The interesting differences between the legislative and judicial branch is not the number of people (moreover, the Supreme Court is not exactly the entirety of the federal judicial branch).
Representing individual states, as such, is supposed to be the job of Congressmen. And - with how low-functioning Congress is looking, these days, patterning anything new after them is probably a bad idea.
And, if the party in power adds enough Supreme Court justices to routinely overturn the current 9, what makes you think that when the other side is in power, they won't add enough to overturn your 12?
The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It's by design.
Funny. Seems like it bent pretty hard in the last election. Why should we only honor the bends to the right?
This courts been in power for 8 years and has overturned 3 major ways that the government operates:
1. Roe v Wade overturned so that the government is back in charge of reproductive rights decisions instead of leaving it as a deeply personal decision for a family to make on their own. There’s pretty clearly a lack of any evidence that late term abortions are a cavalier thing. When it gets that late it’s not a change of mind thing 99.999% of the time.
2. Brady and similar decisions basically removing congress’ and states’ abilities to regulate guns
3. Chevron doctrine overturned so unless congress writes impossible laws the courts get to arbitrarily define ambiguities even though it was delegated to the executive to create justifiable well researched exposition of those ambiguities.
Basically, this court has already delivered 3 major decisions shifting American politics in pretty drastic ways in the 8 years. This is certainly not a liberal or status quo court.
And the court itself has serious perception issues of accepting gifts and bribes (and significantly reducing the definition of what counts as corruption in the first place, which is well outside their mandate considering these are actually laws congress passed). They’re badly in need of cultural reform as is congress and in both scenarios adjusting the number of representatives and the number of justices is called for to relieve the pressure that’s been building.
Can you clarify how these aren’t left/right distinctions?
As for constitutional but not partisan, it was a 6-3 decision along ideological lines. And famously the criticism from the left of Roe v Wade was that it found protection in the wrong parts of the constitution - that it was based on privacy and physician rights instead of women’s rights. So you’d have to be willfully trying to deceive to paint this as a non-partisan issue.
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-public-corruption-b...
> The high court’s 6-3 opinion along ideological lines found the law criminalizes bribes given before an official act, not rewards handed out after.
> “Some gratuities can be problematic. Others are commonplace and might be innocuous,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote. The lines aren’t always clear, especially since many state and local officials have other jobs, he said.
> The high court sided with James Snyder, a Republican who was convicted of taking $13,000 from a trucking company after prosecutors said he steered about $1 million worth of city contracts to the company.
Congress has yet to do this because it will never pass - at least unless one party gets a filibuster-proof majority in the senate or the filibuster is removed.
The design that can and has been undermined and bent on partisan lines, because of a dedicated campaign to achieve this very goal?
Looking at a few Supreme Court's rulings, say -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Anderson
- I'd be inclined to say that the Supreme Court's design is to bend the results of every political election to suit their own wishes.