While the USA is a relatively young country, it's oddly one of the oldest democracies.
I believe most other democracies have better-written laws and better checks and balances because, in part, of mistakes the founders made when writing the US constitution (which was always a highly imperfect compromise, allowed for slavery, and had to be ammended several times just to patch it up).
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in. But I think the shitshow we call the SCOTUS is somewhat unique.
In the case of Colombia, there are independent investigation agencies that aren't subject to any of the three branches, and specifically the judiciary branch has a committee that investigates disciplinary trespasses by judges. Also, there are three separate "Supreme Courts": one handles typical everyday cases, another handles conflicts between citizens and the government, and another handles Constitutional violations. So there are several protections against a rogue Court.
And we still haven't gotten to the part where government workers, all the way up to the president, are forbidden from making any public statements in favor of candidates or campaigns.
much less than the US supreme court, which allows for corruption and has lifetime appointments.
It's easy to think about the US supreme Court versus other high courts the same way that the US treats voting districts.
In almost every country with a similar voting system, gerrymandering, dividing up districts arbitrarily, is illegal because you can easily say well. I'm going to divide it like this so that only these people's votes count and I'll just ignore the voters that I don't like.
That is illegal in most western countries.
Gerrymandering is perfectly legal in the US, resulting in a far weaker vote because entire counties can be disregarded by dividing the county up cleverly to benefit the Republicans, who take far greater advantage of this.
Same with the court systems, the US didn't set up protections and hasn't modifed or improved the court as time has gone on and problems have arisen like direct bribery or contradicting rulings or politically refusing justice appointments.
gerrymandering only works due to the whole first past the post voting system you have for districts.
In addition, the commission who draws up the electoral districts in the US are not independent, but appointed by whichever party is ruling in a given state. John Oliver covered the topic.
I don't understand that since gerrymandering allows you to manipulate the results of the voting itself by diminishing the significance of the votes themselves.
Can you explain more how gerrymandering only works with fptp?
Different countries have a variety of very different approaches to appointing judges, and some of those methods are not nearly as easy to corrupt as the American system.
Americans are subject to a lot of cultural indoctrination about how their system is the "greatest democracy in the world," "leader of the free world," and other such platitudes. It's really not the case, though. America's system is one of the earliest that's still around, and unfortunately that means it's got a lot of problems that have been corrected in democracies that were founded later on but have remained embedded in America's.
Doesn't help that America has a somewhat problematic electorate as well.
I remember being taught in school all of those, and the fact that justices not being elected or having term limits meant that they were 100% not swayed by anything other than justice. A very noble idea I respect, but we see obviously that anyone is corruptable. I see very few judges now who aren't electable. They don't run under a platform, they have agendas and it's not perfect - but it's better than our system where we're stuck until they die - and then we're at the mercy of whoever the flavor of the month is.
Okay, so, American here who has been telling fellow Americans "it can happen here" for years about various shit. Because I know it can. There's no reason it can't.
But seeing someone use that expression to say that something happening in the US could happen elsewhere just made that phrase click in a terrifying way.
Other places haven’t come anywhere near the politicisation that the US has. Instead, appointments are treated as pretty meritocratic.
I’ve personally spoken to a former chief justice of a country about the selection process, and they said unequivocally that it should be taken away from the government. It should instead be done by an intermediate selection committee whose members are selected by the government. Basically creating a degree of separation between the government and the court to buffer against politicking the whole thing.
Makes perfect sense to me and is probably the best chance the US has apart from packing the court.
Otherwise, without knowing much about the US situation, it seems to be in part attributable to the polarisation of the strict two party system, the central quasi-monarchical presidency and the vagueness and hearheat of the bill of rights. Lots of places just don’t have that combination of factors … where in same ways the US system is likely showing its age and lack of evolution over time.
In fact, generally, it might be true to say that US politics over the past 10 years and into the next century will be driven by the friction between needing to adapt to its new state in the world (less super power and more dependent on global affairs) and wanting to cling to its traditional role and the old promises of the post-war era.
Here in Greece the supreme court is determining goverment actions as unconstitutional, recommending changes, and nothing is being done. It is essentially powerless.
In the case of Germany: a lot less, but it's not impossible.
The German equivalent to the supreme court is the Bundesverfassungsgerichtshof (BVerG, federal Constitutional Court) and in stark contrast to the highest American court, it is not an appeals court. A lower court might refer a case to the BVerG, or ask it to clarify a constitutional question, that has come up during a trial but most case don't even have a theoretical path to Karlsruhe. Political parties and NGOs may also go to directly in front of the Constitutional Court to protest the constitutionality of laws.
New justices are confirmed with a 2/3 majority which means that you need to convince roughly 30% of the opposition to vote for your candidate. That in turn leads to more moderate candidates put forward. Justices are also limited to one term of twelve years. Outside of that a justice may be removed from office by the German federal president* if 2/3 of BVerG justices vote to impeach their colleague.
So far so good. Unfortunately there are some weaknesses in the entire setup. The law responsible for needing a 2/3 majority to elect a justice can be changed with a simple majority. A right wing government could also expand the court by introducing a third senate and pack it with their appointees. But that requires them to get into power first.
German late night show Die Anstalt did a segment about that problem a while back: https://youtu.be/ljjZ6AZsmGk (Video in German)
Tldr: the highest German court is not going to stop a fascist government from doing fascism but it is also not working to put the fascists into power, the way the US supreme court is.
Yes Germany has a president. The role is largely ceremonial though as he isn't head of government
Update: Yesterday the German government introduced a constitutional amendment that would protect the Constitutional Court from some of this. It's not perfect but it is still pretty good and it has the necessary 2/3 majority to pass
In a non first past the post voting system, it's less likely that 1 radical party remains in power long enough to screw up the high courts. But it can still happen, case in point Hungary and Poland.
Iirc, Orban had been in power for many years in Hungary and went for a gradual erosion of the independence of the courts. Death by a thousand cuts.
The eu should have kicked out both states out of the decision making process and implemented sanctions, but since that required unanimity, Poland and Hungary were essentially protecting each other from consequences. Now that pis lost in Poland, I hope that the eu takes action and prevents this from happening again.
While the most systems are built more robust than the Us one, it is still a sad fact that fascism / totalitarism is on the rise in many countries currently. Even robust systems are vulnerable.
Italy has been in the hands of one man recently who owned all the press and the better part of the state, and he transformed it into a puppet show. He is gone but the country is still suffering.
Austria was on the brink only a few years ago. One man had nearly owned the 3 powers legislature, executive and judiciary. Only a strong scandal in the press has saved the country.
A lot of Western democracies are parliamentary, which eliminates the need for a powerful Supreme Court like in the US since there shouldn't be any fighting between the executive and the legislature.
The US also practices common law instead of civil law, again giving more power to judges as common law relies a lot more on precedent and interpreting the law.
Shocking, one of the few democracies that empowers its judges to the level of the US is Iran.
As a very rough description, civil law is a legal structure where the written legal codes take complete supremacy over any case law. Legal precedent has little value and, in many cases, can't be used as part of a legal argument. Judges have relatively little power in the interpretation of the law.
Common law, in contrast, is based on a series of previous legal decisions which can end up having the same affect as law. Previous rulings can carry the same weight as law, especially when laws are vague and need clarification.
Most of the countries that follow common law today were remnants of the British Empire. While civil law in its modern form came from Napoleonic France and its codification of Roman Law into the Napoleonic Code, other countries continued the practice and modified the code based on internal practices.
The only other major legal system in the world is Islamic law, which is its own thing.
I don't know that much about the process of selecting the court or corrupting it, but in Australia in the last little while we've had three whistleblowers tried in our supreme court.
One was exposing the government illegally spying on East Timorese diplomats to gain bargaining power. The trial was held in secret because of "national security concerns". The accused was only known as Witness K, and he managed to avoid jail time.
Richard Boyle exposed abusive practices by our welfare and tax offices to illegally share information in a "robodebt" scheme that fraudulently sent poor people crushing amounts of debt. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. He may go to prison for a long time. (Edit: he's facing up to 46 years, and it seems the robodebt scandal was separate, but the ATO was part of that as well EDIT 2: It was in fact about robodebt and the predatory culture in the ATO that spurred it)
David McBride exposed war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and was given six years jail time. His identity was exposed when our previous right wing government raided our national journalists' offices and stole documents regarding their investigation into the war crimes.
Our current nominally-leftist government could have stopped the last two of these prosecutions at any time and they just let them continue.
Oh and of the three incidents, only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. None of the people doing the crimes have been charged with anything.
Our government and its courts have made their priorities extremely clear: snitches get stitches.
In Switzerland we don't really have a supreme court in the sense the US have one, parliament decides if they follow the constitution or not. The federal court only decides if the lower courts applied the law correctly. They don't even take cases with plaintiffs and defendants.
French constitutional court is allowing ministers to vote in the parliament if their resignation has been accepted. It's a fun combo because it involves all 3 powers : executive, legislative and judiciary.
The way the Supreme Court works in the US is not how it works in most other democratic countries. The combination of that system with Common Law is quite unique in fact.
So there are lots and lots of already existing alternatives as to how to place a Supreme Court differently.