Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called for a radical overhaul of the scandal-plagued U.S. Supreme Court.
The court has been rocked by ethics scandals – particularly those involving justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – and Raskin urged Congress in an interview with Slate to pass major reforms to rein in what he sees as an increasingly lawless judicial branch to reflect a broader view of the United States.
"The Constitution does not fix the numerical composition of the Supreme Court, and it has changed nine or 10 different times over the course of our history," Raskin told the publication. "We have 13 federal circuits. We’ve got nine justices. Five of those justices are from New York. We’ve got one for each borough. We have entire federal circuits that don’t have a single justice."
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Donald Trump, who appointed three of the current justices as president, recently told an audience at an NRA conference that he preferred to appoint younger judges who might stay on the bench for up to 50 years, and Raskin said no president should have that power.
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"How about we start to talk about having 13 justices on the Supreme Court, one from each circuit, 18-year terms — they still get life tenure because they can go and be on the district bench or the circuit bench," Raskin said. "Each president gets two appointments to the court. Obviously, the Senate still has to advise and consent, but it will remove some of the toxicity and the poison from the nominations if we know that each president will get two. We can deal with this problem, but the current Supreme Court is just a scandal."
Thomas has been criticized for accepting gifts and luxury travel from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow and other friends, and he and Alito, along with justice Neil Gorsuch, have been criticized for socializing or doing business with groups and individuals with cases before the court.
"I never thought I would live to see the day where justices have their own billionaire sugar daddies who give them houses and automobiles and private school tuitions," Raskin said. "My friend Dar Williams sings a song where she says: 'It’s a long road from law to justice.' I was a law professor for 25 years. People come up to me on the street and they say, 'Wait a second — you were a tenured professor of constitutional law, and you went down there to work with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert?' But I left for a reason. I fell out of love with the idea of trying to make it work. I mean, I think it’s great that people do it. But to my mind, we’ve gotta organize the people in America. That’s where the power comes from. And we will, if and when we win back the House and the Senate and the White House. We will look at the Supreme Court and figure out what can be done about that extremely corrupted and contaminated body."