The whole SCOTUS debacle is seemingly intractable: Republicans have the opportunity to engineer a court favourable to the party's strongly held convictions on what is the right way for the constitution and laws to be interpreted; Democrats, feeling that the ACB confirmation process is the last straw in Republican's misuse of procedures to stack federal courts from top to bottom, may soon have the opportunity to seek retribution if they can control the levers of government, and may use that control to ignore any remaining vestiges of collegiality.
But might this be avoided? Can the country step away from the brink?
I've seen several different options that show there are still people looking for compromise. Here are a couple
1.
A compact in the Senate, prior to the election: in this scenario, 6-10 Senators from each party, in "safe" seats, would agree that the SCOTUS confirmation be put on hold until after the election. Should Trump win, the confirmation process would go ahead, but if Biden wins, the Republicans would agree not to confirm ACB. In return for the Republicans agreeing to this, the Democrats would agree to preserve the filibuster if they win the Senate.
2. If such an agreement could not be made prior to the election, if ACB was confirmed either before the election or during the lame duck session, and if the Democrats win the Presidency and the Senate (which looks likely at this point): the Democrats would need to show unilateral restraint... but they could do this by "packing" the courts -
or rather, expanding them. The basic suggestion addresses the immediate cause of friction at the level of SCOTUS (the court's imbalance), but also addresses a fundamental flaw of the nominations process - that the (currently) 9 most powerful jurists in the world, and the structure of their court, can be thrown randomly into chaos as a result of an untimely death.
This proposal is to expand the court not to just 13 jurists, but rather to 25 or 30, thus making each nomination, and the position of each judge, far less important. And in good faith, the president should nominate a list of jurists from all parts of the political spectrum, with an eye to balancing the court. Once inlace, there would simply be little benefit in choosing a hyper partisan judge, nor of filibustering the Senate and bringing the work of the legislature to a halt, just for 1 position out of 30. Marry that with term limits for all federal judges and the efforts to pack the courts with hyper-partisan judges becomes less effective, too.
What other cooperative ideas do people have to climb down from the precipice?