Alex Aronson
speaker
168 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Alex Aronson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There are so many reforms that are needed to deal with so many problems that have emerged from our courts by virtue of the Federalist Society's capture scheme.
We don't have time probably to get into all of the reforms that are needed to restore public faith and to have a court that's a court again.
I do think it's likely that if for any pro-democracy agenda, like a substantive agenda to survive, some reform will be needed, some aggressive reform to constrain this court will be needed.
Something like expanding the court, putting justices on the court, or deploying other less widely understood, talked about reforms like jurisdiction stripping.
The Constitution gives Congress significant authority
to set the jurisdiction of the federal courts, both the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court.
So it could use its powers to carve out jurisdictional exceptions to entire areas of cases where the courts would no longer have jurisdiction to meddle in democratically enacted laws.
I mean, how does that work?
Right, right.
I have inadvertently, or maybe not inadvertently, and you have taken the invitation, but we've opened the door to the nuclear question in constitutional law and federal courts, which is the scope of Congress's power to strip the courts out of the picture.
And the concern that you raise is a very real one for a situation in which sort of an authoritarian majority might want to do something like you describe and where we would want
the courts to maintain a role right and and the 20th century is a good proof point for the importance of having courts particularly in the context of checking state power right i think we we think too much about the the good that the court has done in sort of the abstract most of the good that the court has done in the 20th century was in the context of checking state authoritarianism
And so there are real concerns about what could happen if Congress starts to use these powers to check the court.
What I would argue is that it tends to be more democratic.
There's a reason the Federalist Society and this
you know, faction of billionaires and extremists chose the unaccountable power of the courts to drive their agenda is because they couldn't advance it through the Congress.
And so we've seen efforts from the right to actually use jurisdiction stripping to advance a national right to life, to ban gay marriage nationwide that never took hold.
And in fact, those those efforts in the 2000s were snuffed out by the Federalist Society folks who said this isn't the way the way to ban abortion nationwide is through the courts.
And so these are questions that we need to get right as we think about what we think American democracy should look like.
And I think they're not easy to resolve.
Showing 101–120 of 168 · page 6 of 9
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