So we need a new Supreme Court Justice...
Sep. 24th, 2020 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickYou might think that this is going to be about how Mitch McConnell is shoving Trump's nominee through in doubletime or how packing the court... but it is not. I am not going to talk about that shit because we all know that shit and either THINK IT IS GREAT, MAGA!!, YAY FEDERALIST SOCIETY!! or are lamenting the direction of our beloved country and worried to death about rollback of the strides we've made toward equality and rights for lgbtq folks and Roe v. Wade and such. I expect everyone already knows how they feel about the current situation and I'm not here for that. I mean, I am here for that and I'm totally gonna go vote in person come November. But, I am not here today to discuss that. I am here today to bring you... what if.
Looking back, historians decided that The Trouble With The Supreme Court started after then-President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to replace liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the fall of 2020. After the nomination, Mitch McConnell, then Senate Majority Leader, shoved the nomination to a vote in a rush so that newly appointed Justice Barrett was seated by the end of September. On October 7, she was shot to death outside 1 First Street NE in Washington DC, by a sniper who (it was later determined by way of ballistics and shooting reconstruction) was situated on the roof of the United Methodist building.
Everyone declared it a great tragedy. Conservatives, naturally, blamed the left. The left blamed extremists, said it was likely extreme Pro Choice people or possibly BLM or Antifa folks. In the aftermath of the shooting, security for all the justices was tightened up considerably. The body was barely cold before Trump nominated Barbara Lagoa to replace Barrett. Mitch McConnell again sped Trump's pick through the Senate confirmation, and she was installed before Halloween.
Nothing happened to Lagoa, though. She settled into the job, the rest of the nation exhaled, and EVERYONE went to the polls in November, one of the largest voter turnouts in history. Trump lost the election by a solid margin and oddly didn't contest it because he was very busy gearing up his new reality show and planning his presidential library, located in Moscow. Joe Biden settled in to a relatively bland and unexciting presidency in January.
February 15, Brett Kavanaugh was found strangled in his car in a parking garage. Video footage of the crime showed persons dressed head to toe in black and a brief struggle, but that was it. The car used to flee the scene was found a few blocks away, but that was no help. It had been reported as stolen two weeks prior and belonged to a senior citizen with a walker. There was no clear motive for the murder besides "Kavanaugh was a supreme court justice" and there were no actual suspects.
Again there was an outcry. Again, conservatives blamed the left. Again, the left blamed extremists. Two justices murdered did look like something of a pattern, but the police and the FBI couldn't come up with any real leads.
Biden nominated Merrick Garland, the judge that Obama hadn't been able to get a vote on. Schumer (the Senate had flipped decisively, adding 7 seats to the Dems, so Schumer was the majority leader) called the vote and Garland was confirmed as the new SCJ to replace Kavanaugh.
Because of the murders, the justices were assigned close security details when they were in DC doing court stuff. People on the internet fostered the belief that there was some kind of organized conspiracy to off the justices, at least the conservative ones, but nobody outside their little groups paid much attention to that.
Things were fine until Clarence Thomas "drowned in his bathtub" at home in April. His wife Ginni swore up and and down that he didn't "take baths" but there was no evidence of foul play. To replace Thomas, Biden nominated Cornelia Pillard, whose confirmation hearing took three weeks. She didn't get seated until May, but almost everyone felt she was a decent choice.
Following the attack on Thomas, the Supreme Court moved everything to zoom sessions. Each justice was assigned a technology coordinator to see to it that everything ran smoothly. The Supreme Court, from that point on, held all sessions remotely with each justice in an undisclosed, separate location. The legal profession as a whole was disgruntled at not being able to argue cases In Front Of The Supreme Court. It didn't seem the same to show up to their own law office conference room, but they'd gotten used to zoom meetings during the (never-ending) covid shit, and it was what it was.
By midsummer of 2021, things were feeling more normal. The news stopped looking like The Onion. Biden didn't say outrageously racist things or threaten to build walls or hold enormous rallies. He strengthened the ACA and put together a working group on MFA but told people not to expect any instant results on that. He improved the EPA and strengthened carbon emission targets. He funded the postal service. He worked with the Eurozone on trade. He did what people expected a Democratic president to do, more or less.
Neil Gorsuch went missing in July. He'd been at his cabin near Granby for the 4th and just... never returned. He remained missing through the remainder of the summer. The news shows speculated, but nobody could prove he was dead without a body, so the court stayed at eight instead of nine. It didn't matter that he failed to show up for work -- lifetime appointments mean that you can't be fired for not clocking in. Also, this wasn't the first time the court had to muddle along with eight members. During the Obama administration, it'd had only eight for the last two hundred or so days while McConnell refused to put Garland to a vote. And it had functioned, sort of. This was like that.
In October, a hiker found an unidentified head in Rocky Mountain National Park, not thirty miles from Gorsuch's cabin. Dental records and DNA testing proved it was the missing justice. When Gorsuch's head was found, congress authorized round the clock bodyguards for the SCJ's on the grounds that even though whoever was killing the justices was clearly equipped with a liberal agenda, this sort of foolishness set a bad precedent and could not stand.
After Gorsuch was clearly deceased, Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the seat. The senate approved her and she became the first black woman on the Supreme Court. The decidedly liberal (6-3) court, which had become so by way of a slew of murders, settled in to hearing cases and enacting a fairly progressive agenda.
The remainder of Biden's term passed without incident. The Senate Dems lost two seats in the midterms, taking the Dem majority from 55 to 53. The House stayed Democratic through the 2024 election. But, Biden decided not to run again (his health was clearly failing). At the DNC, Harris got the nod to run against the Republican's choice of Ted Cruz. Harris ran a strong campaign, but lost by the skin of her teeth. Lyin' Ted became president.
In February, 2024, Justice Sotomayor was found dead in her home. Autopsy revealed she'd been injected with a massive dose of insulin and the death was ruled a murder. Like with the previous justices, there was no evidence. There were no leads. No leads, nothing to investigate. Yeah, there was an outcry, but the FBI can't do much with an outcry.
Cruz's first pick didn't get approved by the (still Democrat-held) Senate though they did grant him the courtesy of holding an actual vote. While his administration (evil, but reasonably competent) was casting a wider net for a judge who could pass the vetting and get the votes in a Democratically-controlled Senate, Justice Breyer died of an execution-style gunshot. His bodyguard, like Sotomayor's, hadn't seen a thing. Justice Breyer was in his study at home, reading, and there was a shot and then there was a dead justice. By this time, it seemed that whoever was killing justices didn't give a shit about whether they were liberal or conservative. Or maybe it was two different groups killing justices. Who could say?
It was around now that the internet conspiracy theorists noticed a strange trend in lower-court judges as well. Federal judges were suffering more... accidents than were reasonably and statistically likely. And this trend, they alleged, had begun at the twilight of the Trump administration. However, since the judges were all over the United States, only the conspiracy theorists had bothered to dig through the alumni sections of law school bulletins to find out how many judges were dying and of what they were dying. "A spearfishing accident in Curaçao? How is that even believable?!?" said one poster on reddit/r/kyllindajudges. The conspiracy theorists started to gain some traction with regular news outlets. John Oliver did a segment on the most unrealistic causes of death for judges.
Meanwhile, Cruz proposed two middle of the road nominees for the supreme court, one a bit liberal and one a bit conservative but both of them pretty close to center. He'd had to stretch a bit to find a second one that could get the Senate nod AND ALSO agreed to serve. Several judges he'd tapped had, somewhat surprisingly, demurred on the grounds that taking a SCJ seat was like having a target painted on their back...
They weren't far wrong. By the time President Belinda Dorrat was elected in 2040, the average term of a Supreme Court Justice was five years. In 2080, when So-Min Cheong sat in the Oval Office, the average term had dropped to just ten months.
But then, a funny thing happened. President Cheong appointed young up-and-comer Omar Washington to the court. He was a well-respected middle-of-the-road guy with a solid track record for being fair and reasoned but not... strongly conservative or liberal. She got him past the Senate... and he stayed. He didn't cause his bodyguards trouble, but he also didn't seem to need them. There were... attempts, yes, but none of them succeeded. He served for ten years and retired alive... the first justice to do so since Kennedy, back in 2018.
On the heels of Washington's appointment, Claire Parks accepted the nod. She was a tad liberal but not excessively so, at the outset, and she survived various attempts on her life through the 2090's. She drifted more left as she served, though, and wound up hung by her heels, in a meat cooler in the twelfth year of her term. Her efforts on the court to grant humane and fair treatment to meat animals like cows, pigs, and chickens ushered in a new era of improved humane farming practices... and also, due to the cost of said humane and fair treatment, a sizeable uptick in vegetarianism since meat became rather pricey under the new system. But, because feedlots and pig shit lagoons from CAFOs were no longer needed, the environment also got a boost.
Other young, relatively hale judges started to accept nominations in the 2090's. They mostly did well enough, liberal or conservative, as long as they were fairly moderate in their decisions and reasonably aware in their everyday lives. It wasn't a cakewalk -- the assassins would get those who accepted a Diet Coke from an aide or failed to check the back seat of their vehicle every time. But, it started to look like at least some judges could get ten years on the Supreme Court without superhuman effort.
Not all judges, though. The further to either end of the spectrum a justice tended to go, the more serious the efforts against them became. It wasn't a subtle effect. The internet conspiracy theorists noticed it shortly after the pioneering work of Omar Washington, the first to survive and retire since The Trouble With The Supreme Court started. It was pretty clear, from survival rates and voting histories, that a middle-of-the-road pick, like Travis Marzetti (appointed 2093, assassinated 2106), didn't have to dodge as well as a firebrand conservative like Helena Strait (appointed 2085, assassinated 2086) or duck as swiftly as a bleeding heart liberal like Okina Pa'au (appointed 2091, assassinated 2091). As time went by, it became clear that after year ten, the gloves came off for the middle-of-the-road justices, too. Only the internet conspiracy theorists noticed that the same thing held for federal judges. They were allowed a bit more sway in the liberal/conservative spectrum but if they pegged the meter at either end, they were assassinated. If they outstayed their welcome (15 years, it seemed, instead of 10), they were also assassinated.
By the mid 2100's, Supreme Court Justices had settled into being well-respected members of the judiciary that Senators on both sides of the aisle could agree were capable minds with solidly-researched and well-argued jurisprudence. Some were a little more conservative and some a little more liberal, but on the whole they represented the middle ground that Most Americans could agree with. They served ten year terms and voluntarily retired when their time had run... or didn't retire and were assassinated within the next few years. Their choice.
A few hit the bench determined to be Strongly Activist and lurch the court one direction or the other. They were put down accordingly and everyone viewed this as The Way Things Should Be.
Eventually, in 2200, the US Constitution was amended to read that a Supreme Court Justice had to be approved by 75% of the Senate, that Supreme Court Nominees (once proposed) must be voted on by the Senate within two calendar weeks, and that the term of a SCJ was limited to ten years. The first justice to be appointed under these rules, Rewa Bakshi, served an uneventful ten years and retired. So did the second, Jose Alvarez. So did the third, fourth, and fifth. And that was the end of the The Trouble With The Supreme Court.
Only now, in the year 2300, with the unsealing of the documents relating to The Trouble With The Supreme Court, have we learned the true story of how a vast network of assassin-lawyers worked tirelessly in cells organized and operated by their local bar associations to repair a politicized court system that was growing more and more partisan with every election. More than anyone else, they were qualified to evaluate judges and to to shut down those who tried to put a thumb on the scales of justice.
Looking back, historians decided that The Trouble With The Supreme Court started after then-President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to replace liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the fall of 2020. After the nomination, Mitch McConnell, then Senate Majority Leader, shoved the nomination to a vote in a rush so that newly appointed Justice Barrett was seated by the end of September. On October 7, she was shot to death outside 1 First Street NE in Washington DC, by a sniper who (it was later determined by way of ballistics and shooting reconstruction) was situated on the roof of the United Methodist building.
Everyone declared it a great tragedy. Conservatives, naturally, blamed the left. The left blamed extremists, said it was likely extreme Pro Choice people or possibly BLM or Antifa folks. In the aftermath of the shooting, security for all the justices was tightened up considerably. The body was barely cold before Trump nominated Barbara Lagoa to replace Barrett. Mitch McConnell again sped Trump's pick through the Senate confirmation, and she was installed before Halloween.
Nothing happened to Lagoa, though. She settled into the job, the rest of the nation exhaled, and EVERYONE went to the polls in November, one of the largest voter turnouts in history. Trump lost the election by a solid margin and oddly didn't contest it because he was very busy gearing up his new reality show and planning his presidential library, located in Moscow. Joe Biden settled in to a relatively bland and unexciting presidency in January.
February 15, Brett Kavanaugh was found strangled in his car in a parking garage. Video footage of the crime showed persons dressed head to toe in black and a brief struggle, but that was it. The car used to flee the scene was found a few blocks away, but that was no help. It had been reported as stolen two weeks prior and belonged to a senior citizen with a walker. There was no clear motive for the murder besides "Kavanaugh was a supreme court justice" and there were no actual suspects.
Again there was an outcry. Again, conservatives blamed the left. Again, the left blamed extremists. Two justices murdered did look like something of a pattern, but the police and the FBI couldn't come up with any real leads.
Biden nominated Merrick Garland, the judge that Obama hadn't been able to get a vote on. Schumer (the Senate had flipped decisively, adding 7 seats to the Dems, so Schumer was the majority leader) called the vote and Garland was confirmed as the new SCJ to replace Kavanaugh.
Because of the murders, the justices were assigned close security details when they were in DC doing court stuff. People on the internet fostered the belief that there was some kind of organized conspiracy to off the justices, at least the conservative ones, but nobody outside their little groups paid much attention to that.
Things were fine until Clarence Thomas "drowned in his bathtub" at home in April. His wife Ginni swore up and and down that he didn't "take baths" but there was no evidence of foul play. To replace Thomas, Biden nominated Cornelia Pillard, whose confirmation hearing took three weeks. She didn't get seated until May, but almost everyone felt she was a decent choice.
Following the attack on Thomas, the Supreme Court moved everything to zoom sessions. Each justice was assigned a technology coordinator to see to it that everything ran smoothly. The Supreme Court, from that point on, held all sessions remotely with each justice in an undisclosed, separate location. The legal profession as a whole was disgruntled at not being able to argue cases In Front Of The Supreme Court. It didn't seem the same to show up to their own law office conference room, but they'd gotten used to zoom meetings during the (never-ending) covid shit, and it was what it was.
By midsummer of 2021, things were feeling more normal. The news stopped looking like The Onion. Biden didn't say outrageously racist things or threaten to build walls or hold enormous rallies. He strengthened the ACA and put together a working group on MFA but told people not to expect any instant results on that. He improved the EPA and strengthened carbon emission targets. He funded the postal service. He worked with the Eurozone on trade. He did what people expected a Democratic president to do, more or less.
Neil Gorsuch went missing in July. He'd been at his cabin near Granby for the 4th and just... never returned. He remained missing through the remainder of the summer. The news shows speculated, but nobody could prove he was dead without a body, so the court stayed at eight instead of nine. It didn't matter that he failed to show up for work -- lifetime appointments mean that you can't be fired for not clocking in. Also, this wasn't the first time the court had to muddle along with eight members. During the Obama administration, it'd had only eight for the last two hundred or so days while McConnell refused to put Garland to a vote. And it had functioned, sort of. This was like that.
In October, a hiker found an unidentified head in Rocky Mountain National Park, not thirty miles from Gorsuch's cabin. Dental records and DNA testing proved it was the missing justice. When Gorsuch's head was found, congress authorized round the clock bodyguards for the SCJ's on the grounds that even though whoever was killing the justices was clearly equipped with a liberal agenda, this sort of foolishness set a bad precedent and could not stand.
After Gorsuch was clearly deceased, Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the seat. The senate approved her and she became the first black woman on the Supreme Court. The decidedly liberal (6-3) court, which had become so by way of a slew of murders, settled in to hearing cases and enacting a fairly progressive agenda.
The remainder of Biden's term passed without incident. The Senate Dems lost two seats in the midterms, taking the Dem majority from 55 to 53. The House stayed Democratic through the 2024 election. But, Biden decided not to run again (his health was clearly failing). At the DNC, Harris got the nod to run against the Republican's choice of Ted Cruz. Harris ran a strong campaign, but lost by the skin of her teeth. Lyin' Ted became president.
In February, 2024, Justice Sotomayor was found dead in her home. Autopsy revealed she'd been injected with a massive dose of insulin and the death was ruled a murder. Like with the previous justices, there was no evidence. There were no leads. No leads, nothing to investigate. Yeah, there was an outcry, but the FBI can't do much with an outcry.
Cruz's first pick didn't get approved by the (still Democrat-held) Senate though they did grant him the courtesy of holding an actual vote. While his administration (evil, but reasonably competent) was casting a wider net for a judge who could pass the vetting and get the votes in a Democratically-controlled Senate, Justice Breyer died of an execution-style gunshot. His bodyguard, like Sotomayor's, hadn't seen a thing. Justice Breyer was in his study at home, reading, and there was a shot and then there was a dead justice. By this time, it seemed that whoever was killing justices didn't give a shit about whether they were liberal or conservative. Or maybe it was two different groups killing justices. Who could say?
It was around now that the internet conspiracy theorists noticed a strange trend in lower-court judges as well. Federal judges were suffering more... accidents than were reasonably and statistically likely. And this trend, they alleged, had begun at the twilight of the Trump administration. However, since the judges were all over the United States, only the conspiracy theorists had bothered to dig through the alumni sections of law school bulletins to find out how many judges were dying and of what they were dying. "A spearfishing accident in Curaçao? How is that even believable?!?" said one poster on reddit/r/kyllindajudges. The conspiracy theorists started to gain some traction with regular news outlets. John Oliver did a segment on the most unrealistic causes of death for judges.
Meanwhile, Cruz proposed two middle of the road nominees for the supreme court, one a bit liberal and one a bit conservative but both of them pretty close to center. He'd had to stretch a bit to find a second one that could get the Senate nod AND ALSO agreed to serve. Several judges he'd tapped had, somewhat surprisingly, demurred on the grounds that taking a SCJ seat was like having a target painted on their back...
They weren't far wrong. By the time President Belinda Dorrat was elected in 2040, the average term of a Supreme Court Justice was five years. In 2080, when So-Min Cheong sat in the Oval Office, the average term had dropped to just ten months.
But then, a funny thing happened. President Cheong appointed young up-and-comer Omar Washington to the court. He was a well-respected middle-of-the-road guy with a solid track record for being fair and reasoned but not... strongly conservative or liberal. She got him past the Senate... and he stayed. He didn't cause his bodyguards trouble, but he also didn't seem to need them. There were... attempts, yes, but none of them succeeded. He served for ten years and retired alive... the first justice to do so since Kennedy, back in 2018.
On the heels of Washington's appointment, Claire Parks accepted the nod. She was a tad liberal but not excessively so, at the outset, and she survived various attempts on her life through the 2090's. She drifted more left as she served, though, and wound up hung by her heels, in a meat cooler in the twelfth year of her term. Her efforts on the court to grant humane and fair treatment to meat animals like cows, pigs, and chickens ushered in a new era of improved humane farming practices... and also, due to the cost of said humane and fair treatment, a sizeable uptick in vegetarianism since meat became rather pricey under the new system. But, because feedlots and pig shit lagoons from CAFOs were no longer needed, the environment also got a boost.
Other young, relatively hale judges started to accept nominations in the 2090's. They mostly did well enough, liberal or conservative, as long as they were fairly moderate in their decisions and reasonably aware in their everyday lives. It wasn't a cakewalk -- the assassins would get those who accepted a Diet Coke from an aide or failed to check the back seat of their vehicle every time. But, it started to look like at least some judges could get ten years on the Supreme Court without superhuman effort.
Not all judges, though. The further to either end of the spectrum a justice tended to go, the more serious the efforts against them became. It wasn't a subtle effect. The internet conspiracy theorists noticed it shortly after the pioneering work of Omar Washington, the first to survive and retire since The Trouble With The Supreme Court started. It was pretty clear, from survival rates and voting histories, that a middle-of-the-road pick, like Travis Marzetti (appointed 2093, assassinated 2106), didn't have to dodge as well as a firebrand conservative like Helena Strait (appointed 2085, assassinated 2086) or duck as swiftly as a bleeding heart liberal like Okina Pa'au (appointed 2091, assassinated 2091). As time went by, it became clear that after year ten, the gloves came off for the middle-of-the-road justices, too. Only the internet conspiracy theorists noticed that the same thing held for federal judges. They were allowed a bit more sway in the liberal/conservative spectrum but if they pegged the meter at either end, they were assassinated. If they outstayed their welcome (15 years, it seemed, instead of 10), they were also assassinated.
By the mid 2100's, Supreme Court Justices had settled into being well-respected members of the judiciary that Senators on both sides of the aisle could agree were capable minds with solidly-researched and well-argued jurisprudence. Some were a little more conservative and some a little more liberal, but on the whole they represented the middle ground that Most Americans could agree with. They served ten year terms and voluntarily retired when their time had run... or didn't retire and were assassinated within the next few years. Their choice.
A few hit the bench determined to be Strongly Activist and lurch the court one direction or the other. They were put down accordingly and everyone viewed this as The Way Things Should Be.
Eventually, in 2200, the US Constitution was amended to read that a Supreme Court Justice had to be approved by 75% of the Senate, that Supreme Court Nominees (once proposed) must be voted on by the Senate within two calendar weeks, and that the term of a SCJ was limited to ten years. The first justice to be appointed under these rules, Rewa Bakshi, served an uneventful ten years and retired. So did the second, Jose Alvarez. So did the third, fourth, and fifth. And that was the end of the The Trouble With The Supreme Court.
Only now, in the year 2300, with the unsealing of the documents relating to The Trouble With The Supreme Court, have we learned the true story of how a vast network of assassin-lawyers worked tirelessly in cells organized and operated by their local bar associations to repair a politicized court system that was growing more and more partisan with every election. More than anyone else, they were qualified to evaluate judges and to to shut down those who tried to put a thumb on the scales of justice.
