UCLA faculty gets big win in suit against Trump’s university attacks

Government can't use funding threats to override the First Amendment.

See full article...

 

[Cthel]

Sigh, I read the opening sentence and saw that it was a District Court, and immediately skipped the rest of the article. Unfortunately, right now District Court rulings against Trump don’t mean anything until they’re upheld by the Supreme Court.


Yeah, we would all love for judges to be picked by some magical enlightened force. But short of that, what’s your solution? Don’t say “voters”, because that’s what got us the legislators and executives that are failing us.

Realistically, the current system has worked well at reopening the ebbs and flows of the other branches. It would’ve worked this time if the republicans hadn’t been able to cheat and let Trump get an extra appointee. They held Scalia’s position open for almost a year so that Trump would get to appoint the replacement because it was “too close to the next election”, and then rammed RBG’s replacement through at the end of Trump’s term so that Biden wouldn’t get to pick. If those two deaths hadn’t lined up like that, or if the Republicans hadn’t had control both times, we wouldn’t be in this position.

In a country with a functional, independent judiciciary that's easy - Supreme Court justices would be chosen by an independent panel of judges.

And if they committed egregious malpractice, they would be removed by an independent panel of judges.

(See: France for an example)

Unfortunateky, the US decided that popularity was the key requirement for judges, rather than competence, so there is no obvious route towards said independent, self-perperuating judiciary.