U.S. Supreme Court Members

Prepare to update this quiz!

I got 2. A little reminder that I should study this topic more.

Technically out of date since Scalia is dead, but I guess there's no point in updating until/unless his replacement is confirmed.

Neil Gorsuch should be added.

Who is Stephen Breyer. Dude must fly so far under the radar. I've literally never heard of him. I got 8 and thought, who am I missing, thinking it was someone obvious that I was forgetting. Nope...someone I never heard of.

He is the fourth member of the liberal wing, but yes, he is often overshadowed by the other three liberal justices: Sotomayor and Kagan, because they were both appointed by Obama and are clearer in people's memories, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is the outspoken and de facto leader of the liberal wing.

3 years later and i remembered him this time :-)

third now ig o.o

1/9. I only knew The Notorious RBG!

I have some bad news from the future

I always forget one when trying to remember them all. This time it was Alito. Sigh.

+1

ah I see what you're doing there, deflecting a valid criticism by bringing up your skepticism about another, completely unrelated, but even more valid and concerning criticism, here addressed in raging strawman form since while we know with absolute certainty some of the very shady/troubling/illegal things that have been going on concerning Russia if you start acting as if someone has paranoid delusions that Putin is behind everything, that minimizes those very real, very valid, very legitimate and well-founded concerns. Genius. Not really.

what?

Is there really a valid criticism of his legitimacy though? He was nominated and confirmed.

There is no VALID criticism of his legitimacy. You can dislike him, or the politicians that confirmed him...you can dislike the idea of constitutional textualist justices over more a liberal interpretation of the constitution...all that is fine and healthy criticism. What makes no sense is the sky-is-falling rhetoric calling into question his legitimacy or crying that "democracy is dead." Those are not valid arguments.

Yes, there are very valid reasons to question the validity of Gorsuch. Obama nominated judge Merrick Garland for that seat over a year before the end of his presidency, and the Republicans in the Senate refused to even take it up for a vote, on the grounds that it was "an election year" - a completely BS argument and one that they would be proven to be shameless hypocrites for putting forward 4 years later when Amy Comey Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court DURING the actual election. The Republicans didn't technically do anything illegal, but it was arguably unconstitutional what they did, by any reasonable interpretation of the Constitution and specifically Article 1. What they did was unprecedented in the modern history of the United States, and it's perfectly valid to state that they stole that seat for the justice currently filling it.

.... grumble grumble... why was my explanation to Jerry deleted? It was very well stated just went point by point explaining exactly what TinklePork meant and the thinking behind his comment. Frustrating.

lol clearly someone doesn't know what checks and balances are-- also low-key funny how you prob want 3 asterisks now, wish it were more :( damn you Putin, the Macedonians, FBI, Romanians, etc. !!!!!

That's not really checks and balances though. It's not like the Senate had legitimate concerns about Merrick Garland's qualifications. It was a naked power grab by the Republicans. Had nothing to do with checks and balances, as they made evident with the appointment of Justice Barrett.

How is it that I'm very familiar with all of these justices for one reason or another, but, I don't think I've ever even heard of Breyer before...

I miss him every time. I don't think he writes any decisions...he's not in the press....he just does his job. I'm not even sure if he's a liberal or a conservative judge. I think he's a liberal judge since he's a Clinton appointee, but I have no idea on what his actual jurisprudence is like.

Gorsuch!!

Please not Kavanaugh!!!

BOOM!

After the shambles of the 2018 confirmation, there's good reason to consider term limits on Supreme Court justices. They have become so politicised. Lifetime appointments cast such a biasing shadow on US politics regardless of which party is in control of the presidency, senate and house.

I've been interested a lot in the current political situation (especially the Midterms) in the US. I honestly think that the cultural division between Democrats and Republicans is getting bigger and bigger. Furthermore, I think that many politicians take "party over country". Maybe for SCOTUS not only term limits, but also minimum amount of senators (like 60 voting in favour). I clearly see that a two-party-system is not working in this case.

"A plague on both their houses." That's an excellent quote, very applicable to this case.

In Europe two-third majority is usually required

Great idea.

Yeah...I've heard this before as well. I like it. One of the big problems is that we've allowed the courts to become too powerful. Both Madison and Hamilton in the Federalist Papers talked about the judicial branch as being the smallest and least powerful of the 3 branches, but now it's on par with the executive branch and both have left the legislative branch in the dust. Personally, I want 535 people that represent my voting interests making laws. Not 9 unelected life appointees.

to buck: as awful and political (and biased way too much toward one party through questionable means) as the Supreme Court has become... I still trust them more than I trust Congress. The justices are not spending 90% of their time fundraising and so completely beholden to their party and their corporate donors. Also, Congress does make laws. The Supreme Court rules on how those laws should be interpreted and whether or not they are Constitutional. This isn't the same thing. People who complain about judges legislating from the bench usually are just upset that they aren't allowed to get away with passing any un-Constitutional law that they see fit.

and my comment here about how Senate confirmation serves a valuable function and should be fixed and de-politicized but not scrapped was also deleted? WHHHHYYYYYYY??? Because I disagreed with you? Constitutional checks and balances are considered too inflammatory now?

I agree with the Quizmaster. This would permanently end the possibility of court-packing by either side.

There have been many good ideas floating around out there to de-politicize the Supreme Court. One that I like is packing the court to extreme levels - make it not 9, 10, or 12 justices, but rather 30 or 60 or 100. Some lower courts have that many. Then, theoretically, decisions would not depend on one or two swing votes, but be more of a consensus thing. I actually think term limits could have the opposite effect, as, if a justice has to be thinking forward to his career AFTER serving on the Supreme Court there might be more pressure to decide cases a certain way. If he knows that he's going to die doing this job, he should, theoretically, be more free to vote his conscience.

But yes, the current condition of the court is shameful. Presidents appoint justices. Republicans have won the popular vote for president ONCE in the past 32 years. And yet 6 out of 9 justices have been appointed by Republican presidents.

Including the last three which include one shameless raging conspiracy-minded partisan and probable rapist, one former Handmaid of a backward religious cult, and Gorsuch who sits in the seat stolen from Merrick Garland.

if any of the comments I left yesterday were going to get deleted I assumed it would be this one. Not the 4 or 5 others which were making much better points. There was no good reason to delete any of those.

when non Americans try and change our rules bc "their" side is losing haha

In New Zealand, Supreme Court justices they are not voted into office by partisan votes of the legislature, but simply appointed to the court in a non-political way. The mandatory age of retirement is 70. Additionally, there is acceptance of the paramountcy of the legislature; thus the Court never seeks to "strike down" laws. Instead, they simply interpret and apply the law as it stands.

Similar here in India, but the chief justice retires every year.

Though... it's worth pointing out that even with all those essentially non-partisan justice confirmations to the court prior to the year 2000, the court made one of its most shamelessly partisan judgments that very year in Bush v Gore. The Republican-appointed justices who voted to stop the ballot counting in Florida, effectively handing the presidency to Bush that year, even wrote that their decision should only ever apply to that one single instance. In a judicial system that relies on precedent as the American system does, this is remarkable. They were basically admitting that they were ruling for partisan reasons and warning that the same logic and interpretation of the law should never influence other cases, because they knew what a bad precedent it would set.

and my comment above this makes no sense anymore as it was a follow-up to what I had just posted before it... about how justices used to get confirmed 99-0 when they weren't controversial or unqualified. And how this only changed since the year 2000 when a combination of Fox News, Karl Rove, George W Bush, the repeal of the fairness doctrine, the Internet, Facebook etc made everything much more polarized and political... W. T. H.

How can you pin this down on Fox? Sure, they are slightly right-leaning, but they are more centrist than all of the left-leaning other channels

and my comment about how supreme court justice confirmation used to be relatively a-political got deleted as well??? Seriously... what the friggin hell?? What was offensive about that comment????? I usually don't mind some of my comments getting deleted I can sort of see the logic behind getting rid of some of them but this makes NO sense. Kinda pissed off now.

I feel like "RBG" should probably be an accepted answer, since that's come to be a common way of referring to her (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBG_(film)).

uhhhhhhh...awkward o.o

Why is RGB accepted instead of RBG?

When Ginsburg retires the court will be ruthless.

RIP RBG :(

Oh God, they\re gonna steal a third SC seat.

Steal??

Not really steal. More like break their own rule of not appointing justices during an election year.

I don't think you know what stealing is...

pretty much stealing, yes. When you haven't won a popular vote but once in 32 years, and you've got a 6-3 majority, you are clearly not playing by the rules.

lol you do realize this is a constitutional REPUBLIC not a "pure" democracy right? Popular vote arguments mean nothing hahahaha

We know the rules. It's still upsetting to watch such odious and hypocritical behavior. It should embarrass you too. Ideological differences are fine, but you should not excuse unprincipled behavior by your government just because it favors your side. Lindsey Graham needs to be blasted into the sun.

Also, speaking of RBG, she should be removed from this list.

They'll remove her when her replacement has been confirmed.

...which was today. Quiz should be updated soon.

And that was fast!

remove ginsburg she is no longer on the scotus

Congratulations Justice Amy Coney Barrett!

My condolences to the USA.

I never thought the day would come when the Democrats started vilifying a Female, Catholic, extremely well-accomplished justice who adopted two Haitian children. The nomination process? Sure. The nominator? Of course. But I never thought that they would stoop to that level.

I guess I was wrong.

Barrett should not have been confirmed for many reasons other than the outrageous hypocrisy and outright lies and rushing to confirmation thing. She's just not fit to sit on the Supreme Court. Though she is better than Kavanaugh.

Alito made it his business to prove your point with his preposterous little tantrum this week. I agree that Kagan and Gorsuch, along with Chief Justice Roberts, are the intellectual heavyweights on the court (Scalia and Ginsburg were their peers in this respect). I don't like Breyer's writing, but I generally find his reasoning to be sound. Thomas is awful in pretty much every respect. Bad writing, bad reasoning, absent during oral argument. He just reflexively takes the most conservative position on pretty much every issue. It's dispiriting to see a justice who engages so little with the cases before him.

yes, because the Dems will make it 13 if they get elected, so it will be 7-6 in their favor, then when the republicans get elected, they'll increase it to 15, then 17, 19,21 so on

That would be completely ridiculous, that a single politician can choose a random lawyer to decide about the country. There are plenty of better systems around the world.

That’s America, if you control all segments of government, you can do virtually anything

Letting the president appoint anyone without checks and balances is a horrible idea. Trump would probably appoint one of his own children!

and my comment here deleted as well... why? Because I said that the argument that court packing sets a bad precedent is dumb? It is dumb. So is this page's moderation...

To briefly reiterate what I said yesterday: the number of justices on the court has fluctuated multiple times. There's nothing at all depressing about the idea of court packing and the Democrats absolutely should do it if they can. If Republicans can reduce the number of seats on the USC to 8 for 2015-2016 then Dems should be able to increase it to 13. And as for this setting a bad precedent, this argument is invalid for multiple reasons. 1. Republicans do not care about precedent. At all. They've demonstrated this over and over again the last 4 years especially. 2. The precedent was already set in the past. The USC has had as few as five justices and as many as ten. It's been expanded and shrunk before and it never led to every American being a justice. 3. The court has already been packed with partisan and unqualified justices through highly questionable probably unconstitutional parliamentary tricks and undemocratic practices. Further packing would help fix something already broken.

If the comment above that you made yourself is fine, the comment I made in response to it was fine. There was no discernible difference between them and you're being inconsistent and hypocritical. If you feel this deserves a ban... well that's up to you. I'm not participating in the conversation to create more work for you.

I call it like I see it. Anyway, I'm out. Peace.

Ugh, I missed the justice pictured, despite knowing this topic fairly well.

I can name 3 US supreme court members off the top of my head, 2 of which are dead. That's one more than for my own country's constitutional court.

This time my first 3 guesses were people who died...

I need to defend my favorite branch of government here: the spurious process by which justices are appointed is no reflection of the justices themselves, who work hard to apply the law correctly. There is a perception of partisanship because the most contested cases, which usually go 5-4, get all the attention. But 9-0 is actually the most common decision, and more than 50% of cases go 7-2 or better. They are not as partisan as people think. I also need to speak up for Chief Justice Roberts. He is very protective of the dignity of the court, and while the other two branches have turned into an absolute sideshow, he has worked hard to maintain the court's integrity. I think if Trump's ridiculous election claims end up before the Court, Roberts will line up the troops for a 9-0 or at least 7-2 (can't count on Kavanaugh or Alito) to let it be known he will not let the court stoop to the level of shameless overwhelming the rest of our government.

Agree with jmellor13. Even though I'm relatively liberal and disagree with Roberts on many issues (although less so now that he's a swing vote), he's earned my respect for steering the court system clear of partisanship and dysfunction and preventing one bloc from overwhelming the court.

That being said, I'd still like to see court reform. It's a bit absurd that 9 unelected justices are allowed to have so much power with no term limits. Not saying that the justices should be elected (that would be absolute chaos) or that the court should be packed, but it would be nice if there were term limits. I also wish they didn't have the power to strike down entire laws. It just seems so counter-productive to strike down the whole thing when they can just strike down part of it and explain the issues with said law. I'd like to see it more like New Zealand (based on what Jerry928 described above).

Why is this discussion so partisan?

All the Justices deserve respect, they have been appointed to the highest court of the land. Can you say any better?