks and balances has been that any of the three branches has the right to check and balance either of the other two branches, so no one of them is Supreme. Although this word is applied to the Court, it is Supreme only as far as the judiciary is concerned. Moreover, if there is anything or any group that is “supreme”, to use one its synonyms it is We, the People who are sovereign. That assertion is surely one of the two innovations emerging from the American Revolution that justify the claim of “exceptionalism” by the United States, the other being that the secular sphere is not intimately and discriminatorily linked – or shackled - to the religious sphere through one faith. There is freedom of worship – and not to worship – and freedom of speech. These two freedoms are themselves mutually dependent, since otherwise speech viewed as blasphemy in a religious context becomes illegal and punishable by secular authorities.
The current Supreme Court, or most but not all Justices, seem to be as ignorant of history (domestic and global) as they are of modern science, or of the significance of past conditions and events as of contemporary circumstances. Or to be fair, they are biased towards at best highly dubious interpretations and views of how we got to where we are today, and both the continuing harmful and beneficial impacts of the paths we have taken, as well as the consequences of the enormous new knowledge and capabilities humans have gained, for better and worse, since 1776.
Not only is Congress supine and complicit in the assaults on democracy and the foundational values of the American Republic being waged from the White House, but as Professor Vladeck shows it is equally if not more supine, if that is even possible, with respect to the Supreme Court. So, to use an analogy I have made elsewhere, the US Government is reduced to a 2-body from a 3-body dynamic. This dynamic is inherently more susceptible to degeneration from a messy democratic but (I would argue) more innovative regime potentially responsive to the needs and wishes of all members of a society and polity, into an authoritarian regime for the benefit of the few, prone to transformation into an oligarchy, kakistocracy, or an idiocracy, or a combination of all three (multibillionaires, Trump/Miller, Patel..). I wonder how Chief Justice Roberts would respond to the question of what he thinks about Trump’s statement "My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me," since that means there is no need for a Supreme Court, or indeed any court. Absolute Monarchy or MAMA - Make Absolute Monarchy Again.” More historically Latin than Anglo-Saxon and more Roman Empire than British. King Charles III recently subtly and amusingly reminded us how much the US had built upon what Britain had developed over the centuries, from Magna Carta in 1215 to the 1689 English Bill of Rights, and the introduction of checks and balances in a governance structure - between the Monarch and Parliament in the British case. The English had after all beheaded their King Charles I in the mid 17th century, a form of impeachment resulting in a conviction. And the primary language of the English Court, Administration and law for about 3 centuries after 1066 was Norman French, not English. Conflating either or worse both nations of Britain and the US only with an English speaking, ethnically based (Anglo-Saxon) blood and soil heritage and hence invoking an existential threat to our "civilizations" (erasure) from people and traditions who do not conform to this myth is false, ludicrous, and shameful. Its propagandists and advocates are shameless. And irredeemably stupid in failing to recognize the facts and implications of global demographics, that humans are one species with 99%+ of DNA that is the same across all human-defined "racial" and "ethnic" categories based on skin color, shape of eyes, hair texture etc., and the ways in which ideas and knowledge originating in Asia and the Euro-centrically defined "Middle East" and elsewhere have been incorporated into "Western Civilization" and vice versa.
I appreciate the examples of non-packing intervention.
I think those that are more pro-court-packing (or at least more court-packing-forward) are less convinced that Congress can't, within the law, provide accountability to the Court, but more skeptical that our actually existing Congress has the capacity to engage in the kind of focused, multi-prong effort that would be needed to actually use these levers.
The biggest upshot of court packing is that while it's a radical step, it's a radical step that only needs to happen once to achieve the desired result; and it will not be ambiguous whether or not the step has been taken.
I'll also say on my part; the biggest reason I'm more court packing forward is that I want moderates to be afraid that if the Court keeps doing unaccountable, lawless things, they're going to face a rebellion from the base of their party. The threat of court packing is as much against moderate Dems as it is SCOTUS itself; if they don't actually do the work to rein in SCOTUS, they'll be thrown and and replaced with people who will take much more dramatic action. From that point or view, calls to pack the courts are an unalloyed good; whether or not it produces actual court packing.
Mr. Vladek, excellent essays. I am a retired attorney who agrees with you about Congress’ -I think duty- to pass laws that override outrageous decisions like so many have been from this hyperpartisan Court. Of course, that requires a functioning Congress. As for the Court-packing, I agree that it would be an untenable race to the bottom; however, the current Court is visibly hyperpartisan. I sure don’t know the answer. I would say let’s get a functioning Congress.
Duty, sure, but *this* Congress passing such laws? And where do you put the odds of a Democratic Senate in 2027? I do tend to think that the Court should be able to function without continual congressional oversight, and if it can't then it lacks legitimacy.
The job of the contemporary Justice is too cushy. They have four clerks—four of the smartest, most anal persons on earth—to ease the work. Their case load gets smaller and smaller. They have very well paying summer jobs. They work in an all political town where they are feted and lionized. And they set their own rules.
My solution? Give them one clerk, cut out the summer teaching, and move the Court to Omaha, a place where they would have to compete with Warren Buffett and cows for attention. Oh, and set firm ethical rules.
I think this might be the best idea yet. I was also thinking about if they did “pack the court” why not have 20 Justices, but only have 9 on each case, you have different justices that have to work with each other and no one knows which justices they will get until the Court has decided to take the case. It seems there are a lot of cases that come to the court from the “dark money” groups that figure out what they want to do then find their plaintiff that fits their narrative. They then have their Federalist Society Justices to give them the outcome they want. But if there are more Justices on the court and they don’t know who they will get, it makes it a little more difficult to get the outcome they want. Just a thought.
Excellent idea The European Court of Justice— the EUs highest court— has 26? Members, But the judges sit in different size panels depending on the case. As Kristi Lau says, it fosters all kinds of good vibes
I saw that suggestion in a previous article here, perhaps from you.
If the 20-justice court had 13 justices on the "right" and 7 on the "left" -- about the same proportion as the current court's 6/3 ratio -- and if the 9 justices were chosen randomly each time, then if I did the calculation correctly, the probability that the "right" would have a majority among the 9 chosen justices is nearly 90%.
That's better than the current 100% probability, but it wouldn't go very far in eliminating partisanship as long as partisan justices continue to be nominated and confirmed.
The underlying problem is the increasing polarization and partisanship in our society, including among voters, and that's a difficult problem to solve.
A bit more detail under the same assumptions (also not peer reviewed :--)
Probability of 5 on the "right" and 4 on the "left" = 27%.
Probability of at least a 6/3 majority on the right among the 9 Justices = 63%
That may be relevant since a 5/4 right/left split isn't as imbalanced as the other cases where the right has a majority.
The fundamental problem is that there isn't enough dedication to impartiality among the voting public, politicians, judges, and Supreme Court Justices. It's hard to change human nature.
How exactly do most of those methods help to address the current Court?
That is what you have to show. Jurisdiction stripping seemed to be the hardball move if you don't want court expansion (and size of the Court WAS something they did, most blatantly to avoid giving President Andrew Johnson a chance to have a justice -- he, like Trump, could have had multiple.) The Federalists also reduced the Court to five, and the Jeffersonians put the justice back.
They are not going to circuit ride. There is a court of appeals.
They already have a separate building.
If you worried about legitimacy, targeting their damn pensions (what will they do? change because of money? you are ssooooo worried about expansion, after people think multiple justices were added corruptly; how will that look?) How about the skipping a whole term thing? Losers!
There are useful tweaks. Ethical reform is fine. There are ways to regulate the docket that probably would help. For instance, I think shining some light in the shadows will help.
And responding strongly to statutory opinions like Shelby County v. Holder (though that was a mix of constitutional and statutory issues) is important. You need a trifecta and no filibuster. Do it, sure.
With our divided country and the current system so locked in with gerrymandering and the Senate, that's going to be hard to do.
The 6-3 Court will remain, maybe with 1 or 2 more Trump justices who will be here for decades, handing down horrible decisions, stripping us of rights, and corrupting the republic. And jurisdiction stripping keep away is apparently off the table, too.
(What if a tragedy happened, and it is a 7-2 Trump Court? At some level, when a court clearly went a certain way, its numbers mattered. Historically, Congress only did so much to restrain them.)
A few of the conservatives will be more wary & somewhat less powerful. The same corrupt justices will continue to have de facto life tenure. Hopefully, the car thieves will drive somewhat more carefully.
I wish you had commented on whether you think Congress could impose an enforceable code of ethics on the justices. Under considerable public pressure, a few years ago the Court itself adopted a code but it contains no enforcement mechanism and which has proven only partially effective. The New York City Bar has published an extensive report advocating for Congressional action in light of the Court’s failure to act effectively, but in typical fashion Congress has done nothing. The report argues that Congress unquestionably possesses the power to impose ethical rules that are enforceable. Do you agree?
How does it come about that there is even a chance that the Calvinball Court will permit a do-over in the LA election already underway when one of its objections to the Texas ruling months before voting started was that "The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections."
I did not know that Congress set the date for the start of a new term of the court. Why October?
And is the justices' 3 month vacation also set by Congress? Now that there is a/c in DC, & that they don't physically "ride circuit" anymore, it seems that they should work year-round like the Circuit Courts of Appeal. And if anyone says that's too much of a burden on the justices given the advanced age of many, they can always retire. And if a longer term means less time for the freebie trips, so much the better. Oh, & if they work 12 months, they can hear more cases.
I think you are on to something!
October is a logical time -- summer off is standard, and they can prepare in September.
Their "vacation" (technically, if something comes up, they still will work) during that time arises from how Congress sets the schedule.
They do work "year around," as I said, with various things popping up during the summer. Circuit courts have a lot more cases.
Congress can force them to take more cases. The logic is that you have two sets of lower courts and the Supreme Court will now only take the most important cases, mostly to settle disputes. Taking some more cases can be useful.
Big picture, I'm unsure how much that will help address what many people care about.
As a compromise, we could have a rule that Supreme Court Justices still get three months off if Congress agrees to do something productive for at least three months.
Thank you for the excellent explanation of the various levers Congress has to exert power over the Court. That’s exactly what I was hoping to see in response to my earlier comment. My ignorance has been cured!
I am a former judge. I do not disagree with your persuasive arguments that once we had a relatively effective system of "checks and balances" and that we desperately need that back to stem the current tide waters. I would like to ask if you will write a piece about how, if we can, get back there without falling again into the polarized, massively partisan congressional acceptance of radical judicial decisions.
I think addressing partisanship is the first step. Here's this organization's proposal for Amendment XXVIII:
An election or campaign for an elective or appointive legislative, executive, or judicial United States, state, or local office will be solely public.
Congress should use the “good behavior” standard for life tenure to impose an enforceable ethics code on Supreme Court justices. It is highly doubtful several justices could meet a reasonable test and their termination would send a useful message to the rest and future occupants.
That's a good idea in principle, but it presupposes that Congress can be a reliable and impartial judge of ethics. Few people nowadays believe that's true.
If the rot pervades society, no formal structural changes will save us.
This is great. Check out Rep Casten's bill for reining in the court: https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/5785711-judicial-system-loses-trust/
I think he has a pretty good list of ideas that track with some of these historical examples.
I know SCOTUS gave itself the right of last review on constitutional matters. The other branches sort of just accepted it, but what if they didn't? They all took the oath too. There would be nothing the court could do about it. SCOTUS has the right of last review as long as the more powerful branches allow them to. I am perfectly fine with an enfeebled court, as it's mostly done harm.
Part of the problem with using the levers "mildly" or "gently" is that a guilty Court would use the shadow docket to stay the effects of the leverage and then would wait out a change in Congressional control to issue a ruling on the merits.
And I was reading up on Evans v Gore and US v. Hatter. Why wouldn't "compensation" include "facilities" and other "penumbral expenses" (to dig at conservatives for non-enumerated items) like clerks, library, etc.? I've thought that they way to get a Supreme Court to agree to a binding Ethical Code, including Conflict of Interest disclosures and recusals, was to eliminate all aspects of a non-conforming Justice's budget. No clerks, no IT, no office, no parking, etc.
Love your articles. Saw you at UoC's Institute of Politics last year as well. Keep up the good work.
At this point: I've lost all hope that the SC can be reformed under any scenario in a sustainable way. I think the Founders messed up and the British had it right with their unitary parliamentary system.
If you had a magic wand that allowed you to change the constitution at will: would you even keep a supreme court and not revert to some version of parliamentary supremacy? Let the peoples representatives (Congress) interpret their own laws if split districts cause problems.
I guess what I'm asking is: these are good ideas for reforming the court. But is that not radical enough? Why keep the court at all? It seems flawed.
If you throw out a branch of government because it’s flawed, we are in trouble. We would be throwing out the presidency, the Congress and the judiciary. We’re never gonna get something that has no flaws. But a group of judges who have stopped grounding their arguments in existing laws and are blind to their prejudices, should not be allowed to stand.
I wonder what really could convince you that the Rubicon has been passed already, or more precisely what coils still happen to convince you.
I have no doubt that Republicans would indeed expand the court right now if they had anything to gain from it.
Hooray! Norm Ornstein also said ths today. AT LAST people of weight are saying: Use the Constitution! The Supreme Court's reckless over-reach destroys legitimate democratic norms by expanding court review recklessly. Congress can curb the Court. Just give us the majority to pass and re-pass democratic legislation governing elections, and exclude Court appellate review! Thank you Norm & Steve. Lets get 21st-century oriented Democrats behind this effort and in 8 months the new Congress can save our electoral democracy.
Thank you for this most welcome and informative post on the history of relationships between Congress and the Supreme Court. My understanding of checks and balances has been that any of the three branches has the right to check and balance either of the other two branches, so no one of them is Supreme. Although this word is applied to the Court, it is Supreme only as far as the judiciary is concerned. Moreover, if there is anything or any group that is “supreme”, to use one its synonyms it is We, the People who are sovereign. That assertion is surely one of the two innovations emerging from the American Revolution that justify the claim of “exceptionalism” by the United States, the other being that the secular sphere is not intimately and discriminatorily linked – or shackled - to the religious sphere through one faith. There is freedom of worship – and not to worship – and freedom of speech. These two freedoms are themselves mutually dependent, since otherwise speech viewed as blasphemy in a religious context becomes illegal and punishable by secular authorities.
The current Supreme Court, or most but not all Justices, seem to be as ignorant of history (domestic and global) as they are of modern science, or of the significance of past conditions and events as of contemporary circumstances. Or to be fair, they are biased towards at best highly dubious interpretations and views of how we got to where we are today, and both the continuing harmful and beneficial impacts of the paths we have taken, as well as the consequences of the enormous new knowledge and capabilities humans have gained, for better and worse, since 1776.
Not only is Congress supine and complicit in the assaults on democracy and the foundational values of the American Republic being waged from the White House, but as Professor Vladeck shows it is equally if not more supine, if that is even possible, with respect to the Supreme Court. So, to use an analogy I have made elsewhere, the US Government is reduced to a 2-body from a 3-body dynamic. This dynamic is inherently more susceptible to degeneration from a messy democratic but (I would argue) more innovative regime potentially responsive to the needs and wishes of all members of a society and polity, into an authoritarian regime for the benefit of the few, prone to transformation into an oligarchy, kakistocracy, or an idiocracy, or a combination of all three (multibillionaires, Trump/Miller, Patel..). I wonder how Chief Justice Roberts would respond to the question of what he thinks about Trump’s statement "My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me," since that means there is no need for a Supreme Court, or indeed any court. Absolute Monarchy or MAMA - Make Absolute Monarchy Again.” More historically Latin than Anglo-Saxon and more Roman Empire than British. King Charles III recently subtly and amusingly reminded us how much the US had built upon what Britain had developed over the centuries, from Magna Carta in 1215 to the 1689 English Bill of Rights, and the introduction of checks and balances in a governance structure - between the Monarch and Parliament in the British case. The English had after all beheaded their King Charles I in the mid 17th century, a form of impeachment resulting in a conviction. And the primary language of the English Court, Administration and law for about 3 centuries after 1066 was Norman French, not English. Conflating either or worse both nations of Britain and the US only with an English speaking, ethnically based (Anglo-Saxon) blood and soil heritage and hence invoking an existential threat to our "civilizations" (erasure) from people and traditions who do not conform to this myth is false, ludicrous, and shameful. Its propagandists and advocates are shameless. And irredeemably stupid in failing to recognize the facts and implications of global demographics, that humans are one species with 99%+ of DNA that is the same across all human-defined "racial" and "ethnic" categories based on skin color, shape of eyes, hair texture etc., and the ways in which ideas and knowledge originating in Asia and the Euro-centrically defined "Middle East" and elsewhere have been incorporated into "Western Civilization" and vice versa.
I appreciate the examples of non-packing intervention.
I think those that are more pro-court-packing (or at least more court-packing-forward) are less convinced that Congress can't, within the law, provide accountability to the Court, but more skeptical that our actually existing Congress has the capacity to engage in the kind of focused, multi-prong effort that would be needed to actually use these levers.
The biggest upshot of court packing is that while it's a radical step, it's a radical step that only needs to happen once to achieve the desired result; and it will not be ambiguous whether or not the step has been taken.
I'll also say on my part; the biggest reason I'm more court packing forward is that I want moderates to be afraid that if the Court keeps doing unaccountable, lawless things, they're going to face a rebellion from the base of their party. The threat of court packing is as much against moderate Dems as it is SCOTUS itself; if they don't actually do the work to rein in SCOTUS, they'll be thrown and and replaced with people who will take much more dramatic action. From that point or view, calls to pack the courts are an unalloyed good; whether or not it produces actual court packing.
Mr. Vladek, excellent essays. I am a retired attorney who agrees with you about Congress’ -I think duty- to pass laws that override outrageous decisions like so many have been from this hyperpartisan Court. Of course, that requires a functioning Congress. As for the Court-packing, I agree that it would be an untenable race to the bottom; however, the current Court is visibly hyperpartisan. I sure don’t know the answer. I would say let’s get a functioning Congress.
Duty, sure, but *this* Congress passing such laws? And where do you put the odds of a Democratic Senate in 2027? I do tend to think that the Court should be able to function without continual congressional oversight, and if it can't then it lacks legitimacy.
The job of the contemporary Justice is too cushy. They have four clerks—four of the smartest, most anal persons on earth—to ease the work. Their case load gets smaller and smaller. They have very well paying summer jobs. They work in an all political town where they are feted and lionized. And they set their own rules.
My solution? Give them one clerk, cut out the summer teaching, and move the Court to Omaha, a place where they would have to compete with Warren Buffett and cows for attention. Oh, and set firm ethical rules.
I think this might be the best idea yet. I was also thinking about if they did “pack the court” why not have 20 Justices, but only have 9 on each case, you have different justices that have to work with each other and no one knows which justices they will get until the Court has decided to take the case. It seems there are a lot of cases that come to the court from the “dark money” groups that figure out what they want to do then find their plaintiff that fits their narrative. They then have their Federalist Society Justices to give them the outcome they want. But if there are more Justices on the court and they don’t know who they will get, it makes it a little more difficult to get the outcome they want. Just a thought.
Excellent idea The European Court of Justice— the EUs highest court— has 26? Members, But the judges sit in different size panels depending on the case. As Kristi Lau says, it fosters all kinds of good vibes
I saw that suggestion in a previous article here, perhaps from you.
If the 20-justice court had 13 justices on the "right" and 7 on the "left" -- about the same proportion as the current court's 6/3 ratio -- and if the 9 justices were chosen randomly each time, then if I did the calculation correctly, the probability that the "right" would have a majority among the 9 chosen justices is nearly 90%.
That's better than the current 100% probability, but it wouldn't go very far in eliminating partisanship as long as partisan justices continue to be nominated and confirmed.
The underlying problem is the increasing polarization and partisanship in our society, including among voters, and that's a difficult problem to solve.
That is what I quickly thought after I sent that. There is so much working against working American’s that it’s hard to see through all the bullshit.
A bit more detail under the same assumptions (also not peer reviewed :--)
Probability of 5 on the "right" and 4 on the "left" = 27%.
Probability of at least a 6/3 majority on the right among the 9 Justices = 63%
That may be relevant since a 5/4 right/left split isn't as imbalanced as the other cases where the right has a majority.
The fundamental problem is that there isn't enough dedication to impartiality among the voting public, politicians, judges, and Supreme Court Justices. It's hard to change human nature.
No matter how it’s done is that it gets done. Then again we need ethics and accountability in all of branches come to think of it! 🤪
How exactly do most of those methods help to address the current Court?
That is what you have to show. Jurisdiction stripping seemed to be the hardball move if you don't want court expansion (and size of the Court WAS something they did, most blatantly to avoid giving President Andrew Johnson a chance to have a justice -- he, like Trump, could have had multiple.) The Federalists also reduced the Court to five, and the Jeffersonians put the justice back.
They are not going to circuit ride. There is a court of appeals.
They already have a separate building.
If you worried about legitimacy, targeting their damn pensions (what will they do? change because of money? you are ssooooo worried about expansion, after people think multiple justices were added corruptly; how will that look?) How about the skipping a whole term thing? Losers!
There are useful tweaks. Ethical reform is fine. There are ways to regulate the docket that probably would help. For instance, I think shining some light in the shadows will help.
And responding strongly to statutory opinions like Shelby County v. Holder (though that was a mix of constitutional and statutory issues) is important. You need a trifecta and no filibuster. Do it, sure.
With our divided country and the current system so locked in with gerrymandering and the Senate, that's going to be hard to do.
The 6-3 Court will remain, maybe with 1 or 2 more Trump justices who will be here for decades, handing down horrible decisions, stripping us of rights, and corrupting the republic. And jurisdiction stripping keep away is apparently off the table, too.
(What if a tragedy happened, and it is a 7-2 Trump Court? At some level, when a court clearly went a certain way, its numbers mattered. Historically, Congress only did so much to restrain them.)
A few of the conservatives will be more wary & somewhat less powerful. The same corrupt justices will continue to have de facto life tenure. Hopefully, the car thieves will drive somewhat more carefully.
I wish you had commented on whether you think Congress could impose an enforceable code of ethics on the justices. Under considerable public pressure, a few years ago the Court itself adopted a code but it contains no enforcement mechanism and which has proven only partially effective. The New York City Bar has published an extensive report advocating for Congressional action in light of the Court’s failure to act effectively, but in typical fashion Congress has done nothing. The report argues that Congress unquestionably possesses the power to impose ethical rules that are enforceable. Do you agree?
Could it? Sure. Would it? This Congress? Nope. Next Senate? Highly unlikely.
How does it come about that there is even a chance that the Calvinball Court will permit a do-over in the LA election already underway when one of its objections to the Texas ruling months before voting started was that "The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections."