Nothing says that we may only have 9 justices - AND - It has not always been 9 justices. The founding fathers started with 5 or 6 - iirc.

FDR scrapped the plan when congress caved IIRC.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/roosevelt-announces-court-packing-plan

On February 5, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt announces a controversial plan to expand the Supreme Court to as many as 15 judges, allegedly to make it more efficient. Critics immediately charged that Roosevelt was trying to “pack” the court and thus neutralize Supreme Court justices hostile to his New Deal.

During the previous two years, the high court had struck down several key pieces of New Deal legislation on the grounds that the laws delegated an unconstitutional amount of authority to the executive branch and the federal government. Flushed with his landslide reelection in 1936, President Roosevelt issued a proposal in February 1937 to provide retirement at full pay for all members of the court over 70. If a justice refused to retire, an “assistant” with full voting rights was to be appointed, thus ensuring Roosevelt a liberal majority. Most Republicans and many Democrats in Congress opposed the so-called “court-packing” plan.

In April, however, before the bill came to a vote in Congress, two Supreme Court justices came over to the liberal side and by a narrow majority upheld as constitutional the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act. The majority opinion acknowledged that the national economy had grown to such a degree that federal regulation and control was now warranted. Roosevelt’s reorganization plan was thus unnecessary, and in July the Senate struck it down by a vote of 70 to 22. Soon after, Roosevelt had the opportunity to nominate his first Supreme Court justice, and by 1942 all but two of the justices were his appointees.

political interference of this magnitude would require support from a majority of the people, not just a majority of votes in congress.

But if SCOTUS makes the kind of things those driving this want, such as making funding for our social programs like Social Security and even mandatory public education unconstitutional, they'd have a hard time holding control. Thing is, all these things take at least a few years.

A social scientist once told me the 17ish year gap between Hillary's 1990s attempt at enacting national healthcare and enough public support to rebuild for the next big attempt in the Obama era was the expected period. This while the destitution, suffereing and death of millions that had lead to majority support in the 1990s continued.

otherwise a Trump court will continue to exercise veto power over everything Democrats want to do

We won't have 67 votes in the senate for a long time.

It would be easier to add two liberal justices to restore the balance, but politically, even that would be a tall order.

Republics will never vote to convict Goresuch in the Senate. If Dems get to 2/3, it will be decades from now, and they won't do it because they believe in the Constitution.

Regardless, there's no need to ask if a SCOTUS Judge can be Impeached. They can.

Only one justice has ever been impeached, and it was for pure political reasons (Jefferson going after Justice Chase in 1805).

Since then, it is unthinkable. The reaction of Congress and the people to the impeachment guaranteed judicial independence in our fledgling republic.

First, Democrats would never do this.

Second, if they did, it would be setting a dangerous precedent regarding judicial independence.

Bad idea, all around.

Confirm them with 50 votes in the Senate (plus V.P. Castro's tiebreaker).

i guess the only out is that a justice was "illegally" appointed and confirmed, but I doubt that even that would succeed.

And I don't mean theft of a seat, because it was technically legal. McConnell did not violate the law, he simply violated a political norm that had never been violated before. Democracies die because political norms are violated more than because of outright illegal activity.

So, if we get full control back, I'd say our best bet is to violate another norm. Nine justices. Why nine? It wasn't always so, it's just been the norm for a long time. We owe the success of the New Deal to FDR's in part to his threat to violate this norm by packing the court up to 15 members. We can do the same. Get with new liberal program, or else we add two more justices. The Republicans will scream bloody murder. Fuck 'em.

The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers [it] to be at a given moment in history; conviction results from whatever offense or offenses two-thirds of the other body considers to be sufficiently serious to require removal of the accused from office. - Gerald Ford, April 15, 1970

But not one we should violate at this time, even if we could. Adding justices to the court at least has some precedent.

The justice himself has to have committed some kind of crime or other offense that would meet the definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors." Objecting to the way he was seated or to the substance of his opinions doesn't even come close. Some federal judges have been removed from office but in all cases they had committed actual crimes, usually bribery. Impeaching judges on the basis of political ideology is no way to preserve an independent judiciary or run a democracy.

It has set a terrible and dangerous partisan precedent and must be somehow corrected. This was the final and most significant catalyst in politicizing a delegitimizing the Supreme Court, along with the revelation that Kennedy is playing ball with the Trump family and the Republicans.

It seems odd to me now in my late 60's that most of us couldn't name more than one or two, maybe three members of the SC until the shit show that was the Clinton impeachment. It's been politicized more and more since then.

He's responsible for Gorsuch being on the court.

I think he is up for reelection again 2020. Kentucky Democrats, you have your work cut out for you.

Given all the suspicion around Trump and the Mueller investigation - how can we let Trump make another appointment to SCOTUS until he is either charged or exonerated?

The President is the President until the moment that he/she is no longer the President.

Our only hope is to get a few of the R senators to not confirm.

Delaying until after the med-terms isn't a good strategy, in my mind, as I'm afraid we're going to lose at least one seat in 2018.

In 2020 I'm very confident that we'll take back the Senate.

Make a SCOTUS-term 15-25 years. Longer than 2 presidential terms, but not too long.

Result: A bad judge will eventually be removed all by himself.

If you're advocating Impeachment for political purposes rather than malfeasance of office, you have no argument when the Republicans do the same.

And FWIW - Impeach still requires 2/3 vote of the Senate. Let us know when you have them lined up.

but I don't know how to go about it. We definitely need to codify some rules about things like this to avoid a repeat. The Constitution had a procedure that is normally followed to replace SCOTUS Justices but didn't anticipate the level of corruption and obstruction that one party might resort to in order to maintain it's power and control. Maybe Democrats can seek to add a Justice to make up for the one Republicans wrongly took? I feel like there has to be *some* kind of redress for what happened with Garland.