Politics

Texas has elected judges, and we'll, I'll let you decide how that's gone.

Nah, there were plenty of dog shit rulings in the runup to the First Civil War

As a Canadian, that sounds even worse to me, lol. Elected judges? That's insanity. Judges should never be making decisions based on political expedience.

Judges should be chosen by people who are experts in the law based on their knowledge and experience.

In Canada, I suppose it's loosely political, but it's several steps removed from direct political appointment. The PM and cabinet appoint someone to be the head of the judiciary, confirmed by the Governor General, and Supreme Court judges can be held accountable by the Senate and House in cases of misconduct.

Electing judges would make it worse, not better, imho.

The best solution I've heard for the US wouldn't require a constitutional amendment, it's to make the Supreme Court position last 18 years before becoming a Justice Emeritus (or whatever) that's mostly ceremonial. That takes away the incentive to stuff the judiciary with young judges, and adds stability that each presidential term is 2 justice appointments on a slowly rolling basis.

Not really obviously best. But there's obvious, well known problems that can be obviously improved.

• Don't let the president alone appoint candidates. Include states or the justice system.
• I assume the Senate confirms with a simple majority; increase to 2/3 majority.
• Separate questions of constitutionality from top-court-revision processes.

One take I've seen some Australian lawyers suggest is that the extent of politicisation of America's Supreme Court is an inevitable result of how highly political their constitution is.

In Australia, our constitution deals with the basic functioning of government; how elections take place, who can vote, and mostly fairly boring procedural stuff like that.

America's constitution quite famously lays out a number of very specific rights. Rights that are, by their very nature, quite politiciseable and open to interpretation. If SCOTUS is able to invent rights that they claim are implied by the written text, with the legislature unable to legislate around it, that's a problem. It becomes even more of a problem when SCOTUS decides they can infer rights that are implied by those rights which SCOTUS themselves inferred. Deciding what rights people have—or removing those rights—should be the job of democratically elected representatives, not political appointees. So the court granting a right to abortion because they say it's implied that you have this right based on the right to privacy (quite a large stretch, IMO), and that right to privacy being implied by your explicit right to due process (a more reasonable inference), is quite a silly arrangement. Better for the legislature to simply do their job.

Not that this is in any way "simple". It would require a complete ground-up rewrite of the American constitution. And that's obviously never going to happen.

Probably pull justices from the lower courts at random to hear individual cases. Much harder to bribe all the judges than like two well known supreme Court justices.