To: Congress, the States, and citizens
Stop Supreme Court Roulette
Petition Text
* Increase the number of judges on the Supreme Court because the Court is divided in such a way that only one individual gets to make many of the decisions. More people on the Court would make for better decisions. FDR attempted this, and he should have succeeded.
* Nullify the Court's right of review. James McGregor Burns put it this way: "John Marshall was wrong: it is emphatically the province and duty of the American people, not of the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court, to say what the Constitution is. A national reappraisal of the all-powerful court chosen by judicial roulette is crucial if American democracy is to meet the rising challenges of the twenty-first century." (From the last page of Burns' Packing the Court.)
Why is this important?
The partisan Court has sided with corporate interests consistently for a long time: It decided that corporations are people, that money is speech, and that the only motive for corporations is profit. A person whose only motive is profit is a sociopath and so it is with corporations.
The Citizens United and McKutcheon rulings will complete our transition to an oligarchy. Elections clearly are for sale now. As Lawrence Lessig has written so well, we have lost our Republic.