The fact that people can't see that the conservatives are basically advocating worldwide for short term economic growth in exchange for basically our future is appalling to me.
I am afraid we will see an immense amount of instability, increased poverty, mass migrations and authoritarian regimes rising up due to the fact that we couldn't manage to convince people that those parties do not care about them.
In a previous post I wrote that conservatives everywhere use moral issues to make people enraged in order to get vote, and in exchange to that they use their power to help the rich get richer. This is exactly what I was talking about. Those Conservative judges were appointed by a President elected by people that rallied behind him hoping to see Roe overturned, and in exchange for that they also gave them a free pass to alter the US political system in a way that is favourable to the Republican party, i.e. the party of big industry and capital.
This is also another small hint that "countries" are a stupid concept - we must stop to pretend that a single country is an island, everything has consequences that irradiate and reflect on the rest of the world, and it's stupid to think everyone can be a ruler of its own tiny spot of our planet.
Countries are like homes, but they aren't cottages in the middle of nowhere, they are flats - if you set your own house on fire, everyone will suffer, everyone will lose something, if not everything.
"$countryname first!" and Nationalism in all its forms is basically just a more general form of Fascism.
> I am afraid we will see an immense amount of instability, increased poverty, mass migrations and authoritarian regimes rising up due to the fact that we couldn't manage to convince people that those parties do not care about them.
This has already been happening for a decade now. But it has been limited to poorer regions, such as north Africa, south-central Americas, and war-torn regions of the Middle East.
Most of this instability was precipitated by food prices, which wealthier nations found themselves immune to. But they are no longer immune, food prices are spiking by double digit annual percentages all over the world. Fuel prices too. The G7 are already in talks about how acquiesce to Russia for their natural gas.
TL;DR? My best attempt:
The federal law did not give authority to EPA to control the type of energy (fuel) used. It only had authority to set emission guidelines.
That’s not false, but it really misses some important detail:
namely, that generation shifting cannot be a “system of emission re- duction” under Section 111. 985 F. 3d 914, 995.
In other words, telling a coal plant operator to reduce their plants emissions by switching some energy production to other sources is beyond the EPA’s legal authority.
However, given that you evidently prefer a single (technocratic?) world government I suppose you might welcome the further erosion of the US republic? In that case damn-the-consequences-do-what-I-want is an understandable position to take, even if it’s inimical to the long term health of the republic.
That's the gist of it but imagine the logical consequences. What the court is saying is that the EPA has no authority to stop the burning of anything, it only has the authority to apply the best-known commercially viable technology to make the emissions of that burning as clean as can be. So, for example, if you wanted to incinerate lead ingots - and let's just ignore the reasons you'd want to do this for debate purposes - the EPA cannot stop you, because there is no commercially viable (i.e. profitable) technology that would make the emissions any cleaner.
Now you may think this is a crazy example but there's an Alcoa facility in Texas that originally burned lignite but long since ran out of the good stuff and has just been burning dirt for decades. It is one of the largest point sources of air pollution in the world, and what the court is saying here is the EPA has not been empowered by Congress to stop that. If Alcoa wants to burn dirt, then fine.
Fix the SCOTUS. I like the proposal to have term limits (long ones, maybe 20 years) and increase the number of justices so that every four years two of them are replaced by the sitting president.
-- from an outside perspective it feels like declined American manufacturing / skilled labour simply continuing it's reflection into the American society? - this started long before trump? -- bail out the banks > 1% hate > occupy wall st etc > "coastal elite" > state pride > trump etc > appetite in the country for the court to address federal vs state precedent? Could be wrong, just how it looks from the outside --
There's more to it. The American right has been working a multi-decade long plan to pack the supreme court with... Well, people like this. And now the chickens are coming home to roost.
They'd have done this regardless of the state of industrialization or 1% hate. It's an alliance between religious fundamentalism, and the business community, and what they want has stayed constant despite the short term ebbs and flows of politics.
Also, please don't buy into the states rights nonsense. This group only believes in states rights when they don't control the federal government.
It's really best to just not listen to what it says, and instead look at what it does.
Trump is a tool. He didn't do this. He doesn't have the brain power to do this. This was the CNP, the Federalist Society, the Koch bruhs, etc. They've worked on this for decades. DECADES.
Major questions doctrine. They ruled that the current law does not empower EPA to require producers to shift generation to different methods (e.g. natural gas, renewables), and that if Congress had meant for the law to do that, they would have written it explicitly.
Congress can still pass a law empowering EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Unlikely. Republicans were only barely willing to work with democrats after the latest in a long string of people gunning down school children. Since hatred of the environment is practically a party platform, they certainly aren't going to cooperate on giving the EPA anything ever.
Consider, for example, how the FDA operates. They have a broad mandate to keep food clean and drugs safe. They don't have an explicit mandate of "you must only regulate tylenol and aspirin, we need to pass a law for new drugs each time they come up."
This ruling finds the EPA, who has the mandate to keep pollutants out of the air, can't determine that CO2 is a pollutant. Why is that? The 2016 clean air act specifically gave them the power to regulate air pollutants.
The only answer is political activism. There is no difference between the FDA's broad mandate and the EPA's broad mandate.
I recommend reading the dissent on this case. It makes it absolutely clear that this is an EPA power. The conservatives couldn't get new laws passed repealing the EPA, so instead they packed the court with political activists so they could make law from the bench.
It might be obvious, but I feel like it's lost due to partisan motivated reasoning. eg. when your preferred party doesn't control the senate, then the filibusterer is an important part part of democracy that forces widespread consensus, but when your party does control the senate the filibusterer is a undemocratic tactic used by the minority to obstruct the majority.
The key word here is "sufficient consensus." Your judgement of sufficiency is a personal opinion.
I could, for example, define "sufficient consensus" as requiring that all laws require a 90% supermajority in the Senate. Or I could reduce this to 50% of the Senate. Alternatively I could reform Congress so that lawmaking requires voting totals representing 50% of the population.
Each of these is one possible version of "sufficient consensus", and still none of them actually matches the version we actually have. What is clear is that the sclerotic nature of today's Congress is problematic, and it's doing a great deal to undermine faith in our democratic system.
The rise of China is testing and will continue to test this assumption. The Chinese government does not require consensus. It can build 40,000 kilometers of high speed rail in just a few years. It can pull hundreds of millions from poverty. It can shut down entire companies and industries overnight (e.g. private school tutoring), jail corrupt corporate executives, and in general coerce compliance to any law.
Do you know how many school teachers in China must buy supplies for their students with their own money? Zero.
Do you know how many Chinese ambassadorships are left vacant because of political bickering? Zero.
I am not a shill for the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, or the ideology of the Chinese political system, but I increasingly am a shill for the ruthless efficiency of the Chinese government.
China is one extreme. The other extreme is the United States, which isn't able to accomplish anything, good or bad. All the US does anymore is renaming post offices, mailing social security checks, funding the army, and tax stuff. Tax cuts, tax credits, tax rebates, tax incentives.
China may well supersede the United States in the future, despite its treatment of minorities.
They also can't enforce building codes leading to fires that kill a lot of people, have no real food safety and dramatically impinge on any sense of individual rights.
The problem is that our federal legislative system is heavily tilted in favor of Republicans despite them being firmly a minority party. This is most apparent in the Senate, but gerrymandering gives them an edge in the House too.
So when you're talking about consensus, the country has it. There's consensus on immigration, gun control, and abortion. It's just that Republicans prevent us from acting on it.
Consensus doesn’t just mean 51%. It means general agreement. If you have 100 people in a room, 51 people are in favor of something and the other 49 are not, is that your “consensus”? Prior to the US each of the states were their own sovereign entities. Why enter the US (or stay in it) if you are going to be ruled against your will? The states agreed to give up some of their power and joined under the explicit conditions of the senate that they would have an equal say.
A majority of Americans support the right to choose [1] (61%), a path to amnesty for undocumented persons [2] (60%), restrictions on firearm purchase and ownership [3] (> 64%), moving off of fossil fuels and treating climate change like the threat it is [4] (76%), a wealth tax on people with a net worth of over $50m [5] (56%), the expanded voting rights in HR 1 [6] (>61%), etc. etc. etc.
These are big majorities, and I'd wager most Americans don't think this stuff is broadly popular.
This is a decent definition: "administrative law principle that compels federal courts to defer to a federal agency's interpretation of an ambiguous or unclear statute that Congress delegated to the agency to administer." The ruling basically undermines the previous notion of the judiciary deferring to an administrative agency, because it just didn't, therefore forcing the legislature to be more explicit in its desires.
Why do you see a blow to the chevron deference doctrine as a good thing?
I'd say that the doctrine properly tries to keep the supreme court, the least democratically responsible branch of US federal government, from being the most powerful of the three branches of government.
The "lifelong bureaucrats" are typically (but not always, see the CDC) policy and subject matter experts.
Chevron deference's main purpose is to free Congress from writing exhaustive laws. If the executive branch does something Congress doesn't like, they can change the law and make it more specific. Of course Congress does almost nothing, so when you say it has to take legislative action to regulate something, what you're effectively doing is deregulating it.
This decision follows more from the Court where they pick and choose what they doom in this way based on their personal politics, contrary to precedent and reliance interests.
We shouldn't think too hard about what this Court does; it's a nakedly ideological power grab that's the endgame of a generation long effort by Conservatives to control the US through the court as they slide further and further into permanent minority status. Future generations will look back on this era as one of infamy.
> The "lifelong bureaucrats" are typically (but not always, see the CDC) policy and subject matter experts.
We really, really needed one of those groups of unelected bureaucrats to be policy and subject matter experts, and they weren't. But don't worry, all the others we haven't actually checked are!
I'll try and read into your low-effort dismissal here a critique of my singling out the CDC and explain further:
The CDC is a relatively unique case of an institution that was really gutted by a mistake decades ago (the swine flu vaccine in the late 70s [0]) and then got some pretty bad Trump-nominated leadership [1] [2]). Elections matter, it turns out.
What agency would you hold up as an example of competence, sanity and political independence, then?
The FAA's got egg on its face from the whole 737-Max situation, the FDA is approving vaccines for under-5 year olds despite no evidence of benefit (and has had a few reviewers resign in protest after the same set of vaccines were approved for other age demographics), I'd bet dollars to donuts that people are going to be mightily unhappy with the Treasury in 6 months, the DOJ has all-but-eliminated the jury trial while providing generally substandard prisons, I've heard many things about the VA but I don't recall a single positive thing, and there's a ton of things that could be said of the DEA/ATF/FBI/DHS gang but very few of them are positive.
Your post is a couple of pot shots at departments that do thousands of things every day and some unsubstantiated claims. Here's guest piece by those two FDA staffers who resigned explaining their disagreement with the administration [0]; the headline is "We don't need universal booster shots. We need to reach the unvaccinated." It's a pretty good piece written by people who sound--at least to me--like policy and subject matter experts. The VA is the largest socialized health care system in the world. Etc. etc.
---
I will say a couple of things to try and reach an agreement here. The first is that our gov't is pretty corrupt, even the executive branch (remember the CDC pulling down testing/masking requirements for flying around the holidays last year?) and it's pretty clear to everyone who looks at it. I'll defend the career civil servants, but the political appointees? Generally nah.
The second is that the US press is basically junk. Their incentives are so screwy that even people who want to be fair and rigorous are forced out in favor of profiteers, which creates an awful dynamic amongst viewers and readers. For example, this article is "Hillary Clinton's emails got as much front-page coverage in 6 days as policy did in 69" [1]. This one says NBC Nightly News spent 31 minutes on emails and 8 minutes on issues [2]. What were readers/viewers supposed to think? Has literally anything been covered so strenuously and consistently? It got more air time than actual terrorism.
The buerocrats take their orders from the president, and if they don't can be overruled and fired by the president, who is elected by the people every 4 years. That's a pretty big difference, no?
> Supreme Court can just ignore its own precedents
I’m not a fan of the current Court, but stare decisis has never been binding. Landmark rulings are landmarks because the create or break precedent. Courts have been doing that since there were courts.
Stare decides bound Casey, at least. It's never before been ignored when it established a new individual right (Dobbs overturns precedent to remove a right, which has never been done before). This really can't be minimized as "Courts gonna Court".
How do you see the Supreme Court as being more democratically responsible than the administrative personel of the executive branch?
To me, it seems clear that the "administrative state" is overseen by the president, who can overrule them and fire individual people, and the president is elected by the people every four years, and that makes the executive branch more democratically responsible than the supreme court, which is not elected by the people, and who serve for life with no democratic accountability.
But I'm open to hearing your argument for how the supreme court is more democratically responsible than the offices of the executive branch! Maybe we don't mean the same thing by "democratically responsible".
I haven't read the opinion in detail but it doesn't appear they touched Chevron, merely ruling this particular case falls under the preexisting major questions doctrine/exception to Chevron.
If you read the dissent they seem to be claiming the majority opinion greatly expands the circumstances in which the major questions exception applies. Which would be a big hit to Chevron making it apply in far fewer cases.
> Congress can still pass a law empowering EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Congress gave the EPA broad discretion that it could have revoked -- using your argument -- at any moment. This issue has been bouncing around for over a decade, and Congress has systematically declined to do so.
I think the argument is that the EPA considered itself to have broad discretion and congress was silent on the matter, and more generally do the executive functions have whatever discretion they assume to have unless congress specifically limits them? Or rather, do they have only the permit that congress gives them?
That's a horrible argument. The Executive branch should never had default allow permissions for anything. The amount of mental gymnastic many of our current regulator bodies have used to claim more authority is already obscene.
Do y'all not consider how the EPA came into being in the first place? It exists because a previous congress did do something and delegated their authority for a very specific reason. Like it was a joint effort between Republicans and Democrats even.
What this Supreme Court has decided to do is say that what they did doesn't matter, knowing that the current makeup in congress is in gridlock due to how modern day Republicans behave. Like the dissent was posted here. Congress explicitly empowered the EPA to work towards the best system of emission reduction.
Congress has to be explicit with what powers they delegate. They can’t just say “do whatever you want to fix this problem”. Neither does it say that in the law. It’s not the job of SCOTUS to give you the outcome you want. It’s to rule on what the law does say and is constitutionally acceptable.
Congress granted the EPA power to regulate air pollution. CO2 and methane are harmful pollutants that cause a greenhouse effect, and the EPA was granted the authority to address this.
Our activist extremely biased Supreme Court has several members who are part of a political advocacy operation called the federalist society and ensures that members get Supreme Court placement specifically to achieve federalist society goals.
Nothing about this is secret.
Nothing about this is acceptable
No they can't. I mean, legally they have the authority to do so. But congress is pretty broken. By the time a congress is elected that can effectively legislate a solution to climate change, it will be too late.
Giving a broken legislative body the sole responsibility of literally saving the world is a really, really dumb idea.
These guys are on a roll. Yesterday was giving states legal rights over indigenous nations. Today this.
I was already planning to expat soon, but this all makes me want to try to hurry that timeline. Sorry to those of you that are stuck in this hellscape.
I'd like to caution other people who are feeling despondent and thinking of leaving that this is exactly what they want. They want you to give them your homes, your relationships, your friends, your resources, your job and everything you've cared about.
So instead of being cynical and celebrating people who are abandoning ship, which I totally understand, we should instead spend time uniting people in opposition. Stay where you are and fight. It's your country. It's mind-blowing that people won't engage in trying to actually do something, even something as simple as helping a campaign, or donating money, but instead they're like "well I'm going to just give up and spend all this time and effort moving to some other country where I also won't uphold any civic responsibility". Madness.
I've been pondering this myself. At a certain point, in places going downhill, like Venezuela or Russia, the smart move is just to get out. Tough to decide when that moment is, though, I guess.
As much as these things can be objectively measured, that's certainly correct. But the trend is not a good one, and the US is considered a 'flawed democracy' rather than a full one according to this: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/02/09/a-new-lo...
The main thing would for us to be under crushing US sanctions. However, because the US needs their oil now, things may be loosening up and Venezuela may do a lot better.
I honestly couldn't live living in the US, I just couldn't exist there knowing that my tax dollars and simply my existence there helps bolster such violence in other countries, good that I don't need to with how common wfh is these days
No place is perfect. Much of the fossil fuels that European countries consume was coming from Russia and is paying for the horrific things Russia is doing in Ukraine.
But narrowly, I'm talking about democracy itself, which is not doing well in the US.
It's not just about chronic malignant threats like those countries; it's also about acute threats. Take as an example, if you were Ukrainian, you had about 2 months of runway during which there was ample evidence Russia was going to invade Ukraine and the country would likely be flattened. And yet, when Russia did invade Ukraine, there were throngs of people trying to escape. I'm not talking about people who are disabled or immobile, I'm talking about middle class people who simply thought they had more time and didn't want to disrupt their life for nothing. See also Afghans in Kabul, who thought either the Taliban wouldn't win or they'd have several more months to get their lives in order.
This is also a popular trope in fiction. In the recent Handmaid's Tale series, there are several episodes devoted to life immediately before the fall, and what you see is a lot of evidence stuff is going to hit a crisis point, and a lot of people insisting that it hasn't quite yet.
Obviously the threshold to act has to be fairly high -- and I'm not saying America is Kabul or Kyiv or Gilead -- but I think there's nothing wrong with listening to the part of your brain that says "wow, it feels like the shit is imminently going to hit the fan". Because if you wait until it actually does, you'll have significantly less capacity to act.
There are also options beyond leaving the country. Some places are physically safer and physically more isolated from threat than others. For example, in the event that there is a rapid institutional collapse in the United States, it seems likely that Hawai'i would be among the places most likely to endure a little while extra or to most easily facilitate leaving the country. Areas near unguarded border crossings on the northern border also have an appeal in that regard. I think the right degree of seriousness with which to take something like this is not so much "I should move to Hawai'i tomorrow in case there's a civil war" and more "If I can work remotely in Hawai'i or if a job opens up, I might gain some degree of personal safety/sovereignty by moving there."
Personal context: I am a non-American. I spent most of the 2010s living in the U.S., and I emigrated to another country in early 2021. The pull factor to emigrate was a job opportunity abroad that was great and that my wife agreed would be a fun way to spend a few years, but the push factor to emigrate was significant uncertainty about the institutional stability of the U.S. We were setting up our paperwork just as the Capitol Insurrection happened.
I think some kind of dramatic failure less likely than a gradual descent. More like Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela or something than some of the more, uh, 'exciting' examples from history.
Of course, things going badly in the US is going to have spillover effects everywhere else too, so that's something to keep in mind. I'm not sure how isolated various places would be.
Barring extreme circumstances‡, one should not moving from the country of one’s birth, but to the country of one’s choice. I emigrated from the U.S. two decades ago to Canada, because of the person who later became my wife—but I had to decide that I could live with Canada, too. Family aside, nothing in the U.S. either held me to America or was pushing me from America.
The process took almost two years, and it was almost five years before I got Canadian citizenship. As I understand it, it would take longer now.
My wife and I are considering moving to Europe or the U.K., but it would take time for this move to materialize, and we need to figure out what it is that we want (especially given our ages). Such a move is not likely to happen for two to five years at this point.
‡ There are exigent circumstances where it becomes safer to leave one country with little care for where one goes, as long as it isn’t worse. I fear with the extremists taking power legitimately and illegitimately and pushing toward their increasingly apartheid goals, there will be larger classes of people who could legitimately become refugees from America, especially if "liberal" states turn extremist—as they seem likely to do, since the divide here is (mostly old, mostly white) rural vs (mostly younger, mostly diverse) urban.
Sitting where I sit, I truly think that America is fucked, and am doing what little that I can to make sure that Canada does not follow in its footsteps, but we have our homegrown extremists whose crypto-christo-fascist messages are being treated with bemusement to respect, and even being promoted by fools like Poilievre.
Yeah, to be clear, I'm not running away from America. I'm in a similar situation where my partner wants to move to Germany (in a couple years), and I think that sounds like a swell idea.
We can't take the natural resources, benefits of geography, and nuclear weapons with us, so those we leave behind will inherit a very powerful nation. Something to think about.
> I'd like to caution other people who are feeling despondent and thinking of leaving that this is exactly what they want.
Could you clarify who "they" is in:
> this is exactly what they want.
?
And are you being a little hyperbolic (nothing wrong with that, we all do it especially when impassioned) or do you really think the supreme court (or whoever "they" is) are trying to cause an exodus of people they disagree with?
I'm not challenging/disagreeing with you, just very interested in understanding your thinking.
I intentionally left they up to interpretation here because I think the same logic applies to anyone who is potentially being forced from their home. This could apply to California w.r.t firearms, or perhaps San Francisco and their lethargic response to a public health crises, or perhaps Ohio where I live where Christian Communists are attempting to subvert the United States and the Constitution.
I've actually always felt this way about immigration and refugees as well. I certainly understand taking people in (from wherever, to wherever), but the big problem with that is once all the good people leave an area you have nothing but the bad people. It's sort of fragile on a global scale. What's the end goal? All "good" people go to a select few countries and then the rest of the world is run by bad people?
> And are you being a little hyperbolic (nothing wrong with that, we all do it especially when impassioned) or do you really think the supreme court (or whoever "they" is) are trying to cause an exodus of people they disagree with?
I don't think there's an active campaign just yet, but I do think that state legislatures are happy when this filtering process happens because it solidifies power. So far they have not undertaken active, visible campaigns, but I believe that it's coming and will come more aggressively from Christian Communists that have taken power in state legislatures. It's not something that Democratic Party leaders will say out loud but of course they're happy when so-called Republicans leave their jurisdiction as well.
> I'm not challenging/disagreeing with you
Please do! We can't get better if we don't explore and have discussions.
> We should instead spend time uniting people in opposition. Stay where you are and fight.
That is definitely one approach, and one I'm hoping to see through. But simultaneously you have to acknowledge that there could come a point where it's time to jump ship. That point is going to be different for everyone. Recent events have pushed some past that point. That doesn't seem hard to grasp.
> It's mind-blowing that people won't engage in trying to actually do something, even something as simple as helping a campaign, or donating money...
Have you been paying attention? People in this country have been more engaged over the last few years than at any point in my lifetime, and at this point the ship is still sinking.
Every time there is a school shooting, there is outrage and no change. Proud boys terrorize another fucking library event, and there aren't even reports of a single arrest. Women's rights being slaughtered and we get to hear how we need to vote. Another hearing laying out the obvious coup attempt on Jan 6th, and no action taken but another news headline.
This is just a snippet of the last ~30 days. 1 short month. I don't argue that it's my country. My country just looks like a real shithole lately.
> but instead they're like "well I'm going to just give up and spend all this time and effort moving to some other country where I also won't uphold any civic responsibility".
This is such a weird take. Consider employment. You can join a startup, work your ass off, cross your fingers, and hope for that big payday. High risk, high reward. Alternatively, you can join a mature company, collect a comfortable paycheck and moderately help to steer the bigger ship.
Right now, the US is looking like that startup. You can work your ass off, and it may give you a great payoff in the form of opportunity. But it's looking increasingly like it's going to fail. Alternatively, you can move somewhere that has all the big stuff in order, and you get to work on the small stuff that still has effect while not worrying as much about whether you're one injury away from bankruptcy.
Who knows? Maybe if we vote harder it'll turn around. At this point, I'm inclined to believe it's cultural. We barely voted out an insurrectionist. 48% of the country voted to keep that in play. This country is full of people who are actively encouraging someone to overthrow our government. 48%.
Couldn't agree with you more. Democracy literally means "people rule." As the rulers, you occasionally have to rule. It blows my mind that so many people act really angry about states that gerrymander or take away abortion rights, but can't even name a single state legislature. The little political motivation people have gets funneled into a few super-popular national issues regardless of their political feasibility, so Congresspeople are incentivized to virtue signal rather than get legislation though.
I have no intent on living through a new North Korea, a new Russia, a new Greater German Reich, or a Gilead.
We're only a few years away from the collapse. It is a smart move to escape while you can. If I need heart pills or insulin in the future and they can't be made safe, then it won't be safe if you have any medical issues. If the water won't be safe because we couldn't regulate new chemicals invented, then it won't be safe to live here. If it isn't safe to have a pregnancy, because they've decided to sentence to death those with an ectopic pregnancy, why should you stay?
-- America began the process of un-uniting quite some time ago - it's unsurprising that the supreme court is reflecting that - curious what Americans here think about this? - much of the country is trending towards "live in the state that you're comfortable in" - seems somewhat reasonable? --
> 1. Moving is hard. Even harder for people that have little means. Living in the state you're comfortable isn't going to work for a lot of people.
Also, don't forget that a lot of blue states (if that's where someone wants to live) have been really bad at providing enough housing, so are pretty difficult for someone to move to if they don't have a lot of money.
-- I'd think that if you wanted to progress your country and change it toward your perspective - it would take folks moving to the areas they're uncomfortable to do the work in those communities - from an outside perspective it seems the conservatives are going to swallow the liberals in the states simply because they're more comfortable literally going to other areas of the country to change/bolster views? (I don't live in the USA)- however - I suppose that's a lot to ask - that said- it's fairly common in some countries --
That's a pipe dream. The division is urban-vs-rural, not state-vs-state. What is now a red state will inexorably become blue as people flock to it. Rinse and repeat.
America has been through divisive times in the past. We'll survive. I think what's notable now is that it's been so damn peaceful for most of our lives that this looks like unprecedented tribalism.
While I think that I understand your feelings, here is something to consider: Yuval Noah Harari (historian who has written some great books for understanding the world) recently said that if countries like the USA can solve the partisanship problems we have then there is no limit to where our society and civilization can go.
This seems well worth working hard for.
My personal approach is to be very hard on family members and friends who if democrats talk about republicans as evil incarnate and if they are republicans then talk about democrats as woke idiots who are ruining the country.
I try to point out how stupid both sides are and they are fighting the wrong battles against the wrong enemy.
Another reason to stay in the USA: currently the world is splitting into two economies led by:
1) BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) - they will probably have about 60% of the world's population aligned with them.
2) USA/Europe/Canada/Australia/etc. - they will probably have about 40% of the world's population aligned with them.
Except for the USA and Russia who have the resources (food, energy, defensibility), I think that most all of the other countries can not exist without external trade. If the shit really hits the fan for the world, being in the USA might be a very good thing, even if we don't solve the political bigotry of democrats and republicans hating each other.
It looks much less so if you turn off the news. I have a good life here, and I'm unconvinced it would be a net improvement to move to Europe. I enjoy visiting there, but it's not like they don't have their own problems.
Large economically disruptive policy changes should come from the legislative rather than the executive or judicial branches, as they are more democratically accountable, at a finer level of detail. To the extend that the consitution codifies that, it's a good thing.
They are limiting the ability of the government to make and enforce laws. The EPA is created with Congressional authority and is empowered to act on their behalf.
Castrating the federal government will have negative repercussions. If the federal government doesn't have the power to control the states, then why bother having one?
They do, they just need to make laws that EPA can enforce. Not let EPA to act on its own. Isn't everyone always talking about unelected burecrauts going against the will of the people?
Not everyone. The phrase "unelected bureaucrats" is almost exclusively a Republican talking point in US politics, used when they want deregulation of exactly this sort.
It's really not that at all. It's a very one-sided talking point, if you're hearing it a lot that simply demonstrates which media bubble you're in.
Search for the phrase "unelected judges": the results are all right-wing sources, literally starting with the Heritage foundation and Daniel Horowitz.
Over here in my media bubble I'm hearing a lot of complaints about judges who borderline perjured themselves in their confirmation hearings, "activist judges" (also a Republican talking point, now being used by Democrats to point out the hypocrisy of that talking point being used when the Heritage Foundation exists), "theocrats", and "destroying stare decisis".
"Unelected" doesn't enter into it, because of course judges shouldn't be elected, the whole point of the judicial system was supposed to be for them to be insulated from politics and focus on the law.
Yes, thank you for demonstrating precisely my point!
The results are r/shitliberalssay, r/conservative, multiple quotes from FOX News, r/roevwadecelebration, r/conservative, r/deplatformed_ (a pro-Trump QAnon crank) and Donald Trump himself.... One single story using the phrase in reference to the Dobbs decision was posted to a handful of leftwing subreddits seven months ago; otherwise it's almost exclusively right-wingers using the phrase.
When people complain about unelected bureaucrats, what they actually mean is that they are unhappy that the executive is doing its job, while the legislature, which has the power to change the direction of the executive, is choosing not to change that direction.
Its some weird Schroedinger's legislature, where it is legally empowered to direct the executive, it chooses not to, and somehow, that choice is the executive's fault, and we need an activist judge to rescue us from it. Instead, of the normal process of 'if the legislature is unhappy with the direction of the executive, it could just issue a course-correction by passing a law'.
The republicans know they can't pass that law right now, so they are using the courts to avoid having to pass it. Then they'll seize control of the legislature in the midterms, and they won't need to pass it. The beauty of having a stacked court, is that you can sit around and do nothing, and not have to write any unpopular legislature, while you sit around and lay all the blame for any consequences of bad governance on appointed-for-life judges.
>>They are limiting the ability of the government to make and enforce laws.
They are in fact doing the exact opposite - telling elected officials that you need to make and enforce laws - not give that responsibility to someone else.
Do you think the IRS should be able to set tax rates? then how is this different?
Congress passed a law to delegate their power and authority to the EPA.
If Congress made a law that the IRS should have the power to set tax rates, then I'd be fine with them being able to set tax rates. Because I think that Congress should have the power to delegate a portion of their power, should they choose to.
This is a weird, and frankly idiotic ruling. Regulations are too complicated and numerous for Congress to decide on every single one. Have you ever read one? They go into excruciating detail about everything because they are written by experts. The best case outcome from this is that the new rules from agencies get tossed into some existing process so that they are rubber stamped, thus adding red tape.
I've lived here in the US for 12 years and recently became a US Citizen. Coming from Ireland, to me the US is quite far from a functioning democracy. The democratic will of the people is not reflected in the make-up of congress, the courts, or three times in my lifetime - the Presidency (Clinton, W. Bush, and Trump were each elected by popular minorities).
Much of this is a result of the court's rulings (very directly in the case of Bush!), entrenching gerrymandering and making it harder and harder to remove the massively corrupting bribery for access that fuels the political system.
Deferring administrative decisions to congress is not a recipe for more democracy, but for more gridlock, and it hands a historically and internationally extremist faction the political victories they want anyway. It will generate Republican outcomes even from Democratic Party executives and congresses (like the current one).
The fact that people can't see that the conservatives are basically advocating worldwide for short term economic growth in exchange for basically our future is appalling to me.
I am afraid we will see an immense amount of instability, increased poverty, mass migrations and authoritarian regimes rising up due to the fact that we couldn't manage to convince people that those parties do not care about them.
In a previous post I wrote that conservatives everywhere use moral issues to make people enraged in order to get vote, and in exchange to that they use their power to help the rich get richer. This is exactly what I was talking about. Those Conservative judges were appointed by a President elected by people that rallied behind him hoping to see Roe overturned, and in exchange for that they also gave them a free pass to alter the US political system in a way that is favourable to the Republican party, i.e. the party of big industry and capital.
This is also another small hint that "countries" are a stupid concept - we must stop to pretend that a single country is an island, everything has consequences that irradiate and reflect on the rest of the world, and it's stupid to think everyone can be a ruler of its own tiny spot of our planet.
Countries are like homes, but they aren't cottages in the middle of nowhere, they are flats - if you set your own house on fire, everyone will suffer, everyone will lose something, if not everything.
"$countryname first!" and Nationalism in all its forms is basically just a more general form of Fascism.
The Constitution doesn't say that the Supreme Court is the final say?
Constitution, Article 3
> The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
If your question was intended to claim that the Article you quoted gives The Supreme Court ‘the final say on legal interpretation,’ I’m interested to know which words in that Article you believe gives that say.
It seems to me like they are considering outcomes. I'm not sure how we know for sure if they are or not, we don't know what's in their heads. But this court appears to many like they've got some outcomes in mind and are fitting the law to them.
And, I mean, Trump literally said that he could guarantee he was going to appoint justices that would overturn Roe, and then they did, as he guaranteed. That's an outcome, right?
A number of people on both sides of the issue have noted that the country was on an arc toward more liberal abortion laws before Roe. When SCOTUS steps in and decides issues without a solid Constitutional basis it interferes with the consensus process of democracy and produces division. The same is likely true with the other privacy rulings.
Have some faith in people. Inventing rights and privileges autocratically is definitely problematic in a democracy. It's better to do the work of persuasion. We all have to live together. Note as well, the number of countries who have arrived at gay marriage through legislation rather than judicial fiat. It's a more respectful way to go.
'More respectful'? What was respectful about states denying people the ability to see their partner in the hospital because they have the crime of being gay? Or being denied the ability to participate in basic rights because they're gay?
Or is it just because it doesn't inconvenience you? Like these are all things that are very fresh in the memory of anyone gay that's lived in southern or red states. It's not a democracy if you have a bunch of people you treat as second class citizens.
Majority rule literally the definition of democracy.
This is obviously in conflict with minority rights.
If you care more about minority rights than democracy, fine. Lots of governments have limits on majority rule. The USA constitution is a famous example.
But those limits are limits on democracy. Which make them anti-democratic.
The more strictly you protect minority rights the less democratic your society is.
> It's not a democracy if you have a bunch of people you treat as second class citizens.
That's the purest democracy there is. A direct democracy that let people vote on absolutely anything would always produce that result.
Yeah supreme court is doing its job just fine. Main issue seems to be Congress peeps voting party line with omnibus bills instead of discrete policy being legislated that they can vote freely on with just their constituents in mind. And then of course the money and corporate capture. I don't think elected members even write the bills anymore.
> but what it has been doing is empowering democracy, which people are nominally for.
I know what you are trying to say, but it is too narrow.
If you think broader, the above is a laughable claim. Overturning the current understanding of laws is jarring to democracy. (Sure, there are times when it is morally necessary.) Why? Previous legislatures operated under the assumption that the Clean Air Act worked in a certain manner.
The Supreme Court has effectively overturned previous democratic work knowing full well the practical implications.
How would you apply this to the Roe v Wade decision overturn? I'm not saying it is infeasible to apply it to that but I am curious to see the argument that that was explicitly focused on laws and not outcomes (especially given some of the language used by some of the justices to refer to abortion)
I'm a software developer, not a legal scholar. Anything I said that could be considered intelligent regarding analysis of SCOTUS opinions would be nothing more than regurgitation I've heard from another source in the media.
As such, I will decline to offer anything beyond what I've already said.
It depends what you mean. Of course the mechanisms under their control are mostly about legal interpretation and Constitutionality. If you read a lot of Supreme Court opinions you'll see that the justices do care about outcomes to a large degree.
Judges use outcomes to interpret the law all the time. There's nothing, on it's face, invalid about that approach. You may personally disagree with it, but then you'd have to justify why the rest of us should believe in a legal philosophy that's clearly going to degrade our quality of life by destroying the environment.
I’m not a conservative, but this ruling is good because it’s interpreting the law as written, which is the only fair way to apply it. Reducing the politicalization of the courts by getting judges away from ruling based on their desired policy rather than the law is probably insufficient, but it’s necessary to maintain general confidence in the system over time.
If you want policy changes to handle whatever real or imaginary threats you believe you face, then the correct way to deal with that is through the elected branches. They are the ones meant to make policy.
I interpret your comment to mean you agree with this decision.
...yeah no, obviously not. The law has meaning and that meaning is stable. Words mean things. If you are stuck in "Anyone can interpret anything as anything else" land you have fallen prey to being too clever.
> Anyone can interpret anything as anything else, this is proven over and over throughout history.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
I suppose that may be a workable political system, but I'm not certain it will produce outcomes anyone will like.
You are oversimplifying. Generally speaking, most of the work of SCOTUS is reigning in the Executive because of overzealous regulators. The US regulatory framework is theoretically designed to be based in law, made by the legislature, not the whims of unelected bureaucracy.
Congress delegating it’s power is suspect at best, and likely unconstitutional entirely (something something, War Powers Act). Congress created the EPA through the power of the purse, but it’s operated by the Executive, and therefore is not and should not be empowered to unilaterally create regulations with the force of law. Making law is Congress’ job.
I agree and the executive branch has at least two major roles in the constitutional law-making process. First is the presidential veto, and second the Vice President in his or her office of President of the Senate can vote on bills from time to time.
There's something to be said for rules and policy being adapted to a locale. What's right for people in one region might not work for some in another. You'll get a tyranny of the majority in much of your life the broader you go away from local governance. I agree there's benefit to have federal and international rules and policy but it's more nuanced than just saying sentiments for keeping power at a national level are fascist.
This sounds like GPT-3 trained on partisan talking points. If it's not, isn't it weird that you didn't notice that Democrats keep promising to codify Roe but never do? They had 40 years!! If they solved the problem, they wouldn't have that to campaign on and raise money with. Keep people enraged to get their vote. You're spot on about that, but it's how both parties operate. Never solve the problem so it'll be there next cycle.
Roe v Wade becomes codified, abortion becomes legal in all 50 states, immediately there is a lawsuit, they appeal to the supreme court, supreme court chooses to hear the case, supreme court repeals the codified Roe v. Wade.
IANAL but how does codifying Roe v Wade change this?
The decision made by the Supreme Court was that abortion was not a constitutionally-protected right, I doubt they would hold that allowing abortion was somehow unconstitutional. If that's what they wanted they would have gone ahead and declared that in their recent ruling. Instead they explicitly stated this is a matter for the legislature to decide.
Yep. Wedge issues. I'm glad the SC is trying to force congress to do its job. If only someone would do something about executive orders, we may make some real progress.
There is a long history and philosophy around the proper roles and relationships of a legislature and court such as SCOTUS. The current Court could claim to make decisions upon a strict originalist philosophy of jurisprudence. Maybe they think they do, and maybe they really do. But...
Take an open-eyed look at history. Look at the process by which the justices are selected. This shows a different ultimate motivator: conservatives have been working for decades to pick justices whose claimed philosophies align with the conservative agenda.
I don't care the motivation. The SC shouldn't be doing congress' job. Congress got burned because they've been complacent.
RvW has always stood on tenuous footing. We've known this. Congress has literally had decades to do something and they chose instead to keep the status quo. Why? Because the republican threat helps democrat voter turnout. Same reason nothing is being done about the failed drug war.
My comment was questioning the language of the other comment. It said "Congress got burned because they've been complacent.". This is a bizarre way of thinking about it.
In general, I push back against language and metaphors that don't have much value. We get to choose what metaphors we use. So we should choose good ones. Fixating on, i.e. "A versus B" is a competitive metaphor. But the branches of government are not competing against each other. They are working as part of system to (hopefully) maintain some semblance of a functioning representative democracy.
When one branch exercises a check against another branch, I don't think it is useful or interesting to say that it "won". I don't want us to start treating any of the branches as competitors in some kind of game or sport. I don't have much joy when, e.g. the House votes to impeach a President. It might be wise and justified (or not), but it is hardly a cause for celebration. But at times, it is necessary duty.
More specifically... No, Congress didn't "get burned". First of all, the composition of Congress has changed significantly over the last decades. Second, to my knowledge, the Dobbs ruling was not directed in any way at Congress or its legislation.
That's unfortunate. The Supreme Court can only function well if the justices are predominantly motivated by judicial, not political, principles.
If the court plays lip service to judicial principles while ultimately being driven by politics, it is a puppet and cannot serve as a proper check and balance.
Yawn. This is a cliche and talking point you know, to use your own language.
This statement does not address the issues head on. If you have a theory of jurisprudence, say it. You don't need to water it down with over-generalizations.
> RvW has always stood on tenuous footing. We've known this. Congress has literally had decades to do something and they chose instead to keep the status quo. Why? Because the republican threat helps democrat voter turnout.
If by 'tenuous footing', you mean that there is not legislation protecting it, I understand what you are saying. However, per stare decisis (respecting judicial precedent), the general idea of Rowe has been settled and stable for a long time. Public opinion has been relatively stable too.
You said "Congress has literally had decades to do something and they chose instead to keep the status quo.". Congress is a body, yes, but it is also comprised of parties and coalitions that disagree. Saying a "split-brain" body "chose" to keep the status quo isn't a very useful way of thinking about it. A better explanation (one that conveys more information about what is happening) is that the parties strongly disagree, and the party lines have gotten firmer over time.
In February (this year, 2022), the House passed a law codifying abortion with Democratic support. It failed the Senate 46-48 due to Republican opposition.
The Democrats have rarely had a filibuster-proof majority in congress that would allow them to codify Roe. And they have been working under the assumption that it was a settled issue. As I recall, even some of the recently appointed Supreme Court justices were under that impression as well. At least until they were sworn in.
Even when they had a filibuster-proof majority, they didn't have a majority that believed in abortion rights. Some of the democrats in obama's brief filibuster proof session were pro life. Even now, at least 1 democrat senator is pro life.
Please do not equate the parties. It is incredibly naïve to see two parties that aren't perfect and somehow wave your arms and say they are equivalently bad. They are clearly different both in terms of their policy objectives and their willingness to stay within the realm of truth and science.
Please do equate them. Neither stays at all within the realm of truth and science. I can't believe anyone still genuinely thinks either party does in the year 2022.
Your attempt to compare the Republican and Democratic parties creates a false equivalency. This is demonstrated by the January 6th insurrection fomented by a Republican president and covered up by the Republican establishment, which has no analog in the Democratic space.
Democrats do bad things. The bad things they do aren't as bad as what Republicans do. It's like having both pancreatic cancer and a zit, one's worse than the other.
You are defining an arbitrary boundary and making a false dichotomy. Do you understand what I'm saying?
Stop putting them in the same category. This is useless and nondescriptive. Here's what I mean by that : if you were to build a machine learning classifier with a decision tree algorithm, what do you think some of the most important differentiators would be?
Tell me which party tends to acknowledge scientific evidence more often.
A fool sets impossible standards and moans that everyone falls short.
Accept reality. Choose from the better options. There is no perfect except in mathematics (and maybe some physics we don't know yet)
You act like this was completely up to the Democrats. Please point to a time in history when codifying Roe with legislation would have passed the Senate.
What the government should do about climate change should be decided by legislation agreed upon by the President and Congress, not by an administrative agency.
That could employ subject matter experts and scientists to draft reasonable and prudent regulations, hopefully away from the influence of lobbyists? What a novel concept.
Or they could legislate. What's the purpose of electing lawmakers if they just hire random bureaucrats. If they want advice they have the money to get that advice
It is common and reasonable for legislation to delegate responsibility. Administrative rulemaking has been around for a long time and will continue to exist.
What’s interesting about this ruling (if you listened to the oral arguments and read the ruling) is that it appears to undercut the ability for any executive agency to make a rule, under them claim that congress cannot delegate its powers.
So the FAA can’t determine and then require that aircraft have transponders. Congress has to do this.
I don't think this is correct. Congress can definitely delegate its power, they are just saying that Congress didn't delegate the power the EPA is trying to use in this case.
From the final paragraph of the opinion:
"But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the
authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in
Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body."
So it seems that Congress can still give the EPA a more clear delegation that they have this power.
How do you write an entire opinion about delegation without mentioning Chevron? As the dissent points out, that delegation is inherently required to do the EPA's job and the court has previously accepted their technical and policy expertise in this area.
You would think they would have reversed Chevron, or distinguished it. But note, I've not read this decision yet, and I'm taking your word for their not mentioning Chevron.
I wonder if the conservative majority will use these recent decisions as precedent to overturn Chevron in what would be another shocking and shameless display of legislating from the bench.
I don't agree it will be chaos. Congress has for far too long abdicated what it is supposed to be directly responsible for to unelected bureaucrats that exist in agencies that are overseen by the executive branch of government.
Congress is now free to focused on creating chaos between the people that elect them. When is the last time you've seen anyone from Congress campaign on any substantive issue? I've not seen it in my lifetime they leave that campaign up to the president. Congress is invested with the sole power to regulate our money when is the last time you've seen them do anything except throw up bloated budgets? They have completely advocated that power to the Federal reserve of which they exercise zero oversight of and apparently leave it to the president who also lets it run autonomously.
So what you call chaos is reconnecting the actual responsibilities of our elected representatives with their duties. I for one would very much enjoy seeing my elected representative actually doing their constitutional duties instead of pitting citizen that one another's throat in order to get reelected again.
have you met any congress personnel? fence posts would be insulted to be compared to some of them.
there's definitely a gap between regulatory officials making regulations and legislature codifying the details. This is where appointing heads of those departments is supposed to come to bear.
It's a mess, but the answer isn't to let lobbyists and special interests burn the house down.
The right answer here is that Congress explicitly delegated a decision to the EPA administrator, so they should be allowed to make that decision. The court's decision is well-argued, but it seems to come down to "I know Congress said you could do this, but it's a really big deal and they might not have thought it through enough, so you have to go ask for permission again before you do it". It's kind of patronizing to both the EPA and Congress, and I don't think it's a good decision or precedent.
The majority of people don’t want to allow abortions at 36 weeks, but they also don’t want abortions completely banned.
So there is a democratic debate to be had about where in the middle the non extreme two sides could meet. (In Europe there is no debate about abortion and most countries allow it to 12 weeks).
Better to have a debate and both sides compromise than some court deciding on one of the most extreme views. The Supreme Court didn’t ban abortion, they did however allow it to 36 weeks for decades.
What they did do last week is say: hey guys, it’s a federal democracy, why don’t you fucking debate it and legislate it somehow where both sides can agree, as is normal with divisive issues in a democracy
Even RBG said that Roe v Wade was on shaky ground as a legal precedent.
And what people don’t realize is that if Roe v Wade wasn’t overturn the next ruling discussed was allowing further restrictions by states, further eroding the precedent.
The alternative was just kicking the can down the road until the next challenge.
I understand your point, but at the same time, I don't want the same "it is like a series of tubes" guys mandating some airplane technology pushed by the highest campaign contribution either.
I have a degree in computer science and a couple decades of experience with software development for, and deployment on, the internet.
I think the metaphor of comparing internet bandwidth to pipes/tubes carrying water is perfectly apt. It seems like a very simple, direct and effective way to describe issues of bandwidth, connectivity, congestion and overall infrastructure.
I've never quite understood why we all pretended like that was a bad analogy. I guess just because it came out of the mouth of an old, white Republican.
It's because his delivery of that analogy came across as unhinged and shouty, and he posited that emails from his staff took days to arrive because of Netflix.
There’s a million nuances in it, rape, incest, medical reasons, and the time of abortion.
The abortion debate doesn’t exist in Europe because almost all sides managed to agree on a 12 week limit and it’s left alone.
I would guess in 10-20 years the US would arrive at the same conclusion, with small differences between red and blue states.
Stop making this a yes or no issue. And that’s not what the Supreme Court did. They didn’t ban abortion. If 60% want abortion legal they can vote for whoever gives them that.
Tell this to the states passing anti-abortion legislation. They seem to view it as a binary. At a minimum, the burden of proof for exceptions is high with the penalties being life in prison in more than a few states.
In Germany's last election, a major issue was about removing a clause disallowing "advertising" abortions. It remains controversial that people seeking abortions have to get extensive psychological counseling from an extremely limited number of therapists before getting an abortion.
In Poland abortion is banned entirely and they are about to start keeping a pregnancy register.
Ireland and Spain also have ongoing debates about the particulars of their laws, with Ireland having just legalized it all in 2018!
The GOP are going to immediately nuke the filibuster and ban abortion at the federal level if they control the government after the next election. Pence has even said this out loud recently. It will likely make no exceptions for rape or incest either. The majority of the country is against this.
> Abortion isn’t 0 or 1, legal or not legal.
As others have already pointed out below, and I already mentioned, over half of states are ready to enact total bans. The repeal of Roe doesn't make abortion illegal, but it does make a _ban_ on abortion legal, which is exactly what is happening.
> I would guess in 10-20 years the US would arrive at the same conclusion, with small differences between red and blue states.
This data visualisation [0] highlights the problem with this approach.
This isn't an issue where you can sit back and contemplate it as some abstract exercise of democracy. So many women will die, or be persecuted during that 10-20 year span you mention and it is completely needless. No one should be adopting a "it'll all work out in the end" mindset.
Yeah, except you are taking a political or moral stance right there, so it’s not fair to the rest of the population. Many people believe you are saving many lives in those 10-20 years.
The actual problem is a poorly educated voting population being manipulated into voting against their interests to support corrupt career politicians that behave in effect like medieval lords.
> Over 60% of the US population think abortion should be legal. More than half of US states are (or are very likely) to institute abortion bans.
Could it be that a majority of the population in those states are against abortion? Wouldn't
Why should this be regulated at the federal level?
I'm pro-choice but I can understand that some people believe life begins at conception and therefore abortion is murder. If a majority of people in a state believe that, isn't it democratic to let them make laws accordingly?
Due to things like the electoral college, gerrymandering, vote suppression tactics, and senate representation to name just few, the US is not very democratic. Nor can these be fixed under current conditions because of the above list.
They do. The people get equal representation under the house. The states get equal representation under the senate. This is a feature to control populist movements as well as protect states' interests (which are also composed by the people, but this separate ensures that the culture of one set of state will not be imposed over the other set).
The senate does not give people equal representation - regardless of the motivation for having it, this is objectively true.
You can say that you like a system that has this feature for states or it has certain other benefits and so on, but you can't say that it is equal representation because it is not.
As I said, the house gives people equal representation. A bill will not become law without passing the with through representation of the house. The only limit is that some things the house wants won't pass because the states don't agree.
If you truly want equal representation, then we have to go the direct democracy route since you will not have equal numbers of people under each representative. You also need to get rid of appointments by the executive (including rule making agencies), closed primaries, and provide universal voting including for felons and non-citizens.
So what is this argument for equal representation across the board? I don't see any benefit other than if you want populist movements to succeed based on the whims of the day and potentially at the expense of the minority rights (even more so than today).
The main point here is that state representation was necessary in order to create the country, and is likely necessary for the country to continue. I don't see any argument that supercedes this so far.
I understand how it works, and you agree that the senate does not provide equal representation for people, only the states. I'm not suggesting that the numbers for each representative be exactly the same because that's not achievable in practice. What I am saying is that the current system is much less democratic than it could be if either there was no senate or it had proportional representation. You may think that would lead to chaos, but I disagree.
It wouldn't lead to chaos. It could lead to states leaving the union if the senate were dissolved. It's happened in the past when states didn't want to be trampled and the divide seems large today.
But what is the objective benefit to removing the senate? The argument I'm hearing is just that it could be more democratic, but there are many changes that could make things more democratic. Some things are about fairness, like gerrymandering. But I don't see any benefit to removing the senate.
Laws like something that could curtail the worst of gerrymandering will never be passed because of the senate. The people that benefit from unequal and unfair representation will never vote to change them. Those people largely sit in the senate unequally representing the people that want positive change.
"Those people largely sit in the senate unequally representing the people that want positive change."
I thought we already covered that they represent states, not people.
By the way, what bill would they pass that would fix gerrymandering? I thought the states had the authority to draw their districts and it can be contentious as to what a good fix is.
And of course we have the same logic on the other side - that a party in power will do what they can to add to their power. We see that with laws about non-citizens voting (struck down), restoring/giving voring rights to groups that would disproportionately support them, and such.
> I thought we already covered that they represent states, not people.
We did, and that's the point.
> what bill would they pass that would fix gerrymandering? I thought the states had the authority to draw their districts and it can be contentious as to what a good fix is.
There is no bill, also my point. Also, it's only contentious to those who are deliberately attempting to gerrymander.
> that a party in power will do what they can to add to their power.
I agree with this part, its also my point; that is, undemocratic processes are self-perpetuating and self-strengthening.
> We see that with laws about non-citizens voting (struck down), restoring/giving voting rights to groups that would disproportionately support them, and such.
Interesting that that all your counter examples here are about giving people rights to vote. People having the right to vote is fundamental to democracy. Seems your view on democracy is of the 'only the right sort of people should be allowed to vote' variety, pun intended.
Then why are you misrepresenting it to mean something that it doesn't? Only one house is meant to represent people.
"Also, it's only contentious to those who are deliberately attempting to gerrymander."
Maybe for the general idea. But I can see implementation ideas being contentious. That's my point - the solutions are likely to contain biases, and there's going to be opposition to that.
"Interesting that that all your counter examples here are about giving people rights to vote. People having the right to vote is fundamental to democracy. Seems your view on democracy is of the 'only the right sort of people should be allowed to vote' variety, pun intended."
Please name a democracy that has unlimited voting rights. All democracies have some limits. Requiring that someone is a citizen is a damn low bar. Losing rights for felonies can be debated, but that's not too uncommon either. The purpose of those most basic restrictions is do that society does not become influenced by the criminal elements (you're banned from office too) or from outside influence. And guess what, those restrictions were democratically implemented. So please stop with the attacks and more righteous than thou attitude. Please state some argument beyond "fundamental".
>Then why are you misrepresenting it to mean something that it doesn't?
I didn't mispresent anything, I've been consistent and clear about my view of the senate.
>Please name a democracy that has unlimited voting rights.
It's not my position that voting rights should be unlimited. I was only pointing out that your own list of bad things were all about giving people who don't have a say about the government whose rules they must live by, a say in that government by vote.
>The purpose of those most basic restrictions is do that society does not become influenced by the criminal elements
This is historical laughable, the purpose of most restrictions is to limit the vote of marginalized groups, usually by race. For just one example, Step 1: Pass laws making weed a felony. Step 2: Focus all law enforcement efforts on marginalized groups smoking weed but let the kids in suburbs and college dorms smoke all they want. Step 3: Harshly punish marginalized groups by making them felons. Step 4: Strip them of the right to vote.
A person in Wyoming doesn't have equal representation in the house as a person in California, by quite a large margin. The house is not representative in practice.
As I said in another branch of this conversation, the use of the filibuster on nearly all bills of any significance (budgets and confirmations aside) in the Senate (and the chilling effect it's had on even bringing other bills to the floor) means that states are not represented equally either. The most obstructionist states have substantially more legislative power than the ones that want to actually pass bills. This is obviously more abstract, but it's pretty clear that in practice states are not equal in the senate.
The other states also have the power to filibuster things they don't like. This is feature not a bug. We want to fail open (liberty). The way to do that is placing safeguards that make it harder to pass laws, as they are generally imposing restrictions. The passage of any law will negatively affect some minority, the point is to make that group small and avoid straight partisanship via a modest supermajority.
Yes, there are some outliers and discrepancy in the number a representative represents. It probably should be adjusted.
I hope it's uncontroversial that, say, blocking a bill to ban slavery is not "failing open," for example, and the persistent effort to prevent slavery from being banned led to many failures in liberty?
When your main bulwark is making it hard to pass bills, all you've really done is make it so that the status quo is powerful. The status quo is not, by default, freedom.
Yes, point in time the status quo may not be the most free. The point is that starting from a more free point (the beginning) there were fewer laws that there are now. By having g that protection, how many additional restrictive laws have we prevented? The laws on the books are predominately restrictions, not freedoms/rights. So on a whole, it seems beneficial, even if there have been failings (we can say that about almost any institution).
> how many additional restrictive laws have we prevented
I mean, we will never know. Any answer to this question can only be speculation. I could as easily ask "how many expansions of freedom have we prevented?" And in this moment of political time I think there are at least a few. But that's also just speculation.
In theory it's supposed to be the constitution itself that prevents these abuses, not the crude instrument of legislative gridlock that prevents all change good or bad, especially in a moment like now or before the civil war where the two dominant political forces can't even see eye to eye on basic structures of power.
Much like, to bring it back to the original point, the Senate is already an unrepresentative body, it does not need the procedural filibuster (a unique creature among legislatures as it exists in the us Senate afaik) to make it one.
The speculation is supported by the numbers - restrictive laws far outnumber rights affirming laws, and thus it would on the net prevent more restrictions than freedoms. Especially since the structure of law is that are not unlawful tend to be legal.
The constitution is supposed to restrict what abuses? There's basically nothing preventing further restrictions in freedoms on many topics. Because the constitution is generally vague and conceptual, the courts have a lot of leeway to allow restrictions, even on well defined rights (rights are not absolute). There's little interest in calling a convention or otherwise amending the constitution it seems.
The senate is a representative body, for the states. The filibuster ensures that controversial bills pass with more than a simple majority. This is a feature which helps ensure that the affected minority is relatively smaller, protects states rights (it's up to the states if the feds dont regulate in moat cases), and help prevents waffling after every election that changes the simple majority.
Senate representation is one thing. Requiring a supermajority to pass anything in an already unrepresentative house is just ridiculous, and absolutely does diminish the quality of "democracy" the US has. Especially considering the US house isn't particularly representative either, due to a combination of an absurdly low representative cap and gerrymandering.
The US is certainly more democratic than it was at its founding, when neither the president nor the Senate were entirely directly elected at all, but it's not even close to as democratic as most Americans appear to believe it is.
I assume you're just talking about the filibuster. What about the other super majority votes like ratifying treaties? Also, they could use budget reconciliation to pass a few things to bypass the filibuster.
I think many Americans have been calling it a democracy for shorthand and people forget that it's an adjective for "republic".
Imo, "it's not a democracy it's a republic" is a pretty empty statement, because there are no pure democracies (and they are likely to be completely impractical anyways). It seems to be a weird meme among Americans that hints at some kind of exceptionalism, but has very little in the way of practical implications.
For the most part, everyone in the world means approximately the same thing an American does when they say democracy ("a representative constitutional democracy, probably with some degree of regional federalism and bicameralism"). The US neither resembles a pure democracy or the republic the founders created at this point anyways, so it doesn't really matter. These terms are pretty fluid.
Pure democracy is basically never the goal anyways. It's not a bad thing for a system of government to be not entirely democratic, there do have to be checks on pure majoritarianism somehow, but the particulars of the US' democratic lacks seem to be both worse than most Americans imagine them to be, and also far more vestigial if not accidental than they ought to be (many were really there to help uphold slavery and/or prevent reconstruction from fully succeeding).
At this point, the net effect of the US' democratic failings is to create a tyranny of the minority, which can hardly be considered a better failure mode than a tyranny of the majority.
"At this point, the net effect of the US' democratic failings is to create a tyranny of the minority, which can hardly be considered a better failure mode than a tyranny of the majority."
Any source fir it only being tyranny of the minority? I see examples of tyranny of the majority too.
Tyranny of majority is an apt summation of the problems facing Nom white peoples but is not accurate when applied to religious groups seeking to impose their regressive theological practices on everyone else. That is in fact fascist and unconstitutional. Weaseling around these intents is a tired tactic of the radical right that they’ve been using for decades to sway the opinion of their poorly educated constituencies.
No you don’t understand, being more democratic in the abstract is more important than actual rights being stripped away or retaining the bare minimum environmental regulations on companies that are destroying the planet.
It’s sad how the flimsiest well-actuallys carry so much weight around here. Anyone making arguments around recent decisions being democratic has their head buried in the sand about how blatantly undemocratic the US has been since its inception.
Processes were followed and have been for generations. SCOTUS is just flipping the table over now for the benefit of biggest polluting industries, not the citizens, country, or the rule of law.
It’s only “clear” for people who accept paper-thin legal logic from a court with an obvious agenda. It’s only clear if you’re willing to slide down the slippery slope of the court stripping authority from all federal agencies they don’t like with the logic that the legislature needs to codify every email sent by an agency.
If you don’t like the EPA just say so, but please stop pretending like the Supreme Court is some real arbiter of logic and constitutionality. It has always been (even during liberal courts) an unelected political institution that justifies huge legislative changes with high-minded philosophical hand waving. Occasionally they throw in civil rights decisions for good PR with their aligned base, but even that’s on the chopping block with the current court.
The idea that Republicans are seeking increased states' rights in good faith is contradicted my most available evidence. Not only have they fought legalizing weed federally, but right after the Roe v. Wade ruling we had Republican politicians advocating for a federal abortion ban[1].
Believing that these ruling will make things more democratic requires ignoring what Republican lawmakers both say and do.
A group of Republican lawmakers introduced a bill Monday to federally decriminalize and tax marijuana, adding an alternative to sweeping Democratic proposals for major marijuana reform and narrow GOP-backed efforts to deschedule the drug in the U.S.
> The States Reform Act has garnered attention as the first prominent bill sponsored by a House Republican to end the federal prohibition of marijuana, which could help give the proposal some political advantage in its efforts to secure bipartisan support. Congressional Democrats have previously introduced various marijuana legalization proposals, including the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, and currently have draft language for the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity (CAO) Act. At this time, however, many observers believe neither of the proposals being led by congressional Democrats will be able to secure the necessary Republican votes for passage in the Senate. Any marijuana legalization proposal would need to secure the support of at least 10 Senate Republicans in order to overcome a potential filibuster.
"A small group of Republicans has finally seen the light at a time they've no power to pass legislation, and it'll fail because of Republican opposition in the Senate" is not quite "The Republicans sponsored a bill".
Come on. The parties aren't monolithic, and the Democrats have a majority in Congress, but they can't pass anything either. Would you say the Democrats against legalization too?
Congress writes laws vague enough for the experts to implement the policy. It's always been this way. It will be total chaos if Congress has to explicate the specific.
They are not. Even if we assume congress wasn't a complete gridlocked mess, they simply do not have the bandwidth. There 535 Members of Congress and they work less than 200 days a year in a typical session.
How many regulatory bodies are there that need rules passed? I can think of the FAA, FTC, EPA, FDA, USDA, and the NRC just off the top of my head. A quick google search shows there are 19 of these rule making agencies. Even with a wide distribution of rule making authority, these agencies struggle to keep up with our rapidly evolving world.
Forcing congress to hear and make a decision on every single regulation these agencies propose would be a bottleneck that brings this country to it's knees.
They have no obligation to actually show up. Many miss more votes than they are present for.
Also, most sessions only run a few hours, and many more are pro forms, where the minimum quorum show up (I think this is something like 15 or 20), open the session and then immediately close it.
> There 535 Members of Congress and they work less than 200 days a year in a typical session.
Sure, Congress is in session for about 200 days, and even when it is the elected officials aren't typically on the floor for the full day. But that doesn't mean that when they aren't on the floor they aren't necessarily working. They could be meeting with constituents, with their staff, reading bills, going to committee meetings, just meeting with other reps/senators etc.
Congress members bring snowballs to the floor as evidence that climate change isn't real. Some of this behavior is due to personal beliefs, but there are other factors:
So due to the ignorance and corruption among conservative lawmakers regarding climate change and carbon emissions, congress has been in an ideological deadlock on the issue of climate initiatives. The EPA existing somewhat independent of that framework was a benefit.
1. Dunning-Krueger or, in other words, Congress probably thinks they know better.
2. Politicians, per definition, are elected to represent the interests of their constituents. Many constituents disagree with experts (climate change, for example). QED, there is little motivation for politicians to listen or follow the advice of experts, especially if an expert's conclusion is not popular.
So they should prepare law novelization for cabinet, cabinet should push it to legislature, and legislature should vote on that. Like in any other country.
> Congress has for far too long abdicated what it is supposed to be directly responsible for to unelected bureaucrats that exist in agencies that are overseen by the executive branch of government.
Yes, that's what the executive branch is for. That's how our government and basically every government in the history of the world has worked.
> When is the last time you've seen anyone from Congress campaign on any substantive issue?
Literally every campaign in my life that I've had any exposure to. Campaigning on real issues is not hard, the problem is getting into Congress and then being unwilling or unable to follow through.
That is silly hyperbolic overreaction. The court literally upheld the EPA regulating greenhouse gasses at the point of creation. It upheld the specific regulations how coal was burned. All it said was the EPA wasn't empowered to move into grid management schemes. If congress wants to grant them that power, it can.
I read this differently (and am a former lawyer who worked on administrative law). This is about the "major questions doctrine", which involves a subset of administrative actions. It's not about whether administrative agencies can do anything whatsoever.
> Under this body of law, known as the major questions doctrine, given both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent, the agency must point to “clear congressional authorization” for the authority it claims.
The reasoning for this is that:
> We presume that “Congress intends to make major policy decisions itself, not leave those decisions to agencies
I didn't see the claim that they can't delegate. The issue I saw discussed is whether or not a specific power was delegated. I don't see rhem invalidating all agency regulations. I do see them requiring better definitions to support that regulation. (Eg C02 was not considered a pollutant under the original grant of power, so the court doesn't want to interpret it to be inclusive).
I guess it's time for congress to actually pass laws (first abortion, and now greenhouse gasses).
Going to be a lot of anger about the results this court season, but I honestly think it's going to be healthier for democracy overall if congress stop leaning on the courts and bureaucracy to make critical regulations.
In my understanding -- and I've read good chunks of the leaked Dobbs opinion -- the above claim is not true. The Dobbs decision's reasoning is largely based on a lack of clear federal legislation saying that abortion is legal.
you are correct that the dobb's ruling does not restrict federal abortion regulation, but it is an open question of whether this court would overturn federal abortion legislation as not being related strongly enough to interstate commerce.
Of course that ruling should cut both ways and eliminate the possibility of a federal ban as well, but as we've seen the majority is willing to overturn precedent both as old as 50 years and as young as 2 years (see Gorsuch dissent on Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta) so its possible they would find the rational to uphold a ban even if they strike down a law mandating access.
If the US Congress passed an amendment that stated abortion is legal nationwide, then the Supreme Court would not be able to strike it down as that would be the new federal law.
Amendments and laws are the same thing, so no. The Constitution can refer to the original laws, or the collection of original laws plus all the new ones.
When Congress passes a law, the law (sometimes referred to as the Constitution) gets amended, hence it is also referred to as an amendment.
Edit: ignore this comment, my information was incorrect!
This is incorrect, at least in the US. A Constitutional Amendment requires the affirmative consent of 3/4s of the states for ratification, it cannot be done unilaterally by the US Congress. The Federal laws are considered the lesser laws and the Constitution the highest law.
There is a big big difference legally in the US between an Amendment and something in the USC
Yes, but it’s subtle. The mandate of SCOTUS is a check against the other branches of the government to ensure they’re following the Constitution. By passing a Constitutional Amendment, it essentially makes the contents of such inherently constitutional. A Federal law could be (and has been) struck down as being unconstitutional.
I see. I’m probably jumping the gun here, but if such a federal law were to be passed is there something in the Constitution that would disallow it? I suppose it depends on the exact wording and so on?
Generally speaking, a Federal law would only be struck down if its intent or wording specifically violates a clause in the Constitution or its Amendments. So, it really depends on how its worded or what its intent is. I think it's pretty clear that Congress has the Constitutional authority to pass environmental regulations and could extend the EPA's mandates or legislatively codify EPA regulations such that they become law, because they have to do primarily with things which are commerce across state lines and national borders (e.g. where energy originates and where its expended are across borders).
Essentially the same justification for why Congress could create the EPA in the first place allows them to codify any regulations as law or to extend the EPA mandate. What cannot happen is the EPA unilaterally deciding to overreach its mandate, because its taking actions with the force of law but without any check/balance. The Constitution is quite clear that laws are the purview of the Legislative, not the Executive, and the EPA is a function of the Executive.
It is not at all obvious that this is true. I think it's highly unlikely given that the federal government has almost unrestricted ability to pass laws about personal rights (either strictly or in practice, see the federal drinking age of 21, smoking, etc).
I agree that it’s not obvious that such a law would actually be unconstitutional. I just think this court has become an unapologetically partisan body.
So you want for women to have their basic rights for us to go through a constitutional amendment path? Interesting. This feels like fascism through paperwork.
You can say "I don't like X". You don't have to say every is "Fascism". It's ok just to be upset and not like something.
Fascism by the way would be rule by fiat - eg a King or a Dictator can just declare new law: "I declare all Hamburgers shall now be served with bacon and anyone who fails to do shall be executed".
Writing down laws and having a neutral body interpret them is a really important part of fair forms of Government (but not unique to Democracy). There is no defense to a fiat in a Dictatorship but that is a defense in eg Democracy. The publishing, disseminating and authority of rules is the basis of a fair form of government.
Where is this neutral body? Half of the court was explicitly groomed to take a partisan stance. They even have the ability to choose their own cases, plus a shadow docket.
Having a body made up of two opposing sides is generally how we build neutral bodies.
The liberal justices are not a beacon of neutrality - they lean towards liberal policies and expansionist interpretations the same way the conservative justices lean towards conservative policies and paring down the Fed.
Single dictators don’t mean fascism. That’s an extremely simplistic and playground view on fascism. Heck, single dictators are much easier to combat than democratic & bureaucratic fascism.
This isn't some kind of new legislative process. This has literally been the law of the land since the constitution where it's described.
And I'm sorry but I'm going to reject the opinion column of a small newspaper as a source.
You're right in that Fascism is not just composed of single dictators but you are confusing the Rule of Law with beaucracy. Having a high court and requiring laws to be explicit is not "Fascism", it is literally the basis of the legal system.
The court ruled in Dobbs that the decision reached in Roe v Wade was improper because there is no right to privacy "deeply rooted" in the Constitution or traditions of the United States, which basically means that if the court sticks with this definition they get to roll back any decisions that they don't like, disregarding two hundred years of precedent.
The fundamental problem is that large important social policy decisions have been made as court cases rather than legislation for the past 50 years. If Congress actually made laws that explicitly granted rights to the people then we wouldn't be in this situation, but by passing the buck to the court they can claim that problems have been solved without actually having to get their hands dirty or face their constituents.
Roe v Wade was the court case giving a federal right to an abortion, that was struck down so it became a state's rights issue bc the federal gov't itself never passed a law guaranteeing the the right to an abortion. one major piece of criticism you'll hear again Democrats is that they have taken too much comfort is court precedent then actually passing laws when they were in power
Because they are pandering for votes. They know that the average citizen doesn't know that the law would be deemed unconstitutional based on the most recent ruling.
The Dobbs case has everything to do with whether or not a federal abortion law would be constitutional. The court determined on 10th amendment grounds that the constitution was silent on abortion. Therefore, that power belongs to each state. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
They ruled that the constitution does not confer the right to an abortion. That’s it.
The constitution does not confer the right to clean water and yet, it’s not unconstitutional for the federal government to make laws regarding clean water standards.
That’s not exactly true. Congress can and has passed laws that apply to and override state law. Take minimum wage for example (fair labor standards act of 1938). In your particular example, there are no federal laws so it defaults to the states.
They ruled that there is no constitutional guaranteed right to abortion, and in lieu of any federal legislation the decision defaults to the states. They did not rule that the federal government cannot have a say on abortion.
I live in a rural area. There are plenty of laws that make sense for my area that would be ridiculous in high density cities and vise verse. Here there is no minimum speed limit and I can drive my tractor down the road by attaching an orange triangle. I can drill my own well. I can chop and burn trees on my property. None if thus would make sense in the city.
What you're describing is pluralism and federalism, not minority rule. Minority rule with your examples would be to force cities to burn their trash because that's what makes sense in rural areas.
NYC makes the rules for NY state. And the people of Buffalo, Plattsburg, etc, etc, aren't exactly happy with that or benefiting from that. They have more industrial economies than downstate does and they are kneecapped hard by some of downstate's economic policies.
States that are economically and politically dominated by a single economic zone are a great examples of why minority contingents need strong veto power.
The democrats have the senate majority. They just have to be willing to pass laws that the moderates will vote for. For dumb political reasons, they refuse to do this, and this is a forcing function to make them act like adults.
They could even get ~2 Republican votes for broad abortion rights, and likely more if they passed a targeted bill about the health of the mother, incest, etc.
As recently as a decade ago the democrats had a supermajority and passed sweeping healthcare reform bills. It's really not an insurmountable barrier.
The Senate is way out of balance from the power it originally had in 1776.
Delaware was the smallest of the 13 states with a population of 59K. That's 2.36% of the 2.5M total in 1776. There were 26 Senators so each one had about 7.7% voting power.
Today, South Dakota has a population of 905K out of 330M or 0.274% of the population. There are 100 Senators so each has about 2% voting power.
A Senator from South Dakota today represents 1/10 the population that a Senator from Delaware did in 1776. If influence scaled with the same distribution it did in 1776, a South Dakota Senator should only have about 0.77% voting power, but today they have 2%. Population distribution is more widely varied today which creates much more power for lower population states than when in the country was formed.
Because the alternative would be not having the rural areas continuing to be part of the nation. If you can't come to an agreement with us, that's fine, try to move the regulation out of the federal government and see if you'll have better luck at the state level with more like-minded people.
Abortion is not mentioned in the constitution and therefore each state has the power to legislate it as they see fit. Any federal abortion law would be deemed unconstitutional on that basis.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Abortion regulation powers were not delegated within the US Constitution and therefore those powers go to the states.
Stop being obtuse. The majority of federal law exists only because broad interpretations of the few subjects the feds were granted the ability to regulate. If abortion was intertwined with interstate commerce or national defense it would be regulated. Of course there's BS that's just as detached as abortion that gets regulated federally but if those subjects were big ideological issues and got the same scrutiny they likely would not be.
It's unfortunate that there isn't a stronger right to bodily autonomy enshrined in the constitution but that's tangential here.
Absent a strict law, congress could just make medicare funding or infrastructure or whatever dependent on abortion access, and every state would fold, just like with the drinking age.
When I travel between states to partake in a service that is allowed in one state but not another that is not interstate commerce. I'm still conducting intrastate commerce within the state where I am located. The federal government doesn't have the authority to regulate all laws federally just because I can travel to a state with different laws.
Regarding bodily autonomy, it becomes a little tricky to make that argument when a mothers' decisions affect a separate body from her own. A body with its own DNA that happens to rely temporarily on her mother. Is the argument that a mother can kill her healthy child as long as it couldn't survive without her?
How can anyone say that with a straight face in the presence of the electoral college (heck even the elected representatives don't have a legal obligation to vote for their party's candidate) and most importantly gerrymandering. Your assumption that the people can vote to enact change is simply not true.
> [...] but I honestly think it's going to be healthier for democracy overall if congress stop leaning on the courts and bureaucracy to make critical regulations.
I don't think that scales. When some group of people is large enough and has enough different things going on it has to delegate regulation making. There is just too much for the top level of management to be directly regulating everything.
The larger the entity grows and the more it has going on the more regulation making needs to be delegated. At some point you reach the point where even critical regulation has to be delegated.
We passed that point, I think, a long time ago in all the large first world economies.
It is valuable for gov’t agencies to be able to act broadly on their mandates without needing congress to dictate everything. As the dissent puts it, “A key reason Congress makes broad delegations like Section 111 is so an agency can respond, appropriately and commensurately, to new and big problems.”
We can hope that Congress will step up and legislate, but that seems pretty unrealistic to me. I fear that this is just the latest wave of successes by the party that wants our government to be as toothless and inept as possible and already has a stranglehold on Congress for the foreseeable future.
The effect of the
Court’s order, followed by the Trump administration’s re-
peal of the rule, was that the Clean Power Plan never went
into effect. The ensuing years, though, proved the Plan’s
moderation. Market forces alone caused the power industry
to meet the Plan’s nationwide emissions target—through
exactly the kinds of generation shifting the Plan contem-
plated. See 84 Fed. Reg. 32561–32562 (2019); Brief for
United States 47. So by the time yet another President took
office, the Plan had become, as a practical matter, obsolete.
For that reason, the Biden administration announced that,
instead of putting the Plan into effect, it would commence a
new rulemaking. Yet this Court determined to pronounce
on the legality of the old rule anyway. The Court may be
right that doing so does not violate Article III mootness
rules (which are notoriously strict). See ante, at 14–16. But
the Court’s docket is discretionary, and because no one is
now subject to the Clean Power Plan’s terms, there was no
reason to reach out to decide this case. The Court today
issues what is really an advisory opinion on the proper
scope of the new rule EPA is considering. That new rule
will be subject anyway to immediate, pre-enforcement judi-
cial review. But this Court could not wait—even to see
what the new rule says—to constrain EPA’s efforts to ad-
dress climate change.
The limits the majority now puts on EPA’s authority fly
in the face of the statute Congress wrote. The majority says
it is simply “not plausible” that Congress enabled EPA to
regulate power plants’ emissions through generation shift-
ing. Ante, at 31. But that is just what Congress did when
it broadly authorized EPA in Section 111 to select the “best
system of emission reduction” for power plants.
§7411(a)(1). The “best system” full stop—no ifs, ands, or
buts of any kind relevant here. The parties do not dispute
that generation shifting is indeed the “best system”—the
most effective and efficient way to reduce power plants’ car-
bon dioxide emissions. And no other provision in the Clean
Air Act suggests that Congress meant to foreclose EPA from
selecting that system; to the contrary, the Plan’s regulatory
approach fits hand-in-glove with the rest of the statute.
The majority’s decision rests on one claim alone: that gen-
eration shifting is just too new and too big a deal for Con-
gress to have authorized it in Section 111’s general terms.
But that is wrong. A key reason Congress makes broad del-
egations like Section 111 is so an agency can respond, ap-
propriately and commensurately, to new and big problems.
Congress knows what it doesn’t and can’t know when it
drafts a statute; and Congress therefore gives an expert
agency the power to address issues—even significant
ones—as and when they arise. That is what Congress did
in enacting Section 111. The majority today overrides that
legislative choice. In so doing, it deprives EPA of the power
needed—and the power granted—to curb the emission of
greenhouse gases.
tl;dr: the majority chose to rule on a plan that never went into effect and will never go into effect, in practice taking on an advisory role rather than waiting for an actual concrete plan to rule on. Beyond that, Congress intentionally chose the broad language of "best system of emissions reductions" but the majority asserts that congress should have instead referred to generation shifting by name despite the technology not existing at the time of drafting
As mentioned in the dissent, congress explicitly gave them the power to regulate green house gasses in this specific scenario. But the majority conservative opinion made up their own rationale as to why that somehow doesn't apply in order to curb the EPAs power.
The modern day supreme court is a joke, unable to be even remotely consistent in how it applies its rationale and its clear they're merely another puppet for conservative politics.
In this case, as I understand it, the EPA was declaring they had authority to enforce some new rules by interpreting where congress wrote "may" as "must". Whether you agree with the EPA's motives or not, it should concern everyone that un-elected bureaucrats have been increasingly inventing or hallucinating the language of their mandates to turn them into whatever they wanted, whenever it suits them, and this was a much needed rebuke of that behavior.
Agreed, the executive branch (the bureaucracies) does not make laws, congress does. The fact that the bureaucracies are governing above and beyond what they are legally allowed to do is actually horrifying and very undemocratic.
>In this case, as I understand it, the EPA was declaring they had authority to enforce some new rules by interpreting where congress wrote "may" as "must".
Congress didn't pass a law and disappear. If Congress felt that the EPA was misinterpreting the language of the Clean Air Act it could have passed a law limiting the agency's powers. The fact that it did not do so is the strongest rebuttal to the claim that the EPA was operating outside its mandate.
This decision is an announcement by the Court that Congress can no longer be trusted to govern the agencies it oversees.
Because the Court has taken an issue that Congress did not [yet] show any urgent inclination to act on, i.e., alleged overreach by the EPA over many Congressional sessions with many different partisan compositions. And they have taken away Congress's discretion to decide its own agenda and priorities by turning this into an emergency that has to be dealt with right now by this Congress. There is real harm to this: it halts an existing regulatory process, and it may take years for Congress to repair the damage.
The fact that nobody was harmed by this regulation -- and there was no urgency -- and yet the Court still took the case is indeed a huge problem that underlines my concerns with this case. Why did the Court step into this case and override both Congress and the executive branch when the regulation itself wasn't harming the plaintiffs? The emergency here is that the EPA now has no idea what its authority will be on any regulatory actions regarding CO2. (And when Congress finally legislates, it won't know what its authority is either.)
>Congress didn't pass a law and disappear. If Congress felt that the EPA was misinterpreting the language of the Clean Air Act it could have passed a law limiting the agency's powers.
It is not congresses job to enforce the law by writing new laws.
This is a silly decision. I don't respect the reasoning at all.
If Republicans want to abolish the EPA, all they have to do is pass a law. They could do it with a simple majority in each House if they abolish the filibuster (which itself requires only a simple majority).
There is no meaningful loss of democratic control here. Congress can do whatever it wants, with or without the EPA.
This is just the highest court in the land acting as toadies for the fossil fuel industry, legislating from the bench on a flimsy right wing legal theory.
For a law to be passed in the US, it must be approved by the House, the Senate, and the President. For a law to be repealed in the US, the repeal must also be approved by the House, the Senate, and the President. So there will often be situations where it matters what the current law is - whenever these three components of the system do not agree, so that the current law will not be changed. In such a situation, it is not supposed to be the case that the President (in control of the executive branch) can unilaterally decide that the current law is whatever they want it to be.
Great, so now we're reliant on congress to get something done. The same congress that's sat on its hands for the past 30 years and has been shown to be completely incapable of addressing the issue.
This is a massive blow to the US being able to reach emissions targets. Every day we're one step closer to the 'business as usual' path that leaves the world 3-4c hotter. That's a catastrophic scenario.
>>This is a massive blow to the US being able to reach emissions targets.
Whose targets though? 'Shouldn't we the people' have a say? i.e. shouldn't congress actually hold the hearings, digest the info and go on the record voting for or against important items?
We don't let the IRS set tax rates, we should not let unelected bureaucrats decide what the environmental goals are - elect people you think represent your priorities, have them go on the record supporting or opposing important decisions, and then pass a law the establishes frameworks to the agencies in charge under which they operate.
> shouldn't congress actually hold the hearings, digest the info and go on the record voting for or against important items?
Of course, but this will never happen. So if the only positive outcome of an action is a long tail event, then maybe the action shouldn’t be taken. We have to look at the expected value of this, which is that people less versed than the experts suddenly making decisions they had previously relegated to the experts. Chaos.
Again, congress has had 30 YEARS to do something. They've done nothing. I'm long past the point of assuming ignorance and incompetence, much of congress is clearly acting in bad faith on this issue because they are beholden to the fossil fuel companies.
Want 'We the People' to have a say in whether or not the EPA should regulate CO2? Put it to a national referendum. Congress has shown repeatedly that it's more than happy to watch the world burn if it means their superpacs are stuffed with lobbyist funds.
From the articles I've seen so far it seems they can still regulate individual power plants.
Does this mean that while they cannot stop new high emissions plants from being built, once a plant actually starts producing they could regulate it?
That might actually work out better, because building a plant and then having it come under regulation would probably be more costly to the plant owners than if they had went for a cleaner plant from the beginning.
I feel like a lot of people here would do well to try and understand the role of the Supreme Court, instead of treating it like a second version of Congress.
That's too complicated for most people. Although it does pain me to see people using their energy so ineffectively.
Protester: "6 unelected officials can't decide what I can do!"
Supreme Court: "That's literally what we just said!"
If Congress punts issues around indefinitely for its own political wheeling and dealing, it still cannot outsource a decision on those issues to other branches of the federal government. Whether thats to the executive branch or the judicial branch. Not hard! Except more of your elected representatives!
If consensus is impossible then that's the reality we live in, the means won't be able to justify the ends, you have to work within the consensus mechanism prescribed on every topic.
that is a very popular perspective, which reinforces exactly what I said about it being too complicated for people.
Congress outsourced the decision to the judicial branch, the judicial branch said its for the elected representatives, aka Congress, to decide. Barring any supremacy from Congress, state laws and the consensus mechanisms of those states are the only laws available.
Congress outsourced emissions decision to the executive branch, the judicial branch said its for the elected representatives, aka Congress, to decide. Barring any supremacy from Congress, state laws and the consensus mechanisms of those states are the only laws available.
Good point. It's interesting to think about this outsourcing as a relief valve Congress uses. Feels like a function of the monetary stakes for any decision are too high. Even freshmen congressional reps are too soaked in the financial implications of their own function that they punt their appointed power to the judicial branch.
Again I call bullshit. There’s no way in a million years these same clowns would apply the same logic to gun control. This is all just motivated reasoning because the court wants to advance a conservative agenda
I'm fully pro-abortion but I have to admit Roe's legal argument was a big stretch at best. Even RBG admitted so. I wish they'd have left it alone but moreso I wish congress made any attempt in 50 years to codify it into law.
No, wrong. Incorrect. Roe v Wade was explicitly a ruling saying that abortion should be broadly allowed, and that no government (neither state nor federal) can regulate it (with caveats). Overturning Roe v Wade has given that power back to the state government and to the federal government.
None of this had anything to do with the federal government regulating it. It was the court saying it was a right not to be infringed upon.
Dobbs effectively have full control to the states. Unless the federal government can make a commerce clause argument any law they make prohibiting/legalizing abortion will be overturned due to the 10th amendment.
>It was the court saying it was a right not to be infringed upon.
Roe v Wade was ruled on the basis of the 14th amendment due process clause regarding the right to privacy. Anyone who thought this ruling was an iron-clad blanket right to abortion was fooling themselves.
Abortion is not specifically enumerated in the constitution. Just like everything else not in the constitution, it's up to States to make their own laws regarding it.
Please don't cross into flamewar like this. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Even in a divisive thread like this one, your comment here stands out as breaking the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them and sticking to the rules when posting here? We'd be grateful.
But then it’s all very self-contradictory. How are people supposed to have faith in the court when it makes a decision, reaffirms it many times over nearly 50 years, then just changes its mind on a dime?
The judicial branch has a responsibility to itself for self-consistent reasoning, which it has completely abandoned this term.
The court is not supposed to change dramatically with every election, that’s what the legislative branch does. And yet, the court did.
It’s legal of course, the court can do what it wants. But it can (and has) lost approval and legitimacy, which at the end of the day were it’s most valuable currency.
It is rare for the Supreme Court to act as a second Congress. When it has, those are the cases that most likely get overruled. Additionally, old cases with poor and antiquated assumptions get overturned (not relevant here, just showing a consistency in what is and can be expected to be reviewed.)
Opposing sides of that court have said the exact same thing about Roe v Wade. Ruth Bader Ginsberg even said "this is pretty weak, going to need Congress here", no different than Justice Alito on the opposite side.
I think your perspective is very common, I think it is disingenuous for different people that should know better to promote that perspective. There is so much the elected representatives and the people can do. This crisis of confidence perspective relies on nobody actually reading these cases.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg is most certainly not an extreme comparable to Alito, lol.
The Supreme Court has acted as a second Congress for a wide variety of things. This is how miranda rights happened. This is how contraception was legalized. This is how homosexuality was legalized. This is how race integration was legalized. ETC.
Congress better get to work and find a rationale in the articles and a variety of amendments
(As just one, like interstate commerce, will keep it on the chopping block by the same court)
also, currently people need to be challenging laws and the court has to accept those challenges, if there isn’t political will to still challenge those things then the cases will never happen
RBG argued that RvW was decided poorly but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a constitutional right to abortion. There are other sources that could be used for the right than SDP.
It doesn't change dramatically with EVERY election, it just changed dramatically with the last one due to a lot of judges retiring/dying off at once. Just a generational phenomenon.
SCOTUS leaned liberal (in the sense that liberal justices tend to believe in larger-scope interpretations of Constitution) for a long time, now for the first time in a while they're leaning conservative (the Constitution says what it says and if we want it to say something different Congress should pass an amendment).
Honestly I find myself falling into the more Conservative camp from a judicial perspective. I'm all for gay marriage and a woman's right to choose, but I feel like we used SCOTUS to do an end-run around Congress to get both at a federal level, and from my layperson's reading the constitutional justifications for both feel stretched to me. In the same sense that you can use creative interpretations of the Bible to justify basically anything, you can do similar things with the Constitution. That isn't how the system is supposed to work
It doesn’t matter what camp you fall into, or if you think the courts decisions in the past were “wrong” (though obviously there is no absolute right or wrong interpreting how a 250 year old document interfaces with modern society).
The court as an institution has a responsibility to maintain some sort of consistency if it wants any legitimacy.
How can people make decisions about where and how to live if their fundamental rights are changing year to year (and most recently being taken away)?
You are also not aligned with the current public opinion. The court is at its lowest approval rating ever, and that is before overturning Roe. If the court cannot maintain it’s appearance of legitimacy then it essentially fails as an institution. The court could have chosen to move more slowly, with more restraint, but it didn’t.
The whole idea of the court is to be above public opinion. This is not the first time in history that the court has made sweeping overturns of previous precedent that large swaths of voters disagreed with. It's also not the first time the legitimacy of those rulings has been challenged. Remember Eisenhower sending the 101st Airborne and federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to enforce integration? Or Kennedy doing similar for Alabama? Those actions were enforcement of a controversial SCOTUS ruling against the local public opinion.
And you can say "yeah but racists were the bad guys", but that's not how any of this works, regardless of what narratives we decide to apply to history after the fact. Did the court's lack of perceived legitimacy in Birmingham or Little Rock (among many other places that required less extreme enforcement) cause it to fail as an institution?
The court only fails as an institution when it's decisions are no longer enforced. Last I checked we haven't reached that point yet. And even if we do, worth remembering SCOTUS survived the last civil war intact.
His argument is that Congress should legislate these issues either through proper laws or constitutional amendments. Turns out 9 judges might disagree with the previous set of 9 judges. That disagreement swings both ways and in the absence of proper legislative action will become the law of the land.
Congress giving the EPA which is staffed by domain experts the ability to decide how much pollution is acceptable is a good thing actually. Why should congressmen be expected to figure that out?
And the court didn't rule that Congress can't do that, the court ruled that Congress didn't do that. Congress can absolutely go write a law giving the EPA that authority, and they should. But if that's not what the law says, then that's not what the EPA can do.
We can't be opposed to police creatively interpreting laws to target minorities and be okay with the EPA creatively interpreting laws to target fossil fuel companies. Just because the latter is in the service of a good cause doesn't make it legal. The ends do not justify the means--down that way lies peril.
I'm old enough to remember when I could grudgingly accept that there was some wisdom in decisions I disagreed with, even if perhaps not enough to sway me. But I could see something argued intelligently.
This is just nakedly partisan stuff going on. I think viewing it through that lens - "we're going to do what we want because it fits our politics" - makes the most sense.
The problem is much of the left’s gains over the last few decades have been based on shaky legal/constitutional ground. Even leftist judges like Ginsberg admitted that, and they were counting on the mistakes being in place for too long to correct (precedent).
Now all that technical debt is coming back to kick our ass.
This isn’t the end of the world though, Congress can fix everything that’s happened in the last few weeks via proper laws.
This is very much the opposite of calvinaball. The rules are in the constitution and that hasn't changed in quite a while.
EDIT: RE: no right to poop(sic) in the constitution
It's a list of things the government may not do, not a list of things you may do. Try reading it, it's very short. I would imagine the court would rule a law against that would violate the right to life.
That rule has been there since the beginning even if you don't acknowledge it.
EDIT: It didn't need to be acknowledged because there wasn't a strong push to disarm the population until fairly recently.
EDIT2: It looks to me like they only really go back to just after the civil war, largely to keep African Americans from carrying firearms. The first attempt by the Federal Government to ban them was in the mid 20th century which was exactly what I expected.
EDIT3: James Madison tried and failed to pass the legislation (presumably because it was unpopular), at the state level (not federal level) and it didn't prevent people from owning guns just carrying them in public.
But isn't it strange that it was there in the beginning and no one acknowledged it for about two centuries?
EDIT for your edit: Huh? When I was a kid in Texas way back in the 90's, it was illegal to carry a gun period. You could take them out hunting or to the range or whatnot, but carrying a gun was illegal. The first concealed handgun law was 1995 if memory serves. Carry bans go back to the colonial era.
> It's a list of things the government may not do, not a list of things you may do.
And yet, they saw fit to include the Ninth Amendment, so some nincompoop wouldn't go "there's no right to privacy!"
> I would imagine the court would rule a law against that would violate the right to life.
The wording is "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"; what happens if pooping is made a capital crime?
Why is banning abortion, marijuana, and whatnot not a similar violation of the "liberty" part of the same clause?
(and what's with this edit-to-reply thing you've got going?)
Reminder: decisions like Roe v. Wade (and many others in the era before this court) weren't passed by "the left" in a political sense. For example: five of the seven-justice majority in Roe were Republican appointees.
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1971. That's not too soon after the great realignment from the election of 1964. Some of those Republican appointments like Brennan and Stewart happened well before the realignment. And even then, the author of the opinion was written by Blackmun who was appointed by Nixon. Nixon, the guy who brought us the EPA and many other things the modern Republican party likes to hate. Meanwhile one of the dissents to Roe was written by White who was appointed by JFK.
The parties of 1971 were both very different compared to today. You can't assume that someone active in the party in 1956 (Brennan) holds the same values as what's talked about on OAN today.
In this new climate, it will take more than laws. Permanence will require constitutional amendments (which is actually how most things get rooted at the state level, the state constitutions change pretty regularly).
Exactly this. And by putting this off, we've avoided the hard work to get the laws we deserve. After all, if the courts can just wave a wand and make something a `right`, who cares who you vote for or if you even vote at all?
I think the temporary pain will be worth it in the long run as we do the hard work to pass the laws the majority agrees will improve the environment, human rights, and so on.
By the standards of the Soviet Union, both US political parties are extremely far right; by the standards of Pharaonic Egypt, they're incomprehensibly far left. Whose standards for center are you using? The objective standard? Are you sure that exists? Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point? People act as if you should just be able to take the leftmost thing imaginable, the rightmost thing imaginable, draw a line between them, find the middle, and then get angry if both US parties are on the same side of that line. But maybe they have poor imaginations. The leftmost thing I can imagine is an insectoid hive-mind; the rightmost thing I can imagine is a rapidly expanding cloud of profit-maximizing nanobots. Are we sure that a line drawn exactly midway between those two things lands on Joe Biden? What if it lands on anarcho-capitalism? Does that mean every existing human is left-wing?
Taken as a relative claim, it at least could make sense. But relative to what?
Relative to the US? False; both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left. You can probably argue that the Republican Party’s structural advantages cause both parties to be a little to the right of where they’d be without them, or that Americans’ ignorance of party platforms means you can smuggle a few points in that are slightly more extreme than what they’d endorse, but it’s going to be a small effect.
> Congress can fix everything that’s happened in the last few weeks via proper laws.
Can it?
In principle, sure, anything can happen.
In practice, given how it's not possible to pass any legislation without a filibuster-proof majority?
As others have commented in this and related threads, this is a win for industry precisely because congress CAN'T do anything in practice, given the reakpolitk of how congress actually "works" today.
I wish folks would stop saying "well, it should just go back to the spec, problem solved". This isn't code. This is the convoluted and complex world of political reality, where, unfortunately, might does often mean right. And more often than not, addressing the root cause isn't even possible, much less practical.
If anything, it's the current supreme court that is taking a binary view of legal interpretation and have "fixed the glitch". Glitches which in reality are patches which have been added organically over time to address changes to the underlying OS, new and unheard of use cases, changing specs and requirements, etc.
Unfortunately, a full rewrite often requires systemic overhall and reboot (something I would hope people are averse to doing in practice)
It's abundantly clear from the Dobbs majority opinion they will not accept a Roe statue from Congress, that they would overturn it on 10th amendment grounds. It's not an express power Congress has, thus it's strictly up to states. Since they also stated in Dobbs they'd use rational basis scrutiny, the lowest scrutiny possible, when judging state laws on abortion restrictions, I expect they will accept state laws that:
* define moment of conception as murder
* fetus as citizen in fact, meaning out of state abortions are also subject to murder charges
* high burden of proof on women, low burden of proof for the state, that a miscarriage rather than abortion occurred
* hold abortion-is-legal states to article 4, section 1 "full faith and credit", i.e. civil fines and extradition for persons fleeing judgements in abortion-is-not-legal states
* hold companies paying for abortion procedures and travel as party to a crime
The Court is lost for a generation, short of expanding the Court. There is no chance 3/4 of the states will ratify a constitutional amendment on this issue. And there's a lot more litigation to come.
And should it come to the Court, I expect they will set aside Griswold, Lawrence, Obergefell using the same logic - it's not a federal power. How they could possible not reverse Loving, I'm not sure, except that likely no state is as yet backward enough to try and making interracial marriage illegal once again.
I think there is merit in the argument that we've been asking the Court to be expedient, while then not doing the dirty work of putting these rights in constitutional amendments. Instead we're kicking the can down the road, but then we are also avoiding a lot of public contention arguing about it - for good and probably not for good to some degree. But look at the polling. Most Americans now disapprove of the judiciary nearly as much as Congress. With all three branches of government at historic low approval, it is very damaging to representative democracy that this has happened, not least of which is that an unpopularly elected president put these three justices on the Court who lied under oath that these cases are "settled law", and yet just deeply unsettled one of them.
Which is ironic since FDR most of the Court decisions were nakedly partisan in the other direction, massively expanding the power and scope of the federal government well beyond would should be constitutionally allowable
Highly disagree. All of the recent decisions make perfect legal sense, this coming from the son of a Constitutional attorney who has described to me the rulings, reasons behind them, precedents, etc.. And he's a pro-choice, anti-gun Democrat. He still agrees with the legal decisions. I read the rulings myself too and they make total sense given what I've learned over decades of listening to him.
They're pretty much at the point of flat out lying about things, like the prayer case. Sotomayor, in her dissent, included actual photographs of the coach huddling/praying with the whole team, which is quite coercive behavior. It wasn't a 'quiet prayer'.
>> included actual photographs of the coach huddling/praying with the whole team, which is quite coercive behavior
The photo on the bottom right was from before the coach was asked to stop giving post-game talks that included prayer, an order he complied with. It is not the behavior at question in the court case, so absolutely irrelevant to the matter at hand. I think Sotomayor should have included a date on the photo to make this clear.
Photo on the top right is of the coach being joined in prayer only by members of the opposing team, so if he was coercing the players on his own team, is was quite ineffective. It was a silent prayer, so yes, quiet.
Photo on the left is the coach being joined in prayer by members of the public, not team members, so also not good evidence of coercion. Also a silent prayer, so yes, quiet.
I think the dissenting opinion on this one makes a lot of sense. Even so, making legal sense doesn't mean they are not biased, seeing as the court decides which cases to rule on, and which ones to ignore.
You can doubt all you want, I read the rules, concurrences, and dissents on most SC decisions. The media doesn't really report the facts on them so I prefer to get them right from the source.
Blockade of judges started in 2001, when Democrats declared Bush illigetimate, and decided that no judges would be selected. Republicans threatened the "nuclear option" (removing fillibusters). The "Gang of 14" in 2005 wrote ideological ground rules and approved a set number of judges to keep the nuclear option from being used.
Obama came to office, and the Democrats used the nuclear option - despite the gang of 14 framework, but then said that it doesn't apply to supreme court ballots. Republicans came in and decided that yes, it did apply.
We've been destroying our own government with crap like this for the last 20 years.
Yet somehow we also managed to appoint SC judges without the senate stalling nominations to prevent the president from being able to appoint them.
Let's not pretend that the current situation represents anything like "normal", and further, that we don't all recognize that bad-faith actions by the Republican party are responsible.
> That was before the Senate hijacked the normal nomination process in 2016.
Yes, it was. What's your point?
Parent poster claimed that a non-political Supreme Court isn't possible, and in reality, the Supreme Court has been essentially completely non-political for all but about 22 years of its existence
Textualism is just one of many excuses to rule the way you want to, as it leaves an immense amount of leeway to interpret.
A textualist reading of the First Amendment would permit the President to infringe free speech/religion/press etc. rights, as it says "Congress", and the "no law" bit would texutally forbid things like banning human sacrifice in religious ceremonies.
Textualists always find an out when they need one.
Do you have a better suggestion that’s less partisan and less prone to abuse?
Humans will always bring bias, but I can’t think of anything better than “interpret as it was plainly written and would have been understood by the people who wrote it at the time”.
Interpreting how it would have been understood at the time is quite subjective; how do we interpret how the Founding Fathers would've considered semi-automatic rifles or Facebook to fall in First/Second Amendment jurisprudence, or how far you can push the General Welfare Clause? The Founding Fathers themselves often disagreed on such things.
> Do you have a better suggestion that’s less partisan and less prone to abuse?
I'm of the opinion that textualism, in actual practice, is a highly partisan and heavily abused concept intended to be a thin veil over "I rule the way I want". I prefer the concept of a living Constitution; per Jefferson:
> I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Did you actually read the constitution end to end? It's not that big, and if you had you would have see that such things you propose aren't in line with the text
A textualist reading of the First Amendment doesn't permit banning human sacrifice in religious ceremonies.
A textualist reading of the Second Amendment doesn't permit banning of personally owned nuclear arms.
Textualists don't seem too interested in overruling the relevant unconstitutional laws in these cases.
(Yes, I've read it. It's vague - deliberately, I'd argue - in spots, like in defining "general welfare", and some folks like to pretend things like the Ninth Amendment don't exist at all.)
We can't because our system of government is broken. If the courts are going to stick to stricter interpretations of the constitution, the US is more likely to rapidly decline or fall apart completely than to fix its problems via legislation. We have only limped along this far because the courts have been lenient on that since our ~3rd major reformulation of our government (FDR). Our system of government cannot support a modern developed-world (go easy on me, citizens of other OECD states—we're kinda developed, anyway) state, without that leniency. The only hope is that monied interests will step in and force a fix because their money's threatened—we've got issues with 70+% support from the public that can't get any traction in the legislature, so clearly "lots of people want it" isn't enough (see again: our system of government is broken) so we have to hope rich people's interests align with ours, or nothing will be fixed. Given modern stateless capital and that so many rich Americans seem to have been working on a comfortable escape route from the US in the last few years, I'm not optimistic.
on the other hand, there have been confrontations with the judicial branch Supreme Court and others in the past, just not seriously in living memory. I was surprised to find in Wikipedia a discussion of changing the number of judges in the pre-WWII era also ("court packing").
In the end, they still accept or reject laws, with no accountability whatsoever. The supreme court’s decisions are laws, for all intent and purposes, and have just as much weight as what Congress writes.
The incestuous relationship between the judiciary and the legislative branch in common law systems is very problematic and does not allow true separation of powers. Like so much in our democratic governments, this works as long as most participants behave in good faith, but breaks down when some do not.
Not the OP, but many folks treat the SCOTUS as divided into the red and blue teams, and that they have to vote like whatever party would, vs an independent check on the other two branches of gov't.
The SCOTUS is a political battleground where Federal laws can be passed as jurisprudence on the interpretation of the US Constitution, circumventing the legislative process.
Instead of laws on reproductive rights, you had a ruling even detailing the time frames in which abortion was legal.
Instead of legalizing gay marriage, you have a ruling on the federal recognition of licenses issued in individual states.
Instead of a law on lobbying, you have a ruling saying that monetary contributions to campaigns are the free speech of lobbying groups.
Instead of an organic law on weapons permits, you have a ruling saying what kinds of firearm regulations states can pass.
But people can't say this politicization of the SCOTUS is new; back when the hot topic were worker rights, in the early XX century, those were the battles being fought there, to skip Congressional debates:
The Supreme Court does not create laws. Congress does. The Supreme Court interprets those laws, making sure they do not violate the Constitution.
The Supreme Court is like a compiler simply running the instructions it's been told. It doesn't have any input over what's written.
Historically, people have used the Supreme Court to create laws, circumventing the voting process and giving 9 people oligarch-like power. This is not ideal.
There's also the general expectation the Supreme Court should do what's "right" which again, isn't a relevant metric for judging whether something is constitutional. The Supreme Court at its best is an amoral, apolitical institution.
The way in which judges are brought to the bench in America and subsequently to SCOTUS is political. While it isn't Congress it isn't as independent as many people previously portrayed it.
I wonder if there’s a change within living memory that has caused that cough Bork cough
Snark aside, there’s a reasonable case to be made that Congress has been increasingly treating the judiciary as a super-legislature. Far easier to avoid the work of compromise etc. when you can punt it to the USSC. Whether that’s pure laziness or something structural based on a reduction of overall party power is up for discussion.
As far as I can tell, the nonsense with Court appointments began back in the 80s, with the campaign against Reagan's nominee Robert Bork. Since then there's been a gradually ramping escalation of hostility from both sides. The GOP had to pay back the DEMs for the Bork thing, the DEMs try to smear Thomas, vetting of nominees is held up, then entirely withheld until the President leaves office, and so forth.
The politicization of the Court is a completely bipartisan affair going back 4 decades at least.
We might even say it goes back 8 decades, to FDR's threats to pack the court (see "a switch in time saves nine").
It’s not as if Bork was first. Haynsworth and Carswell were rejected by democrats for political reasons (leading to Blackmun being confirmed). Abe Fortas was rejected as Chief Justice by republicans.
Bork’s appointment problems stem from Reagan’s essentially rewarding him for obstructing impeachment of Nixon.
I’ve never understood why the Democrats are painted as the bad guys interfering in a non-partisan appointment of Bork. Nominating Bork was an insane act.
Recent history shows us many examples of SCOTUS saying "the Constitution doesn't let you do this", and people being up in arms crying "but the thing you just struck down is necessary".
Folks: it's not within the Court's authority to decide what is a good idea and what is a bad idea. Their sole job is to interpret laws through the lens of the Constitution. The justices may well agree with your wishes of what Congress could do, but they see that the current laws of our nation won't allow Congress to do it, or at least not in that way.
But even if you believe that a given law is good - that women should have an inalienable right to an abortion, or that there should be tight controls on who can carry a weapon, or whatever - you've got to recognize that sometimes the Constitution does not give the government the power to make that happen. In such events, you can't claim that the Court is corrupt because the justices won't recognize the important of what you value.
Rather, you have to recognize that it's become your moral duty to alter the laws of the land to allow for what you seek. The Constitution's Article V is there precisely for this reason. Granted, it's a really high bar to clear, but there is a built-in mechanism for fixing any such bugs that we find in the Constitution.
> But even if you believe that a given law is good - that women should have an inalienable right to an abortion, or that there should be tight controls on who can carry a weapon, or whatever - you've got to recognize that sometimes the Constitution does not give the government the power to make that happen.
It does, though, via the Ninth Amendment, which explicitly notes that the Constitution is not an exhaustive listing of the rights of American citizens.
As well as the “privileges and immunities” clause.
The whole point of these was to avoid unenumerated rights being completely unprotected. The current court seems to think only the 1st and 2nd amendment exist.
There's an argument to be made there, but it's most certainly NOT "explicit". The 9th does say that there are other rights, that's pretty much its whole point. But it absolutely does not "explicitly" mention abortion or anything else.
You also ignored my example of 2A, or the current controversy (for which I haven't yet read the argument, but I assume that the 10th Amendment plays into it in exactly the same way you're arguing for the 9th).
It is explicit in the Constitution that people have rights not listed in it. Those unenumerated rights are, by their nature, not listed, but I find it hard to credit the idea that Americans don't have a right to privacy.
> You also ignored my example of 2A
Sure, because everyone does. The number of people arguing bans on personal ownership of nuclear arms are unconstitutional is... small. Even originalist/textualists seem to agree it's by no means absolute.
I don't think this is a winning argument. The fact that one argument - and one thought important enough to enumerate actually explicitly - is frequently ignored doesn't support the idea that another unenumerated one exists, and quite possibly the opposite.
More specifically, most Roe supporters have been ignoring the "bodily autonomy" philosophy all along, and more recently even going directly against it. It would seem that it's no more absolute than you believe 2A to be.
As I wrote elsewhere in this thread:
1. Have you taken to the streets protesting when people, even after consulting with their doctor, have been forbidden the right to use marijuana medicinally?
2. Do you oppose the authority of the FDA to determine what medications Americans should be allowed to use, such that we should be able to use a pharmaceutical even if the FDA says it's too dangerous, or not effective enough?
3. Have you even argued against the authority of the government to force individuals to take covid-19 vaccinations?
If you answer "no" to any of the above, then I assert that your claims to believe in the "bodily autonomy" argument behind Roe is false.
Roe talks about this in terms of "privacy", saying that a woman in consultation with her doctor has the right to determine what's the best course of treatment; the government doesn't have the authority to take abortion off the table.
So, how does the government get the authority to take marijuana off the table? How do they get the authority to take any other treatment off the table? And how do they have the authority to say that vaccination is the only acceptable course when covid-19 is rampant?
This all seems to be the same argument, so why don't I hear very many Roe supporters arguing for the freedoms I referenced above, or at least providing answers to my questions? What's the principled line of philosophy that supports a freedom to abortion without also recognizing a right to medicinal marijuana or passing up a covid-19 show (when either is done under doctor supervision)?
> Roe talks about this in terms of "privacy", saying that a woman in consultation with her doctor has the right to determine what's the best course of treatment; the government doesn't have the authority to take abortion off the table.
Roe also makes it quite clear it's not absolute:
"A State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life. At some point in pregnancy, these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision. ... We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."
> So, how does the government get the authority to take marijuana off the table?
For the same reason as Roe highlights above; that the right to privacy is not absolute. I think you'll find the leftist position on marijuana is fairly similar to the leftist position on abortion, though.
> And how do they have the authority to say that vaccination is the only acceptable course when covid-19 is rampant?
I think you'll find the leftist position on marijuana is fairly similar to the leftist position on abortion, though.
I think that's true directionally, but not quantitatively. I haven't seen riots about marijuana, or claims that SCOTUS is corrupt.
And although I can't say this about any particular individual, I think that statistically, the left position regarding covid-19 vaccinations seems to be contrary to the "bodily autonomy" philosophy. Admittedly, there may be differences in scale of risk that lead to this difference. But the rhetoric we're hearing today seems to frame abortion rights as an absolute with no room for such finesse. And I think it is on them to explain how to draw that line.
So? "You can only say it's a right if you riot about it" is a weird position to take.
> And although I can't say this about any particular individual, I think that statistically, the left position regarding covid-19 vaccinations seems to be contrary to the "bodily autonomy" philosophy.
I don't know what you think the leftist position is on this, but no state nor the Federal government has even hinted at the idea of a universal vaccination requirement for COVID-19.
Virtually all states require quite a few vaccinations - measles, mumps, rubella, etc. - in public schools. Once again, Roe doesn't rely on "bodily autonomy", and any such right is very clearly not absolute (as Roe itself makes clear about privacy). My autonomy to swing a knife around ends when it hits your face.
Thought experiment: Do we have a right to poop? Can Congress forbid me from pooping? How would SCOTUS rule on a law banning bowel movements?
> "You can only say it's a right if you riot about it" is a weird position to take.
A month ago, governmental violations of bodily autonomy were ignored, or grumbled about at most. If you want me to believe that this change is qualitatively different, you need to explain that, or else I'm going to put both violations in the same bucket.
> no state nor the Federal government has even hinted at the idea of a universal vaccination requirement for COVID-19
First, regardless of what they've actually tried to do, there has been a lot of talk about how they should. Such talk comes pretty much exclusively from the same group of people who think that overturning Roe is an apocalypse.
Second, they most certainly have tried to force vaccination as much as they could get away with. That wasn't by a law saying "get vaccinated or go to jail". That was a backdoor coercive thing where the gov't tried to say "if you want to do business with the gov't then all your employees must be vaccinated (leading to employees getting fired)", in conjunction with the fact that the government is already so damned big that they can be the 800lb gorilla in purchasing as a backdoor alternative to legislation. And while this was going on, people who I'm very sure support Roe were nodding their heads saying it's the right thing to do. Again, there may be a principled argument for treating this differently. But I think it's incumbent on the Roe protesters to explain what that principle is, or they appear to be unprincipled hypocrites.
> But I think it's incumbent on the Roe protesters to explain what that principle is, or they appear to be unprincipled hypocrites.
I'll take a stab at one potential explanation.
Pregnancy isn't infectious; you will not get pregnant by sitting next to a pregnant woman on the bus. Rights become more complicated when they impact others.
FWIW when it comes to the argument of bodily autonomy in regards to covid vaccinations, you're still free to not get a covid vaccine. The government isn't marching into your house with armed men injecting you with covid vaccines. Making vaccine standards for things like public schools (which you can still choose to homeschool or send to private schools) is not the same as the government forcing you to get a vaccine.
When it comes to marijuana, it can be more difficult to get past Wickard and Heart of Atlanta Motel when it relates to things like commodities sold on near international markets. Abortion services are often way more local of a law, far more difficult to argue interstate commerce.
when it comes to the argument of bodily autonomy in regards to covid vaccinations, you're still free to not get a covid vaccine.
I think you're making it sound more black-and-white than it really was. It's true that they weren't talking about coming into your house and holding you down. But they did try to make it as close to "you can't get a job to earn money to buy food" as they could. Pres Biden did issue an EO saying that anybody doing business with the federal government, and anybody in their supply chain, must ensure that their employees are vaccinated. Given the enormous size of the federal government, this covers a huge proportion of the country. (the courts did throw this out, but not before they'd coerced a lot of people to go against their own conscience)
Further, that's as far as the politicians and regulators were able to go. I seem to recall talk in some locales (NYC?) talking about wanting to implement vaccine passports, with which local businesses would deny entry to unvaccinated people, so you can't even go to the grocery store to buy food.
And, of course, my main point was about what the masses were arguing for. I don't think you could seriously deny that a sizable faction of people were arguing that the government SHOULD do all of the above. And that's exactly what I'm saying: people are claiming to back the idea of "bodily autonomy", but for a whole lot of them, their actions demonstrate that this is much less a fundamental inalienable right than they're willing to admit today.
Bodily autonomy, right? Like, the right to not to get infected by a communicable disease in which there are preventative measures out there?
A pregnant woman the next desk over to you doesn't have any effect on your body. A person infected with covid the next desk over does. You do understand how pregnancy works, right?
I imagine most would agree I have bodily autonomy to move my arms. I can't then swing my arms and beat someone to death, right? Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.
You have all the right you want to not get vaccinated so long as your action doesn't impact everyone else around you. Feel free to go live in the woods with everyone else who doesn't interact with the rest of society. Nobody is going to come by and say you need to get vaccinated, just that there are a lot of benefits to being a member of society if you choose to do so.
How can you think it's not blatant politics when they lied about their opinions in congressional hearings only to overturn Roe once they had power. How can you think that is in good faith?
To argue, "oh whoops you didn't _do the work_ to obtain your RIGHTS" is also simply a distraction. The US is founded on the concept of unenumerated rights. Do not be fooled. We had those rights and now we don't thanks to this new court.
Look at it the other way around: if the nominees are being questioned about what their opinions are on specific issues, the Congress has already turned it into a political match. The Congress ought to be trying to probe for their qualifications as a justice, and I don't think that one's opinion on self defense or abortion figure directly into that.
Further, I don't buy that you truly believed the argument behind Roe anyway. I don't know you personally, but it's a good bet that you don't support the philosophy that it described. What Roe said[1] was that a person can make whatever[2] treatment they individual decide (in consultation with their doctor) is most appropriate for their circumstances.
But I'm betting that you don't actually agree with this, as evidenced that you likely haven't pursued other violations of it with such vehemence. So I ask you:
1. Have you taken to the streets protesting when people, after consulting with their doctor, have been forbidden the right to use marijuana medicinally?
2. Do you oppose the authority of the FDA to determine what medications Americans should be allowed to use, such that we should be able to use a pharmaceutical even if the FDA says it's too dangerous, or not effective enough?
3. Have you even argued against the authority of the government to force individuals to take covid-19 vaccinations?
If you answer "no" to any of the above, then I assert that your claims to believe in the argument behind Roe is false.
[1] Believe it or not, I actually support the philosophy of bodily autonomy. But that doesn't change the fact that the actual argument behind Roe was a notably lousy one. This is precisely the point I was trying to make in my original comment: one's opinions about the goodness of something are independent of their judgment about the legality of legislation under the Constitution.
[2] Actually, Roe's text limits itself to just abortions, but it seems clear that such a principle ought to apply to all medical treatments in principle - that's why many of today's protests are framed more broadly as "bodily autonomy".
Being forced to carry to term is a different circumstance. As you say yourself, the text limits the ruling to abortion which even today's court has ruled as a unique circumstance. Women should have this right and not the states. I truly believe that, but my opinions are also a distraction...
The justices lied to congress and were always going to overturn Roe. There's no higher judicial ground here.
That works in principle but not in practice. The core issue in roe v wade was tossing out precedent while failing to show reasoning why tossing out precedent should be ok. So now the court seems to be chaotic. Whatever the makeup of the court, they may toss out precedent that doesn’t match the current majority’s interpretation of the constitution (of which there are many). Then suppose the scotus becomes a liberal majority. Then they may reinstate all the tossed out precedents. That’s just chaos, with the main focus becoming which party chooses justices, not any reasonable continuity and coherence of constitutional law.
I agree with your concerns about thrashing. I think that the fact that justices aren't elected politically, together with their typical lengthy tenure, is intended to buffer against that. But as politics becomes more polarized, perhaps the buffer doesn't serve as well anymore.
A core problem IMO is that justices are appointed politically. There's an assumption that politicians and their parties will appoint unbiased justices, presumably out of the goodness of their heart and respect for norms... That assumption looks laughably flawed today.
Agreed. Elsewhere in this thread someone pointed out that some recent justices may have been... less than truthful... in answers to the Senate during their nomination hearings, at least giving the impression that they'd continue to support Roe.
My response to that seems not to have been popular. It's the job of the Senate to help vet the nominees based on their abilities as judges. I don't think the senators should be making these decisions based on the nominee's adherence to a particular ideology. And to the extent that the senators are deciding based on this, it's those very senators that are making the Court political - don't blame the justices.
You're ignoring the fact that there are several philosophies behind constitutional interpretation, and that the dominant philosophy which you list here ("sole job is to interpret laws through the lens of the Constitution"), also called Originalism, is a recent creation by Scalia.
I'm hopeful they will visit AUMF at some point and revert back to having the Congress have to explicitly authorize war and also not redefine things as near-war but not war. Deploying troops in active conflicts = war.
Absolutely correct. There is a process for writing laws. There is a process for amending the constitution. But instead of building a broad coalition to go and do these things they would rather roll the dice with the judiciary. And when they lose try to change the judiciary. Completely wrong headed. We need to get our legislature working. We also need people to realize that living in a democracy means that you don’t always get your way.
But that's just what it is now, isn't it?
A political entity driven by political goals. With an outsized power to reinterpret laws and rules to suit a certain group's political goals.
It may have started with a certain role, but it is now a political entity. I treat it as such.
I really don't like having this unelected councils of wizards who get wield god-like "authority"-- it feels a bit gross in a democracy.
I 'get it' w/ respect BrownvBoard, Miranda, etc, but at least in my lifetime the court hasn't done much to expand or protect my rights. Greatest hits from them are weird election cases (Florida 2000) making it easier for really shadowy/fucked organizations to plow $$$ into elections.
If these folks are indeed just umpires & good old legal "scholars" who are there to call balls & strikes, why are hundreds of millions dollars spent promoting + grooming these individuals?
Going forward I'm very much in favor of subtle "judicial humiliation"-- across the board de-sanctify this institution
Congress delegated their authority to the EPA. Congress is empowered to retain that authority and they're empowered to overrule any EPA regulation they disagree with. Congress retains all the power.
When it comes to the Supreme Court - that's it. Congress can't do anything about Supreme Court rulings. Your comparison of the EPA to the Supreme Court is misguided.
>>Congress can't do anything about Supreme Court rulings.
Actually, they can, that is the whole point - congress has the power to pass laws - SC does not. That is exactly what the SC just told congress to do - their job.
If Congress is adhering to their oath and acting in good faith then they may not pass laws that violate the Constitution. The Supreme Court determines what the Constitution does or doesn't say, which impacts the laws Congress may or may not pass. Putting this together we conclude Congress can't do anything about Supreme Court rulings.
Congress can’t just say “do whatever you want to fix X problem”. They have to be explicit with what powers they delegate to the executive branch and what they are permitted to do. Otherwise the law is plain unconstitutional since breaks the fundamental separation of powers. The purpose of SCOTUS is not to decide cases based on the desired outcome. It’s to decide based on what the law actually says, not what it should say.
It is happening at the state level too. In Wisconsin, the gerrymandered (google it for background on Wisconsin) legislature has chosen to not conduct hearings on governor appointees, with the result that holdovers from prior administrations can remain in office indefinitely.
""(T)he expiration of Prehn's term on the DNR Board does not create a vacancy. Prehn lawfully retains his position on the DNR Board as a holdover," wrote Chief Justice Annette Ziegler for the majority. "Therefore, the Governor cannot make a provisional appointment to replace Prehn." [1]
Everyone stating this is a good thing because it's not the Supreme Court's job to do xyz are conveniently ignoring the fact these decisions are being made due to tribalism, not out of some concern for rule of law.
These people could be part of their respective tribes because they believe that the rule of law dictates one thing or another. Many of these Justices in the past have followed their own philosophies, which happen to align with one party or another.
We just happen to have people who have a very... different... idea about what the law means than their predecessors.
Also, even if the surpreme court was completely correct to do this: why is this their focus? Why is this so much more important than the the thousands of other cases waiting for their attention?
The actual decisions do not reflect that at all, and they go into great depth to explain the reasoning, none of which seems remotely ideological (other than legal ideology which is orthogonal to political leaning).
Like the school prayer case from yesterday where Gorsuch was literally making things up in his opinion, so Sontomayer included photos of the offending action to show that Gorsuch was making things up in his opinion?
The legal trappings of the conservative positions have been explicitly merely legal trappings.
How do you know this? Do you disagree with the outcomes or agree with them? If you disagree with the outcomes then it may come across as calling people who disagree with you tribal because they reached the "wrong" conclusions.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 396 ms ] threadI am afraid we will see an immense amount of instability, increased poverty, mass migrations and authoritarian regimes rising up due to the fact that we couldn't manage to convince people that those parties do not care about them.
In a previous post I wrote that conservatives everywhere use moral issues to make people enraged in order to get vote, and in exchange to that they use their power to help the rich get richer. This is exactly what I was talking about. Those Conservative judges were appointed by a President elected by people that rallied behind him hoping to see Roe overturned, and in exchange for that they also gave them a free pass to alter the US political system in a way that is favourable to the Republican party, i.e. the party of big industry and capital.
This is also another small hint that "countries" are a stupid concept - we must stop to pretend that a single country is an island, everything has consequences that irradiate and reflect on the rest of the world, and it's stupid to think everyone can be a ruler of its own tiny spot of our planet.
Countries are like homes, but they aren't cottages in the middle of nowhere, they are flats - if you set your own house on fire, everyone will suffer, everyone will lose something, if not everything.
"$countryname first!" and Nationalism in all its forms is basically just a more general form of Fascism.
This has already been happening for a decade now. But it has been limited to poorer regions, such as north Africa, south-central Americas, and war-torn regions of the Middle East.
Most of this instability was precipitated by food prices, which wealthier nations found themselves immune to. But they are no longer immune, food prices are spiking by double digit annual percentages all over the world. Fuel prices too. The G7 are already in talks about how acquiesce to Russia for their natural gas.
However, given that you evidently prefer a single (technocratic?) world government I suppose you might welcome the further erosion of the US republic? In that case damn-the-consequences-do-what-I-want is an understandable position to take, even if it’s inimical to the long term health of the republic.
Now you may think this is a crazy example but there's an Alcoa facility in Texas that originally burned lignite but long since ran out of the good stuff and has just been burning dirt for decades. It is one of the largest point sources of air pollution in the world, and what the court is saying here is the EPA has not been empowered by Congress to stop that. If Alcoa wants to burn dirt, then fine.
Otherwise we wouldn't need courts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson
They'd have done this regardless of the state of industrialization or 1% hate. It's an alliance between religious fundamentalism, and the business community, and what they want has stayed constant despite the short term ebbs and flows of politics.
Also, please don't buy into the states rights nonsense. This group only believes in states rights when they don't control the federal government.
It's really best to just not listen to what it says, and instead look at what it does.
Congress can still pass a law empowering EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Congress could have mooted this case with ordinary statutory procedures at any point, but did not.
Consider, for example, how the FDA operates. They have a broad mandate to keep food clean and drugs safe. They don't have an explicit mandate of "you must only regulate tylenol and aspirin, we need to pass a law for new drugs each time they come up."
This ruling finds the EPA, who has the mandate to keep pollutants out of the air, can't determine that CO2 is a pollutant. Why is that? The 2016 clean air act specifically gave them the power to regulate air pollutants.
The only answer is political activism. There is no difference between the FDA's broad mandate and the EPA's broad mandate.
I recommend reading the dissent on this case. It makes it absolutely clear that this is an EPA power. The conservatives couldn't get new laws passed repealing the EPA, so instead they packed the court with political activists so they could make law from the bench.
HN is broken
I could, for example, define "sufficient consensus" as requiring that all laws require a 90% supermajority in the Senate. Or I could reduce this to 50% of the Senate. Alternatively I could reform Congress so that lawmaking requires voting totals representing 50% of the population.
Each of these is one possible version of "sufficient consensus", and still none of them actually matches the version we actually have. What is clear is that the sclerotic nature of today's Congress is problematic, and it's doing a great deal to undermine faith in our democratic system.
Do you know how many school teachers in China must buy supplies for their students with their own money? Zero.
Do you know how many Chinese ambassadorships are left vacant because of political bickering? Zero.
I am not a shill for the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, or the ideology of the Chinese political system, but I increasingly am a shill for the ruthless efficiency of the Chinese government.
The US's genocidal oppression has been ongoing far, far longer than the oppression of the Uyghur people.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/29/1108717407/supreme-court-narr...
And knowing that, you'd take the guard rails off? Crazy.
China may well supersede the United States in the future, despite its treatment of minorities.
So when you're talking about consensus, the country has it. There's consensus on immigration, gun control, and abortion. It's just that Republicans prevent us from acting on it.
A majority of Americans support the right to choose [1] (61%), a path to amnesty for undocumented persons [2] (60%), restrictions on firearm purchase and ownership [3] (> 64%), moving off of fossil fuels and treating climate change like the threat it is [4] (76%), a wealth tax on people with a net worth of over $50m [5] (56%), the expanded voting rights in HR 1 [6] (>61%), etc. etc. etc.
These are big majorities, and I'd wager most Americans don't think this stuff is broadly popular.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/13/about-six-i...
[2]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000177-d4f4-dd7d-ab77-fcfd4...
[3]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000178-cfbd-d112-a97e-ffbde...
[4]: https://morningconsult.com/2021/04/27/paris-agreement-climat...
[5]: https://www.businessinsider.com/over-half-americans-see-weal...
[6]: https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/4/dfp-vox-hr-...
It's not honest, it's not nice, and it's against the site guidelines.
I'd say that the doctrine properly tries to keep the supreme court, the least democratically responsible branch of US federal government, from being the most powerful of the three branches of government.
By pushing the responsibility to lifelong bureaucrats? I honestly don't see a difference there.
Chevron deference's main purpose is to free Congress from writing exhaustive laws. If the executive branch does something Congress doesn't like, they can change the law and make it more specific. Of course Congress does almost nothing, so when you say it has to take legislative action to regulate something, what you're effectively doing is deregulating it.
This decision follows more from the Court where they pick and choose what they doom in this way based on their personal politics, contrary to precedent and reliance interests.
We shouldn't think too hard about what this Court does; it's a nakedly ideological power grab that's the endgame of a generation long effort by Conservatives to control the US through the court as they slide further and further into permanent minority status. Future generations will look back on this era as one of infamy.
We really, really needed one of those groups of unelected bureaucrats to be policy and subject matter experts, and they weren't. But don't worry, all the others we haven't actually checked are!
The CDC is a relatively unique case of an institution that was really gutted by a mistake decades ago (the swine flu vaccine in the late 70s [0]) and then got some pretty bad Trump-nominated leadership [1] [2]). Elections matter, it turns out.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/03/991570372/michael-lewis-the-p...
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/politics/cdc-redfield-aids-wa...
[2]: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/18/cdc-director-avoid...
The FAA's got egg on its face from the whole 737-Max situation, the FDA is approving vaccines for under-5 year olds despite no evidence of benefit (and has had a few reviewers resign in protest after the same set of vaccines were approved for other age demographics), I'd bet dollars to donuts that people are going to be mightily unhappy with the Treasury in 6 months, the DOJ has all-but-eliminated the jury trial while providing generally substandard prisons, I've heard many things about the VA but I don't recall a single positive thing, and there's a ton of things that could be said of the DEA/ATF/FBI/DHS gang but very few of them are positive.
Here's the list, by the way: https://www.usaspending.gov/agency
---
I will say a couple of things to try and reach an agreement here. The first is that our gov't is pretty corrupt, even the executive branch (remember the CDC pulling down testing/masking requirements for flying around the holidays last year?) and it's pretty clear to everyone who looks at it. I'll defend the career civil servants, but the political appointees? Generally nah.
The second is that the US press is basically junk. Their incentives are so screwy that even people who want to be fair and rigorous are forced out in favor of profiteers, which creates an awful dynamic amongst viewers and readers. For example, this article is "Hillary Clinton's emails got as much front-page coverage in 6 days as policy did in 69" [1]. This one says NBC Nightly News spent 31 minutes on emails and 8 minutes on issues [2]. What were readers/viewers supposed to think? Has literally anything been covered so strenuously and consistently? It got more air time than actual terrorism.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/29/booster-sh...
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2017/12/7/16747712/study-media-2016-elec...
[2]: https://www.mediamatters.org/nbc/study-confirms-network-even...
I’m not a fan of the current Court, but stare decisis has never been binding. Landmark rulings are landmarks because the create or break precedent. Courts have been doing that since there were courts.
To me, it seems clear that the "administrative state" is overseen by the president, who can overrule them and fire individual people, and the president is elected by the people every four years, and that makes the executive branch more democratically responsible than the supreme court, which is not elected by the people, and who serve for life with no democratic accountability.
But I'm open to hearing your argument for how the supreme court is more democratically responsible than the offices of the executive branch! Maybe we don't mean the same thing by "democratically responsible".
Since when
Congress gave the EPA broad discretion that it could have revoked -- using your argument -- at any moment. This issue has been bouncing around for over a decade, and Congress has systematically declined to do so.
"Congress gave them broad authority" != "they have authority over everything they can in any way claim relates (however loosely) to their mandate".
What this Supreme Court has decided to do is say that what they did doesn't matter, knowing that the current makeup in congress is in gridlock due to how modern day Republicans behave. Like the dissent was posted here. Congress explicitly empowered the EPA to work towards the best system of emission reduction.
Giving a broken legislative body the sole responsibility of literally saving the world is a really, really dumb idea.
I was already planning to expat soon, but this all makes me want to try to hurry that timeline. Sorry to those of you that are stuck in this hellscape.
So instead of being cynical and celebrating people who are abandoning ship, which I totally understand, we should instead spend time uniting people in opposition. Stay where you are and fight. It's your country. It's mind-blowing that people won't engage in trying to actually do something, even something as simple as helping a campaign, or donating money, but instead they're like "well I'm going to just give up and spend all this time and effort moving to some other country where I also won't uphold any civic responsibility". Madness.
But yeah, rough stuff
But narrowly, I'm talking about democracy itself, which is not doing well in the US.
This is also a popular trope in fiction. In the recent Handmaid's Tale series, there are several episodes devoted to life immediately before the fall, and what you see is a lot of evidence stuff is going to hit a crisis point, and a lot of people insisting that it hasn't quite yet.
Obviously the threshold to act has to be fairly high -- and I'm not saying America is Kabul or Kyiv or Gilead -- but I think there's nothing wrong with listening to the part of your brain that says "wow, it feels like the shit is imminently going to hit the fan". Because if you wait until it actually does, you'll have significantly less capacity to act.
There are also options beyond leaving the country. Some places are physically safer and physically more isolated from threat than others. For example, in the event that there is a rapid institutional collapse in the United States, it seems likely that Hawai'i would be among the places most likely to endure a little while extra or to most easily facilitate leaving the country. Areas near unguarded border crossings on the northern border also have an appeal in that regard. I think the right degree of seriousness with which to take something like this is not so much "I should move to Hawai'i tomorrow in case there's a civil war" and more "If I can work remotely in Hawai'i or if a job opens up, I might gain some degree of personal safety/sovereignty by moving there."
Personal context: I am a non-American. I spent most of the 2010s living in the U.S., and I emigrated to another country in early 2021. The pull factor to emigrate was a job opportunity abroad that was great and that my wife agreed would be a fun way to spend a few years, but the push factor to emigrate was significant uncertainty about the institutional stability of the U.S. We were setting up our paperwork just as the Capitol Insurrection happened.
Of course, things going badly in the US is going to have spillover effects everywhere else too, so that's something to keep in mind. I'm not sure how isolated various places would be.
Barring extreme circumstances‡, one should not moving from the country of one’s birth, but to the country of one’s choice. I emigrated from the U.S. two decades ago to Canada, because of the person who later became my wife—but I had to decide that I could live with Canada, too. Family aside, nothing in the U.S. either held me to America or was pushing me from America.
The process took almost two years, and it was almost five years before I got Canadian citizenship. As I understand it, it would take longer now.
My wife and I are considering moving to Europe or the U.K., but it would take time for this move to materialize, and we need to figure out what it is that we want (especially given our ages). Such a move is not likely to happen for two to five years at this point.
‡ There are exigent circumstances where it becomes safer to leave one country with little care for where one goes, as long as it isn’t worse. I fear with the extremists taking power legitimately and illegitimately and pushing toward their increasingly apartheid goals, there will be larger classes of people who could legitimately become refugees from America, especially if "liberal" states turn extremist—as they seem likely to do, since the divide here is (mostly old, mostly white) rural vs (mostly younger, mostly diverse) urban.
Sitting where I sit, I truly think that America is fucked, and am doing what little that I can to make sure that Canada does not follow in its footsteps, but we have our homegrown extremists whose crypto-christo-fascist messages are being treated with bemusement to respect, and even being promoted by fools like Poilievre.
It's better to gtfo.
Some people are deriving plasure from fighting the fights even at high personal cost. But most people don't.
Your top responsibility is to yourself, to make the best of the short time you have. Fighting loosing fights doesn't seem to be that for most people.
Ironically this is the mindset behind keeping the coal plants online.
Could you clarify who "they" is in:
> this is exactly what they want.
?
And are you being a little hyperbolic (nothing wrong with that, we all do it especially when impassioned) or do you really think the supreme court (or whoever "they" is) are trying to cause an exodus of people they disagree with?
I'm not challenging/disagreeing with you, just very interested in understanding your thinking.
I've actually always felt this way about immigration and refugees as well. I certainly understand taking people in (from wherever, to wherever), but the big problem with that is once all the good people leave an area you have nothing but the bad people. It's sort of fragile on a global scale. What's the end goal? All "good" people go to a select few countries and then the rest of the world is run by bad people?
> And are you being a little hyperbolic (nothing wrong with that, we all do it especially when impassioned) or do you really think the supreme court (or whoever "they" is) are trying to cause an exodus of people they disagree with?
I don't think there's an active campaign just yet, but I do think that state legislatures are happy when this filtering process happens because it solidifies power. So far they have not undertaken active, visible campaigns, but I believe that it's coming and will come more aggressively from Christian Communists that have taken power in state legislatures. It's not something that Democratic Party leaders will say out loud but of course they're happy when so-called Republicans leave their jurisdiction as well.
> I'm not challenging/disagreeing with you
Please do! We can't get better if we don't explore and have discussions.
That is definitely one approach, and one I'm hoping to see through. But simultaneously you have to acknowledge that there could come a point where it's time to jump ship. That point is going to be different for everyone. Recent events have pushed some past that point. That doesn't seem hard to grasp.
> It's mind-blowing that people won't engage in trying to actually do something, even something as simple as helping a campaign, or donating money...
Have you been paying attention? People in this country have been more engaged over the last few years than at any point in my lifetime, and at this point the ship is still sinking.
Every time there is a school shooting, there is outrage and no change. Proud boys terrorize another fucking library event, and there aren't even reports of a single arrest. Women's rights being slaughtered and we get to hear how we need to vote. Another hearing laying out the obvious coup attempt on Jan 6th, and no action taken but another news headline.
This is just a snippet of the last ~30 days. 1 short month. I don't argue that it's my country. My country just looks like a real shithole lately.
> but instead they're like "well I'm going to just give up and spend all this time and effort moving to some other country where I also won't uphold any civic responsibility".
This is such a weird take. Consider employment. You can join a startup, work your ass off, cross your fingers, and hope for that big payday. High risk, high reward. Alternatively, you can join a mature company, collect a comfortable paycheck and moderately help to steer the bigger ship.
Right now, the US is looking like that startup. You can work your ass off, and it may give you a great payoff in the form of opportunity. But it's looking increasingly like it's going to fail. Alternatively, you can move somewhere that has all the big stuff in order, and you get to work on the small stuff that still has effect while not worrying as much about whether you're one injury away from bankruptcy.
Who knows? Maybe if we vote harder it'll turn around. At this point, I'm inclined to believe it's cultural. We barely voted out an insurrectionist. 48% of the country voted to keep that in play. This country is full of people who are actively encouraging someone to overthrow our government. 48%.
We're only a few years away from the collapse. It is a smart move to escape while you can. If I need heart pills or insulin in the future and they can't be made safe, then it won't be safe if you have any medical issues. If the water won't be safe because we couldn't regulate new chemicals invented, then it won't be safe to live here. If it isn't safe to have a pregnancy, because they've decided to sentence to death those with an ectopic pregnancy, why should you stay?
1. Moving is hard. Even harder for people that have little means. Living in the state you're comfortable isn't going to work for a lot of people.
2. Currently, it doesn't feel like "the state you're comfortable in" will be that way for long in this country.
3. Moving to a country you're comfortable in is the same principle, so why not do that if you're already comfortable moving?
But to play this card,
Also, don't forget that a lot of blue states (if that's where someone wants to live) have been really bad at providing enough housing, so are pretty difficult for someone to move to if they don't have a lot of money.
That's a pipe dream. The division is urban-vs-rural, not state-vs-state. What is now a red state will inexorably become blue as people flock to it. Rinse and repeat.
America has been through divisive times in the past. We'll survive. I think what's notable now is that it's been so damn peaceful for most of our lives that this looks like unprecedented tribalism.
This seems well worth working hard for.
My personal approach is to be very hard on family members and friends who if democrats talk about republicans as evil incarnate and if they are republicans then talk about democrats as woke idiots who are ruining the country.
I try to point out how stupid both sides are and they are fighting the wrong battles against the wrong enemy.
Another reason to stay in the USA: currently the world is splitting into two economies led by:
1) BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) - they will probably have about 60% of the world's population aligned with them.
2) USA/Europe/Canada/Australia/etc. - they will probably have about 40% of the world's population aligned with them.
Except for the USA and Russia who have the resources (food, energy, defensibility), I think that most all of the other countries can not exist without external trade. If the shit really hits the fan for the world, being in the USA might be a very good thing, even if we don't solve the political bigotry of democrats and republicans hating each other.
It looks much less so if you turn off the news. I have a good life here, and I'm unconvinced it would be a net improvement to move to Europe. I enjoy visiting there, but it's not like they don't have their own problems.
"EPA regulations were inconsequential in GHG emission reductions in the US during the last 20 years"
"This decision could doom humanity"
"An excess of environmental regulations is accelerating climate change, scientists find"
"Experts say the private sector will continue to seek emissions efficiencies on its own, regardless of environmental regulations"
"ESG investing norms could be 10x better for the environment than EPA regulations, climate scientists say"
Etc.
Castrating the federal government will have negative repercussions. If the federal government doesn't have the power to control the states, then why bother having one?
populists are not 'everyone'
For example, I am hearing a awful lot of complaints about un-elected judges this week.
Search for the phrase "unelected judges": the results are all right-wing sources, literally starting with the Heritage foundation and Daniel Horowitz.
Over here in my media bubble I'm hearing a lot of complaints about judges who borderline perjured themselves in their confirmation hearings, "activist judges" (also a Republican talking point, now being used by Democrats to point out the hypocrisy of that talking point being used when the Heritage Foundation exists), "theocrats", and "destroying stare decisis".
"Unelected" doesn't enter into it, because of course judges shouldn't be elected, the whole point of the judicial system was supposed to be for them to be insulated from politics and focus on the law.
The results are r/shitliberalssay, r/conservative, multiple quotes from FOX News, r/roevwadecelebration, r/conservative, r/deplatformed_ (a pro-Trump QAnon crank) and Donald Trump himself.... One single story using the phrase in reference to the Dobbs decision was posted to a handful of leftwing subreddits seven months ago; otherwise it's almost exclusively right-wingers using the phrase.
But maybe our bubbles might be reversed.
Its some weird Schroedinger's legislature, where it is legally empowered to direct the executive, it chooses not to, and somehow, that choice is the executive's fault, and we need an activist judge to rescue us from it. Instead, of the normal process of 'if the legislature is unhappy with the direction of the executive, it could just issue a course-correction by passing a law'.
The republicans know they can't pass that law right now, so they are using the courts to avoid having to pass it. Then they'll seize control of the legislature in the midterms, and they won't need to pass it. The beauty of having a stacked court, is that you can sit around and do nothing, and not have to write any unpopular legislature, while you sit around and lay all the blame for any consequences of bad governance on appointed-for-life judges.
They are in fact doing the exact opposite - telling elected officials that you need to make and enforce laws - not give that responsibility to someone else.
Do you think the IRS should be able to set tax rates? then how is this different?
If Congress made a law that the IRS should have the power to set tax rates, then I'd be fine with them being able to set tax rates. Because I think that Congress should have the power to delegate a portion of their power, should they choose to.
This is a weird, and frankly idiotic ruling. Regulations are too complicated and numerous for Congress to decide on every single one. Have you ever read one? They go into excruciating detail about everything because they are written by experts. The best case outcome from this is that the new rules from agencies get tossed into some existing process so that they are rubber stamped, thus adding red tape.
Much of this is a result of the court's rulings (very directly in the case of Bush!), entrenching gerrymandering and making it harder and harder to remove the massively corrupting bribery for access that fuels the political system.
Deferring administrative decisions to congress is not a recipe for more democracy, but for more gridlock, and it hands a historically and internationally extremist faction the political victories they want anyway. It will generate Republican outcomes even from Democratic Party executives and congresses (like the current one).
That's not democracy.
I am afraid we will see an immense amount of instability, increased poverty, mass migrations and authoritarian regimes rising up due to the fact that we couldn't manage to convince people that those parties do not care about them.
In a previous post I wrote that conservatives everywhere use moral issues to make people enraged in order to get vote, and in exchange to that they use their power to help the rich get richer. This is exactly what I was talking about. Those Conservative judges were appointed by a President elected by people that rallied behind him hoping to see Roe overturned, and in exchange for that they also gave them a free pass to alter the US political system in a way that is favourable to the Republican party, i.e. the party of big industry and capital.
This is also another small hint that "countries" are a stupid concept - we must stop to pretend that a single country is an island, everything has consequences that irradiate and reflect on the rest of the world, and it's stupid to think everyone can be a ruler of its own tiny spot of our planet.
Countries are like homes, but they aren't cottages in the middle of nowhere, they are flats - if you set your own house on fire, everyone will suffer, everyone will lose something, if not everything.
"$countryname first!" and Nationalism in all its forms is basically just a more general form of Fascism.
Constitution, Article 3
> The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
And, I mean, Trump literally said that he could guarantee he was going to appoint justices that would overturn Roe, and then they did, as he guaranteed. That's an outcome, right?
You want effective standards, do the work and pass a law.
The scotus is still operating in this environment. I don’t see how “fuck it throwing you to the wolves” has any immediate or future benefits?
Have some faith in people. Inventing rights and privileges autocratically is definitely problematic in a democracy. It's better to do the work of persuasion. We all have to live together. Note as well, the number of countries who have arrived at gay marriage through legislation rather than judicial fiat. It's a more respectful way to go.
Or is it just because it doesn't inconvenience you? Like these are all things that are very fresh in the memory of anyone gay that's lived in southern or red states. It's not a democracy if you have a bunch of people you treat as second class citizens.
This is obviously in conflict with minority rights.
If you care more about minority rights than democracy, fine. Lots of governments have limits on majority rule. The USA constitution is a famous example.
But those limits are limits on democracy. Which make them anti-democratic.
The more strictly you protect minority rights the less democratic your society is.
> It's not a democracy if you have a bunch of people you treat as second class citizens.
That's the purest democracy there is. A direct democracy that let people vote on absolutely anything would always produce that result.
In that case, is democracy good?
I know what you are trying to say, but it is too narrow.
If you think broader, the above is a laughable claim. Overturning the current understanding of laws is jarring to democracy. (Sure, there are times when it is morally necessary.) Why? Previous legislatures operated under the assumption that the Clean Air Act worked in a certain manner.
The Supreme Court has effectively overturned previous democratic work knowing full well the practical implications.
Oh and they've also convinced their party that cooperation is weakness because they are literally fighting the devil.
As such, I will decline to offer anything beyond what I've already said.
If you want policy changes to handle whatever real or imaginary threats you believe you face, then the correct way to deal with that is through the elected branches. They are the ones meant to make policy.
This supreme court has been stomping the other branches of government.
Congress created the EPA. If they don't like what they created, it's on them to fix it.
...yeah no, obviously not. The law has meaning and that meaning is stable. Words mean things. If you are stuck in "Anyone can interpret anything as anything else" land you have fallen prey to being too clever.
Congress delegating it’s power is suspect at best, and likely unconstitutional entirely (something something, War Powers Act). Congress created the EPA through the power of the purse, but it’s operated by the Executive, and therefore is not and should not be empowered to unilaterally create regulations with the force of law. Making law is Congress’ job.
Unless that was a typo and you mean to write "after the modern era"
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead. Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George! '
Res ipsa loquitor...
IANAL but how does codifying Roe v Wade change this?
There is a long history and philosophy around the proper roles and relationships of a legislature and court such as SCOTUS. The current Court could claim to make decisions upon a strict originalist philosophy of jurisprudence. Maybe they think they do, and maybe they really do. But...
Take an open-eyed look at history. Look at the process by which the justices are selected. This shows a different ultimate motivator: conservatives have been working for decades to pick justices whose claimed philosophies align with the conservative agenda.
I don't care the motivation. The SC shouldn't be doing congress' job. Congress got burned because they've been complacent.
RvW has always stood on tenuous footing. We've known this. Congress has literally had decades to do something and they chose instead to keep the status quo. Why? Because the republican threat helps democrat voter turnout. Same reason nothing is being done about the failed drug war.
This is a bizarre metaphor to use. This isn't a zero sum game. It is a three branch government.
In general, I push back against language and metaphors that don't have much value. We get to choose what metaphors we use. So we should choose good ones. Fixating on, i.e. "A versus B" is a competitive metaphor. But the branches of government are not competing against each other. They are working as part of system to (hopefully) maintain some semblance of a functioning representative democracy.
When one branch exercises a check against another branch, I don't think it is useful or interesting to say that it "won". I don't want us to start treating any of the branches as competitors in some kind of game or sport. I don't have much joy when, e.g. the House votes to impeach a President. It might be wise and justified (or not), but it is hardly a cause for celebration. But at times, it is necessary duty.
More specifically... No, Congress didn't "get burned". First of all, the composition of Congress has changed significantly over the last decades. Second, to my knowledge, the Dobbs ruling was not directed in any way at Congress or its legislation.
That's unfortunate. The Supreme Court can only function well if the justices are predominantly motivated by judicial, not political, principles.
If the court plays lip service to judicial principles while ultimately being driven by politics, it is a puppet and cannot serve as a proper check and balance.
Yawn. This is a cliche and talking point you know, to use your own language.
This statement does not address the issues head on. If you have a theory of jurisprudence, say it. You don't need to water it down with over-generalizations.
If by 'tenuous footing', you mean that there is not legislation protecting it, I understand what you are saying. However, per stare decisis (respecting judicial precedent), the general idea of Rowe has been settled and stable for a long time. Public opinion has been relatively stable too.
You said "Congress has literally had decades to do something and they chose instead to keep the status quo.". Congress is a body, yes, but it is also comprised of parties and coalitions that disagree. Saying a "split-brain" body "chose" to keep the status quo isn't a very useful way of thinking about it. A better explanation (one that conveys more information about what is happening) is that the parties strongly disagree, and the party lines have gotten firmer over time.
In February (this year, 2022), the House passed a law codifying abortion with Democratic support. It failed the Senate 46-48 due to Republican opposition.
We're on hacker news and hopefully we've all read the guidelines. Please respond to a charitable interpretation of the other party.
I'm still waiting you for you to address the questions presented.
Your attempt to compare the Republican and Democratic parties creates a false equivalency. This is demonstrated by the January 6th insurrection fomented by a Republican president and covered up by the Republican establishment, which has no analog in the Democratic space.
Democrats do bad things. The bad things they do aren't as bad as what Republicans do. It's like having both pancreatic cancer and a zit, one's worse than the other.
Stop putting them in the same category. This is useless and nondescriptive. Here's what I mean by that : if you were to build a machine learning classifier with a decision tree algorithm, what do you think some of the most important differentiators would be?
Tell me which party tends to acknowledge scientific evidence more often.
A fool sets impossible standards and moans that everyone falls short.
Accept reality. Choose from the better options. There is no perfect except in mathematics (and maybe some physics we don't know yet)
:P
It is common and reasonable for legislation to delegate responsibility. Administrative rulemaking has been around for a long time and will continue to exist.
So the FAA can’t determine and then require that aircraft have transponders. Congress has to do this.
If they continue down this path it will be chaos.
From the final paragraph of the opinion:
"But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body."
So it seems that Congress can still give the EPA a more clear delegation that they have this power.
Congress is now free to focused on creating chaos between the people that elect them. When is the last time you've seen anyone from Congress campaign on any substantive issue? I've not seen it in my lifetime they leave that campaign up to the president. Congress is invested with the sole power to regulate our money when is the last time you've seen them do anything except throw up bloated budgets? They have completely advocated that power to the Federal reserve of which they exercise zero oversight of and apparently leave it to the president who also lets it run autonomously.
So what you call chaos is reconnecting the actual responsibilities of our elected representatives with their duties. I for one would very much enjoy seeing my elected representative actually doing their constitutional duties instead of pitting citizen that one another's throat in order to get reelected again.
there's definitely a gap between regulatory officials making regulations and legislature codifying the details. This is where appointing heads of those departments is supposed to come to bear.
It's a mess, but the answer isn't to let lobbyists and special interests burn the house down.
have you met any congress personnel? "dedicated", "idealistic", and/or "thoughtful" apply to some of them.
Majority of square feet of land or majority of people?
So there is a democratic debate to be had about where in the middle the non extreme two sides could meet. (In Europe there is no debate about abortion and most countries allow it to 12 weeks).
Better to have a debate and both sides compromise than some court deciding on one of the most extreme views. The Supreme Court didn’t ban abortion, they did however allow it to 36 weeks for decades.
What they did do last week is say: hey guys, it’s a federal democracy, why don’t you fucking debate it and legislate it somehow where both sides can agree, as is normal with divisive issues in a democracy
Even RBG said that Roe v Wade was on shaky ground as a legal precedent.
And what people don’t realize is that if Roe v Wade wasn’t overturn the next ruling discussed was allowing further restrictions by states, further eroding the precedent.
The alternative was just kicking the can down the road until the next challenge.
This just ripped the bandaid off.
I think the metaphor of comparing internet bandwidth to pipes/tubes carrying water is perfectly apt. It seems like a very simple, direct and effective way to describe issues of bandwidth, connectivity, congestion and overall infrastructure.
I've never quite understood why we all pretended like that was a bad analogy. I guess just because it came out of the mouth of an old, white Republican.
To the broader point, there has to be _representative_ democracy for decentralized decision making to be fair
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2021/nov/...
There’s a million nuances in it, rape, incest, medical reasons, and the time of abortion.
The abortion debate doesn’t exist in Europe because almost all sides managed to agree on a 12 week limit and it’s left alone.
I would guess in 10-20 years the US would arrive at the same conclusion, with small differences between red and blue states.
Stop making this a yes or no issue. And that’s not what the Supreme Court did. They didn’t ban abortion. If 60% want abortion legal they can vote for whoever gives them that.
That's simply not true.
In Germany's last election, a major issue was about removing a clause disallowing "advertising" abortions. It remains controversial that people seeking abortions have to get extensive psychological counseling from an extremely limited number of therapists before getting an abortion.
In Poland abortion is banned entirely and they are about to start keeping a pregnancy register.
Ireland and Spain also have ongoing debates about the particulars of their laws, with Ireland having just legalized it all in 2018!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/24/abortion-...
> I would guess in 10-20 years the US would arrive at the same conclusion, with small differences between red and blue states.
This data visualisation [0] highlights the problem with this approach.
This isn't an issue where you can sit back and contemplate it as some abstract exercise of democracy. So many women will die, or be persecuted during that 10-20 year span you mention and it is completely needless. No one should be adopting a "it'll all work out in the end" mindset.
[0] https://twitter.com/monachalabi/status/999562371461992448?la...
So fix the actual problem instead of trying to kludge your way around it.
This has both benefits and drawback. The decision of more than half of US states will impact less than half the us states citizens.
Could it be that a majority of the population in those states are against abortion? Wouldn't Why should this be regulated at the federal level?
I'm pro-choice but I can understand that some people believe life begins at conception and therefore abortion is murder. If a majority of people in a state believe that, isn't it democratic to let them make laws accordingly?
You can say that you like a system that has this feature for states or it has certain other benefits and so on, but you can't say that it is equal representation because it is not.
If you truly want equal representation, then we have to go the direct democracy route since you will not have equal numbers of people under each representative. You also need to get rid of appointments by the executive (including rule making agencies), closed primaries, and provide universal voting including for felons and non-citizens.
So what is this argument for equal representation across the board? I don't see any benefit other than if you want populist movements to succeed based on the whims of the day and potentially at the expense of the minority rights (even more so than today).
The main point here is that state representation was necessary in order to create the country, and is likely necessary for the country to continue. I don't see any argument that supercedes this so far.
But what is the objective benefit to removing the senate? The argument I'm hearing is just that it could be more democratic, but there are many changes that could make things more democratic. Some things are about fairness, like gerrymandering. But I don't see any benefit to removing the senate.
I thought we already covered that they represent states, not people.
By the way, what bill would they pass that would fix gerrymandering? I thought the states had the authority to draw their districts and it can be contentious as to what a good fix is.
And of course we have the same logic on the other side - that a party in power will do what they can to add to their power. We see that with laws about non-citizens voting (struck down), restoring/giving voring rights to groups that would disproportionately support them, and such.
We did, and that's the point.
> what bill would they pass that would fix gerrymandering? I thought the states had the authority to draw their districts and it can be contentious as to what a good fix is.
There is no bill, also my point. Also, it's only contentious to those who are deliberately attempting to gerrymander.
> that a party in power will do what they can to add to their power.
I agree with this part, its also my point; that is, undemocratic processes are self-perpetuating and self-strengthening.
> We see that with laws about non-citizens voting (struck down), restoring/giving voting rights to groups that would disproportionately support them, and such.
Interesting that that all your counter examples here are about giving people rights to vote. People having the right to vote is fundamental to democracy. Seems your view on democracy is of the 'only the right sort of people should be allowed to vote' variety, pun intended.
Then why are you misrepresenting it to mean something that it doesn't? Only one house is meant to represent people.
"Also, it's only contentious to those who are deliberately attempting to gerrymander."
Maybe for the general idea. But I can see implementation ideas being contentious. That's my point - the solutions are likely to contain biases, and there's going to be opposition to that.
"Interesting that that all your counter examples here are about giving people rights to vote. People having the right to vote is fundamental to democracy. Seems your view on democracy is of the 'only the right sort of people should be allowed to vote' variety, pun intended."
Please name a democracy that has unlimited voting rights. All democracies have some limits. Requiring that someone is a citizen is a damn low bar. Losing rights for felonies can be debated, but that's not too uncommon either. The purpose of those most basic restrictions is do that society does not become influenced by the criminal elements (you're banned from office too) or from outside influence. And guess what, those restrictions were democratically implemented. So please stop with the attacks and more righteous than thou attitude. Please state some argument beyond "fundamental".
I didn't mispresent anything, I've been consistent and clear about my view of the senate.
>Please name a democracy that has unlimited voting rights.
It's not my position that voting rights should be unlimited. I was only pointing out that your own list of bad things were all about giving people who don't have a say about the government whose rules they must live by, a say in that government by vote.
>The purpose of those most basic restrictions is do that society does not become influenced by the criminal elements
This is historical laughable, the purpose of most restrictions is to limit the vote of marginalized groups, usually by race. For just one example, Step 1: Pass laws making weed a felony. Step 2: Focus all law enforcement efforts on marginalized groups smoking weed but let the kids in suburbs and college dorms smoke all they want. Step 3: Harshly punish marginalized groups by making them felons. Step 4: Strip them of the right to vote.
Neither of these things are actually true in practice.
As I said in another branch of this conversation, the use of the filibuster on nearly all bills of any significance (budgets and confirmations aside) in the Senate (and the chilling effect it's had on even bringing other bills to the floor) means that states are not represented equally either. The most obstructionist states have substantially more legislative power than the ones that want to actually pass bills. This is obviously more abstract, but it's pretty clear that in practice states are not equal in the senate.
Yes, there are some outliers and discrepancy in the number a representative represents. It probably should be adjusted.
I hope it's uncontroversial that, say, blocking a bill to ban slavery is not "failing open," for example, and the persistent effort to prevent slavery from being banned led to many failures in liberty?
When your main bulwark is making it hard to pass bills, all you've really done is make it so that the status quo is powerful. The status quo is not, by default, freedom.
I mean, we will never know. Any answer to this question can only be speculation. I could as easily ask "how many expansions of freedom have we prevented?" And in this moment of political time I think there are at least a few. But that's also just speculation.
In theory it's supposed to be the constitution itself that prevents these abuses, not the crude instrument of legislative gridlock that prevents all change good or bad, especially in a moment like now or before the civil war where the two dominant political forces can't even see eye to eye on basic structures of power.
Much like, to bring it back to the original point, the Senate is already an unrepresentative body, it does not need the procedural filibuster (a unique creature among legislatures as it exists in the us Senate afaik) to make it one.
The constitution is supposed to restrict what abuses? There's basically nothing preventing further restrictions in freedoms on many topics. Because the constitution is generally vague and conceptual, the courts have a lot of leeway to allow restrictions, even on well defined rights (rights are not absolute). There's little interest in calling a convention or otherwise amending the constitution it seems.
The senate is a representative body, for the states. The filibuster ensures that controversial bills pass with more than a simple majority. This is a feature which helps ensure that the affected minority is relatively smaller, protects states rights (it's up to the states if the feds dont regulate in moat cases), and help prevents waffling after every election that changes the simple majority.
The US is certainly more democratic than it was at its founding, when neither the president nor the Senate were entirely directly elected at all, but it's not even close to as democratic as most Americans appear to believe it is.
I think many Americans have been calling it a democracy for shorthand and people forget that it's an adjective for "republic".
For the most part, everyone in the world means approximately the same thing an American does when they say democracy ("a representative constitutional democracy, probably with some degree of regional federalism and bicameralism"). The US neither resembles a pure democracy or the republic the founders created at this point anyways, so it doesn't really matter. These terms are pretty fluid.
Pure democracy is basically never the goal anyways. It's not a bad thing for a system of government to be not entirely democratic, there do have to be checks on pure majoritarianism somehow, but the particulars of the US' democratic lacks seem to be both worse than most Americans imagine them to be, and also far more vestigial if not accidental than they ought to be (many were really there to help uphold slavery and/or prevent reconstruction from fully succeeding).
At this point, the net effect of the US' democratic failings is to create a tyranny of the minority, which can hardly be considered a better failure mode than a tyranny of the majority.
Any source fir it only being tyranny of the minority? I see examples of tyranny of the majority too.
It’s sad how the flimsiest well-actuallys carry so much weight around here. Anyone making arguments around recent decisions being democratic has their head buried in the sand about how blatantly undemocratic the US has been since its inception.
Creating laws out of thin air and not through the proper processes is the opposite of democratic.
This ruling is the right one.
If you don’t like the EPA just say so, but please stop pretending like the Supreme Court is some real arbiter of logic and constitutionality. It has always been (even during liberal courts) an unelected political institution that justifies huge legislative changes with high-minded philosophical hand waving. Occasionally they throw in civil rights decisions for good PR with their aligned base, but even that’s on the chopping block with the current court.
Believing that these ruling will make things more democratic requires ignoring what Republican lawmakers both say and do.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/mike-pence-celebrates-end-roe-1529376...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annakaplan/2021/11/15/republica...
A group of Republican lawmakers introduced a bill Monday to federally decriminalize and tax marijuana, adding an alternative to sweeping Democratic proposals for major marijuana reform and narrow GOP-backed efforts to deschedule the drug in the U.S.
> The States Reform Act has garnered attention as the first prominent bill sponsored by a House Republican to end the federal prohibition of marijuana, which could help give the proposal some political advantage in its efforts to secure bipartisan support. Congressional Democrats have previously introduced various marijuana legalization proposals, including the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, and currently have draft language for the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity (CAO) Act. At this time, however, many observers believe neither of the proposals being led by congressional Democrats will be able to secure the necessary Republican votes for passage in the Senate. Any marijuana legalization proposal would need to secure the support of at least 10 Senate Republicans in order to overcome a potential filibuster.
"A small group of Republicans has finally seen the light at a time they've no power to pass legislation, and it'll fail because of Republican opposition in the Senate" is not quite "The Republicans sponsored a bill".
I think the current crop is largely apathetic about it. The Party rejected legalization in the 2020 platform. https://www.marijuanamoment.net/democratic-party-delegates-r...
There's a fairly clear red/blue state divide on the issue. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Map_of_U...
Polling backs this up, too: https://iop.harvard.edu/survey/details/political-issue-marij...
> Democrats support legalization 49 percent to 28 percent (oppose), Republicans oppose, 32 (support) percent to 50 percent;
How many regulatory bodies are there that need rules passed? I can think of the FAA, FTC, EPA, FDA, USDA, and the NRC just off the top of my head. A quick google search shows there are 19 of these rule making agencies. Even with a wide distribution of rule making authority, these agencies struggle to keep up with our rapidly evolving world.
Forcing congress to hear and make a decision on every single regulation these agencies propose would be a bottleneck that brings this country to it's knees.
Removing ~3 weeks vacation gets you down to 245. Eleven federal holidays? 234.
200 days/year sounds like an almost full-time job?
Also, most sessions only run a few hours, and many more are pro forms, where the minimum quorum show up (I think this is something like 15 or 20), open the session and then immediately close it.
Sure, Congress is in session for about 200 days, and even when it is the elected officials aren't typically on the floor for the full day. But that doesn't mean that when they aren't on the floor they aren't necessarily working. They could be meeting with constituents, with their staff, reading bills, going to committee meetings, just meeting with other reps/senators etc.
You make it sound like they don't do anything.
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E01
So due to the ignorance and corruption among conservative lawmakers regarding climate change and carbon emissions, congress has been in an ideological deadlock on the issue of climate initiatives. The EPA existing somewhat independent of that framework was a benefit.
Because then you're left with who is better convincing uninformed people; the experts, or paid lobbyists.
2. Politicians, per definition, are elected to represent the interests of their constituents. Many constituents disagree with experts (climate change, for example). QED, there is little motivation for politicians to listen or follow the advice of experts, especially if an expert's conclusion is not popular.
They can and should take advice but the whole point of democracy is that the policymakers are democratically accountable.
Yes, that's what the executive branch is for. That's how our government and basically every government in the history of the world has worked.
> When is the last time you've seen anyone from Congress campaign on any substantive issue?
Literally every campaign in my life that I've had any exposure to. Campaigning on real issues is not hard, the problem is getting into Congress and then being unwilling or unable to follow through.
> Under this body of law, known as the major questions doctrine, given both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent, the agency must point to “clear congressional authorization” for the authority it claims.
The reasoning for this is that:
> We presume that “Congress intends to make major policy decisions itself, not leave those decisions to agencies
Darn, my interpretation is shown to be naïve by someone who actually has the specific relevant experience!
Joking aside, thanks for your comment.
Going to be a lot of anger about the results this court season, but I honestly think it's going to be healthier for democracy overall if congress stop leaning on the courts and bureaucracy to make critical regulations.
In my understanding -- and I've read good chunks of the leaked Dobbs opinion -- the above claim is not true. The Dobbs decision's reasoning is largely based on a lack of clear federal legislation saying that abortion is legal.
Of course that ruling should cut both ways and eliminate the possibility of a federal ban as well, but as we've seen the majority is willing to overturn precedent both as old as 50 years and as young as 2 years (see Gorsuch dissent on Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta) so its possible they would find the rational to uphold a ban even if they strike down a law mandating access.
When Congress passes a law, the law (sometimes referred to as the Constitution) gets amended, hence it is also referred to as an amendment.
Edit: ignore this comment, my information was incorrect!
There is a big big difference legally in the US between an Amendment and something in the USC
Essentially the same justification for why Congress could create the EPA in the first place allows them to codify any regulations as law or to extend the EPA mandate. What cannot happen is the EPA unilaterally deciding to overreach its mandate, because its taking actions with the force of law but without any check/balance. The Constitution is quite clear that laws are the purview of the Legislative, not the Executive, and the EPA is a function of the Executive.
Even if it was, there's no reason not to test it.
But states that don’t set their drinking age to 21 lose 8% of their highway funding.
By now, every state is in compliance, but some held out for years, and they could decide to change it in the future and forfeit the money.
Fascism by the way would be rule by fiat - eg a King or a Dictator can just declare new law: "I declare all Hamburgers shall now be served with bacon and anyone who fails to do shall be executed".
Writing down laws and having a neutral body interpret them is a really important part of fair forms of Government (but not unique to Democracy). There is no defense to a fiat in a Dictatorship but that is a defense in eg Democracy. The publishing, disseminating and authority of rules is the basis of a fair form of government.
The liberal justices are not a beacon of neutrality - they lean towards liberal policies and expansionist interpretations the same way the conservative justices lean towards conservative policies and paring down the Fed.
Fascism mixed with bureaucracy is extremely powerful and extremely difficult to fight.
Hopefully this article can shed some light on it for you.
https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/columnists/290919/bu...
This is what I view is happening in the US.
Single dictators don’t mean fascism. That’s an extremely simplistic and playground view on fascism. Heck, single dictators are much easier to combat than democratic & bureaucratic fascism.
And I'm sorry but I'm going to reject the opinion column of a small newspaper as a source.
You're right in that Fascism is not just composed of single dictators but you are confusing the Rule of Law with beaucracy. Having a high court and requiring laws to be explicit is not "Fascism", it is literally the basis of the legal system.
A “rule of law” is a tool that can be used for evil. I’m not sure why we’re being blind to this?
Is it? Then why am I reading news today about the Democrats wanting to suspend the filibuster for a federal abortion law?
The fundamental problem is that large important social policy decisions have been made as court cases rather than legislation for the past 50 years. If Congress actually made laws that explicitly granted rights to the people then we wouldn't be in this situation, but by passing the buck to the court they can claim that problems have been solved without actually having to get their hands dirty or face their constituents.
The constitution does not confer the right to clean water and yet, it’s not unconstitutional for the federal government to make laws regarding clean water standards.
Whether it can be legislated at the Federal level is a completely different question.
I live in a rural area. There are plenty of laws that make sense for my area that would be ridiculous in high density cities and vise verse. Here there is no minimum speed limit and I can drive my tractor down the road by attaching an orange triangle. I can drill my own well. I can chop and burn trees on my property. None if thus would make sense in the city.
NYC can make rules for NYC.
States that are economically and politically dominated by a single economic zone are a great examples of why minority contingents need strong veto power.
They could even get ~2 Republican votes for broad abortion rights, and likely more if they passed a targeted bill about the health of the mother, incest, etc.
As recently as a decade ago the democrats had a supermajority and passed sweeping healthcare reform bills. It's really not an insurmountable barrier.
Delaware was the smallest of the 13 states with a population of 59K. That's 2.36% of the 2.5M total in 1776. There were 26 Senators so each one had about 7.7% voting power.
Today, South Dakota has a population of 905K out of 330M or 0.274% of the population. There are 100 Senators so each has about 2% voting power.
A Senator from South Dakota today represents 1/10 the population that a Senator from Delaware did in 1776. If influence scaled with the same distribution it did in 1776, a South Dakota Senator should only have about 0.77% voting power, but today they have 2%. Population distribution is more widely varied today which creates much more power for lower population states than when in the country was formed.
Abortion regulation powers were not delegated within the US Constitution and therefore those powers go to the states.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantive_due_process
It's unfortunate that there isn't a stronger right to bodily autonomy enshrined in the constitution but that's tangential here.
There's still precedent and federal law that protects bodily autonomy in respect to having private medial exchanges with doctors.
We still have the FACE act for example, which is federal law preventing people from blocking the entrance of abortion clinics.
I think we'll find quite soon how much abortion is intertwined with interstate commerce.
Regarding bodily autonomy, it becomes a little tricky to make that argument when a mothers' decisions affect a separate body from her own. A body with its own DNA that happens to rely temporarily on her mother. Is the argument that a mother can kill her healthy child as long as it couldn't survive without her?
How can anyone say that with a straight face in the presence of the electoral college (heck even the elected representatives don't have a legal obligation to vote for their party's candidate) and most importantly gerrymandering. Your assumption that the people can vote to enact change is simply not true.
I don't think that scales. When some group of people is large enough and has enough different things going on it has to delegate regulation making. There is just too much for the top level of management to be directly regulating everything.
The larger the entity grows and the more it has going on the more regulation making needs to be delegated. At some point you reach the point where even critical regulation has to be delegated.
We passed that point, I think, a long time ago in all the large first world economies.
"It is within the power of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions"
and leave the rest to the bureaucrats, and that would have been enough. I don't think that's an unreasonable ask.
We can hope that Congress will step up and legislate, but that seems pretty unrealistic to me. I fear that this is just the latest wave of successes by the party that wants our government to be as toothless and inept as possible and already has a stranglehold on Congress for the foreseeable future.
The effect of the Court’s order, followed by the Trump administration’s re- peal of the rule, was that the Clean Power Plan never went into effect. The ensuing years, though, proved the Plan’s moderation. Market forces alone caused the power industry to meet the Plan’s nationwide emissions target—through exactly the kinds of generation shifting the Plan contem- plated. See 84 Fed. Reg. 32561–32562 (2019); Brief for United States 47. So by the time yet another President took office, the Plan had become, as a practical matter, obsolete. For that reason, the Biden administration announced that, instead of putting the Plan into effect, it would commence a new rulemaking. Yet this Court determined to pronounce on the legality of the old rule anyway. The Court may be right that doing so does not violate Article III mootness rules (which are notoriously strict). See ante, at 14–16. But the Court’s docket is discretionary, and because no one is now subject to the Clean Power Plan’s terms, there was no reason to reach out to decide this case. The Court today issues what is really an advisory opinion on the proper scope of the new rule EPA is considering. That new rule will be subject anyway to immediate, pre-enforcement judi- cial review. But this Court could not wait—even to see what the new rule says—to constrain EPA’s efforts to ad- dress climate change. The limits the majority now puts on EPA’s authority fly in the face of the statute Congress wrote. The majority says it is simply “not plausible” that Congress enabled EPA to regulate power plants’ emissions through generation shift- ing. Ante, at 31. But that is just what Congress did when it broadly authorized EPA in Section 111 to select the “best system of emission reduction” for power plants. §7411(a)(1). The “best system” full stop—no ifs, ands, or buts of any kind relevant here. The parties do not dispute that generation shifting is indeed the “best system”—the most effective and efficient way to reduce power plants’ car- bon dioxide emissions. And no other provision in the Clean Air Act suggests that Congress meant to foreclose EPA from selecting that system; to the contrary, the Plan’s regulatory approach fits hand-in-glove with the rest of the statute. The majority’s decision rests on one claim alone: that gen- eration shifting is just too new and too big a deal for Con- gress to have authorized it in Section 111’s general terms. But that is wrong. A key reason Congress makes broad del- egations like Section 111 is so an agency can respond, ap- propriately and commensurately, to new and big problems. Congress knows what it doesn’t and can’t know when it drafts a statute; and Congress therefore gives an expert agency the power to address issues—even significant ones—as and when they arise. That is what Congress did in enacting Section 111. The majority today overrides that legislative choice. In so doing, it deprives EPA of the power needed—and the power granted—to curb the emission of greenhouse gases.
tl;dr: the majority chose to rule on a plan that never went into effect and will never go into effect, in practice taking on an advisory role rather than waiting for an actual concrete plan to rule on. Beyond that, Congress intentionally chose the broad language of "best system of emissions reductions" but the majority asserts that congress should have instead referred to generation shifting by name despite the technology not existing at the time of drafting
The modern day supreme court is a joke, unable to be even remotely consistent in how it applies its rationale and its clear they're merely another puppet for conservative politics.
And, Barrett couldn't even cite the first amendment...
If this was true it would have been the case for all previous court panels. That it's not shows that it's the court playing politics now.
Congress didn't pass a law and disappear. If Congress felt that the EPA was misinterpreting the language of the Clean Air Act it could have passed a law limiting the agency's powers. The fact that it did not do so is the strongest rebuttal to the claim that the EPA was operating outside its mandate.
This decision is an announcement by the Court that Congress can no longer be trusted to govern the agencies it oversees.
> The emergency here is that the EPA now has no idea what its authority will be on any regulatory actions regarding CO2.
That's hyperbole.
It is not congresses job to enforce the law by writing new laws.
If Republicans want to abolish the EPA, all they have to do is pass a law. They could do it with a simple majority in each House if they abolish the filibuster (which itself requires only a simple majority).
There is no meaningful loss of democratic control here. Congress can do whatever it wants, with or without the EPA.
This is just the highest court in the land acting as toadies for the fossil fuel industry, legislating from the bench on a flimsy right wing legal theory.
This is a massive blow to the US being able to reach emissions targets. Every day we're one step closer to the 'business as usual' path that leaves the world 3-4c hotter. That's a catastrophic scenario.
I think this is the actual goal. I don't know if they are aware that it does not make a difference climate-wise what they believe (or not).
Whose targets though? 'Shouldn't we the people' have a say? i.e. shouldn't congress actually hold the hearings, digest the info and go on the record voting for or against important items?
We don't let the IRS set tax rates, we should not let unelected bureaucrats decide what the environmental goals are - elect people you think represent your priorities, have them go on the record supporting or opposing important decisions, and then pass a law the establishes frameworks to the agencies in charge under which they operate.
Of course, but this will never happen. So if the only positive outcome of an action is a long tail event, then maybe the action shouldn’t be taken. We have to look at the expected value of this, which is that people less versed than the experts suddenly making decisions they had previously relegated to the experts. Chaos.
Want 'We the People' to have a say in whether or not the EPA should regulate CO2? Put it to a national referendum. Congress has shown repeatedly that it's more than happy to watch the world burn if it means their superpacs are stuffed with lobbyist funds.
Does this mean that while they cannot stop new high emissions plants from being built, once a plant actually starts producing they could regulate it?
That might actually work out better, because building a plant and then having it come under regulation would probably be more costly to the plant owners than if they had went for a cleaner plant from the beginning.
Protester: "6 unelected officials can't decide what I can do!"
Supreme Court: "That's literally what we just said!"
If Congress punts issues around indefinitely for its own political wheeling and dealing, it still cannot outsource a decision on those issues to other branches of the federal government. Whether thats to the executive branch or the judicial branch. Not hard! Except more of your elected representatives!
If consensus is impossible then that's the reality we live in, the means won't be able to justify the ends, you have to work within the consensus mechanism prescribed on every topic.
> Supreme Court: "That's literally what we just said!"
Bullshit. The court was perfectly happy telling millions of people they had no right to an abortion. They’re just a bunch of partisan hacks
Congress outsourced the decision to the judicial branch, the judicial branch said its for the elected representatives, aka Congress, to decide. Barring any supremacy from Congress, state laws and the consensus mechanisms of those states are the only laws available.
Congress outsourced emissions decision to the executive branch, the judicial branch said its for the elected representatives, aka Congress, to decide. Barring any supremacy from Congress, state laws and the consensus mechanisms of those states are the only laws available.
This is not what happened at all. They ruled against the federal government's ability to regulate it.
None of this had anything to do with the federal government regulating it. It was the court saying it was a right not to be infringed upon.
Roe v Wade was ruled on the basis of the 14th amendment due process clause regarding the right to privacy. Anyone who thought this ruling was an iron-clad blanket right to abortion was fooling themselves.
Abortion is not specifically enumerated in the constitution. Just like everything else not in the constitution, it's up to States to make their own laws regarding it.
Even in a divisive thread like this one, your comment here stands out as breaking the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them and sticking to the rules when posting here? We'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The judicial branch has a responsibility to itself for self-consistent reasoning, which it has completely abandoned this term.
The court is not supposed to change dramatically with every election, that’s what the legislative branch does. And yet, the court did.
It’s legal of course, the court can do what it wants. But it can (and has) lost approval and legitimacy, which at the end of the day were it’s most valuable currency.
Opposing sides of that court have said the exact same thing about Roe v Wade. Ruth Bader Ginsberg even said "this is pretty weak, going to need Congress here", no different than Justice Alito on the opposite side.
I think your perspective is very common, I think it is disingenuous for different people that should know better to promote that perspective. There is so much the elected representatives and the people can do. This crisis of confidence perspective relies on nobody actually reading these cases.
The Supreme Court has acted as a second Congress for a wide variety of things. This is how miranda rights happened. This is how contraception was legalized. This is how homosexuality was legalized. This is how race integration was legalized. ETC.
(As just one, like interstate commerce, will keep it on the chopping block by the same court)
also, currently people need to be challenging laws and the court has to accept those challenges, if there isn’t political will to still challenge those things then the cases will never happen
I agree that Congress or the consensus mechanisms of the states are more accurate authorities.
I also agree that it is wildly disruptive to do this. But for that I empathize, and hope to inspire on other ways of consensus making.
SCOTUS leaned liberal (in the sense that liberal justices tend to believe in larger-scope interpretations of Constitution) for a long time, now for the first time in a while they're leaning conservative (the Constitution says what it says and if we want it to say something different Congress should pass an amendment).
Honestly I find myself falling into the more Conservative camp from a judicial perspective. I'm all for gay marriage and a woman's right to choose, but I feel like we used SCOTUS to do an end-run around Congress to get both at a federal level, and from my layperson's reading the constitutional justifications for both feel stretched to me. In the same sense that you can use creative interpretations of the Bible to justify basically anything, you can do similar things with the Constitution. That isn't how the system is supposed to work
The court as an institution has a responsibility to maintain some sort of consistency if it wants any legitimacy.
How can people make decisions about where and how to live if their fundamental rights are changing year to year (and most recently being taken away)?
You are also not aligned with the current public opinion. The court is at its lowest approval rating ever, and that is before overturning Roe. If the court cannot maintain it’s appearance of legitimacy then it essentially fails as an institution. The court could have chosen to move more slowly, with more restraint, but it didn’t.
And you can say "yeah but racists were the bad guys", but that's not how any of this works, regardless of what narratives we decide to apply to history after the fact. Did the court's lack of perceived legitimacy in Birmingham or Little Rock (among many other places that required less extreme enforcement) cause it to fail as an institution?
The court only fails as an institution when it's decisions are no longer enforced. Last I checked we haven't reached that point yet. And even if we do, worth remembering SCOTUS survived the last civil war intact.
Or the court can function perpetually against the public will?
We can't be opposed to police creatively interpreting laws to target minorities and be okay with the EPA creatively interpreting laws to target fossil fuel companies. Just because the latter is in the service of a good cause doesn't make it legal. The ends do not justify the means--down that way lies peril.
This is just nakedly partisan stuff going on. I think viewing it through that lens - "we're going to do what we want because it fits our politics" - makes the most sense.
The problem is much of the left’s gains over the last few decades have been based on shaky legal/constitutional ground. Even leftist judges like Ginsberg admitted that, and they were counting on the mistakes being in place for too long to correct (precedent).
Now all that technical debt is coming back to kick our ass.
This isn’t the end of the world though, Congress can fix everything that’s happened in the last few weeks via proper laws.
Proper laws are no match for calvinball rulings.
EDIT: RE: no right to poop(sic) in the constitution
It's a list of things the government may not do, not a list of things you may do. Try reading it, it's very short. I would imagine the court would rule a law against that would violate the right to life.
EDIT: It didn't need to be acknowledged because there wasn't a strong push to disarm the population until fairly recently.
EDIT2: It looks to me like they only really go back to just after the civil war, largely to keep African Americans from carrying firearms. The first attempt by the Federal Government to ban them was in the mid 20th century which was exactly what I expected.
EDIT3: James Madison tried and failed to pass the legislation (presumably because it was unpopular), at the state level (not federal level) and it didn't prevent people from owning guns just carrying them in public.
EDIT for your edit: Huh? When I was a kid in Texas way back in the 90's, it was illegal to carry a gun period. You could take them out hunting or to the range or whatnot, but carrying a gun was illegal. The first concealed handgun law was 1995 if memory serves. Carry bans go back to the colonial era.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/26/conservati...
The Ninth Amendment basically says "this isn't a list of all the rules".
There's no right to poop in the Constitution. Do we have one? If Congress banned pooping, how would the court rule?
And yet, they saw fit to include the Ninth Amendment, so some nincompoop wouldn't go "there's no right to privacy!"
> I would imagine the court would rule a law against that would violate the right to life.
The wording is "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"; what happens if pooping is made a capital crime?
Why is banning abortion, marijuana, and whatnot not a similar violation of the "liberty" part of the same clause?
(and what's with this edit-to-reply thing you've got going?)
The parties of 1971 were both very different compared to today. You can't assume that someone active in the party in 1956 (Brennan) holds the same values as what's talked about on OAN today.
https://www.thwink.org/sustain/articles/017_PowellMemo/
SCOTUS deliberately kneecapped the Voting Rights Act quite a bit in recent years. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder
Legislation isn't much protection from a nakedly partisan Court.
I think the temporary pain will be worth it in the long run as we do the hard work to pass the laws the majority agrees will improve the environment, human rights, and so on.
>This isn’t the end of the world though, Congress can fix everything that’s happened in the last few weeks via proper laws.
No, this us pretty much what the end of the world looks like.
Taken as a relative claim, it at least could make sense. But relative to what?
Relative to the US? False; both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left. You can probably argue that the Republican Party’s structural advantages cause both parties to be a little to the right of where they’d be without them, or that Americans’ ignorance of party platforms means you can smuggle a few points in that are slightly more extreme than what they’d endorse, but it’s going to be a small effect.
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-there-are-two-...
Can it?
In principle, sure, anything can happen.
In practice, given how it's not possible to pass any legislation without a filibuster-proof majority?
As others have commented in this and related threads, this is a win for industry precisely because congress CAN'T do anything in practice, given the reakpolitk of how congress actually "works" today.
I wish folks would stop saying "well, it should just go back to the spec, problem solved". This isn't code. This is the convoluted and complex world of political reality, where, unfortunately, might does often mean right. And more often than not, addressing the root cause isn't even possible, much less practical.
If anything, it's the current supreme court that is taking a binary view of legal interpretation and have "fixed the glitch". Glitches which in reality are patches which have been added organically over time to address changes to the underlying OS, new and unheard of use cases, changing specs and requirements, etc.
Unfortunately, a full rewrite often requires systemic overhall and reboot (something I would hope people are averse to doing in practice)
Dream on. You're trolling right?
If you don't think they'll call any regulation (or enumeration of rights) they don't like unconstitutional, I don't know what to tell you.
It's abundantly clear from the Dobbs majority opinion they will not accept a Roe statue from Congress, that they would overturn it on 10th amendment grounds. It's not an express power Congress has, thus it's strictly up to states. Since they also stated in Dobbs they'd use rational basis scrutiny, the lowest scrutiny possible, when judging state laws on abortion restrictions, I expect they will accept state laws that:
* define moment of conception as murder
* fetus as citizen in fact, meaning out of state abortions are also subject to murder charges
* high burden of proof on women, low burden of proof for the state, that a miscarriage rather than abortion occurred
* hold abortion-is-legal states to article 4, section 1 "full faith and credit", i.e. civil fines and extradition for persons fleeing judgements in abortion-is-not-legal states
* hold companies paying for abortion procedures and travel as party to a crime
The Court is lost for a generation, short of expanding the Court. There is no chance 3/4 of the states will ratify a constitutional amendment on this issue. And there's a lot more litigation to come.
And should it come to the Court, I expect they will set aside Griswold, Lawrence, Obergefell using the same logic - it's not a federal power. How they could possible not reverse Loving, I'm not sure, except that likely no state is as yet backward enough to try and making interracial marriage illegal once again.
I think there is merit in the argument that we've been asking the Court to be expedient, while then not doing the dirty work of putting these rights in constitutional amendments. Instead we're kicking the can down the road, but then we are also avoiding a lot of public contention arguing about it - for good and probably not for good to some degree. But look at the polling. Most Americans now disapprove of the judiciary nearly as much as Congress. With all three branches of government at historic low approval, it is very damaging to representative democracy that this has happened, not least of which is that an unpopularly elected president put these three justices on the Court who lied under oath that these cases are "settled law", and yet just deeply unsettled one of them.
As opposed to shaky electoral/gerrymandering grounds
Reverse Wickard, and put the Federal Government back in its narrow scope
https://twitter.com/cristianafarias/status/15414273388266291...
The photo on the bottom right was from before the coach was asked to stop giving post-game talks that included prayer, an order he complied with. It is not the behavior at question in the court case, so absolutely irrelevant to the matter at hand. I think Sotomayor should have included a date on the photo to make this clear.
Photo on the top right is of the coach being joined in prayer only by members of the opposing team, so if he was coercing the players on his own team, is was quite ineffective. It was a silent prayer, so yes, quiet.
Photo on the left is the coach being joined in prayer by members of the public, not team members, so also not good evidence of coercion. Also a silent prayer, so yes, quiet.
[X] Doubt
Blockade of judges started in 2001, when Democrats declared Bush illigetimate, and decided that no judges would be selected. Republicans threatened the "nuclear option" (removing fillibusters). The "Gang of 14" in 2005 wrote ideological ground rules and approved a set number of judges to keep the nuclear option from being used.
Obama came to office, and the Democrats used the nuclear option - despite the gang of 14 framework, but then said that it doesn't apply to supreme court ballots. Republicans came in and decided that yes, it did apply.
We've been destroying our own government with crap like this for the last 20 years.
Partisanship is a hell of a drug.
Let's not pretend that the current situation represents anything like "normal", and further, that we don't all recognize that bad-faith actions by the Republican party are responsible.
Yeah, that's because change happened.
Pretending that something can't be done because it worked for hundreds of years and then something bad happened isn't actually very correct.
The court has been an illegitimate and partisan body ever since Garland's seat was denied.
It's a much bigger problem then just this.
Yes, it was. What's your point?
Parent poster claimed that a non-political Supreme Court isn't possible, and in reality, the Supreme Court has been essentially completely non-political for all but about 22 years of its existence
It’s not their job to write laws or advance policy, it’s their job to enforce the constitution as written.
A textualist reading of the First Amendment would permit the President to infringe free speech/religion/press etc. rights, as it says "Congress", and the "no law" bit would texutally forbid things like banning human sacrifice in religious ceremonies.
Textualists always find an out when they need one.
Humans will always bring bias, but I can’t think of anything better than “interpret as it was plainly written and would have been understood by the people who wrote it at the time”.
> Do you have a better suggestion that’s less partisan and less prone to abuse?
I'm of the opinion that textualism, in actual practice, is a highly partisan and heavily abused concept intended to be a thin veil over "I rule the way I want". I prefer the concept of a living Constitution; per Jefferson:
> I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
A textualist reading of the Second Amendment doesn't permit banning of personally owned nuclear arms.
Textualists don't seem too interested in overruling the relevant unconstitutional laws in these cases.
(Yes, I've read it. It's vague - deliberately, I'd argue - in spots, like in defining "general welfare", and some folks like to pretend things like the Ninth Amendment don't exist at all.)
The incestuous relationship between the judiciary and the legislative branch in common law systems is very problematic and does not allow true separation of powers. Like so much in our democratic governments, this works as long as most participants behave in good faith, but breaks down when some do not.
Instead of laws on reproductive rights, you had a ruling even detailing the time frames in which abortion was legal.
Instead of legalizing gay marriage, you have a ruling on the federal recognition of licenses issued in individual states.
Instead of a law on lobbying, you have a ruling saying that monetary contributions to campaigns are the free speech of lobbying groups.
Instead of an organic law on weapons permits, you have a ruling saying what kinds of firearm regulations states can pass.
But people can't say this politicization of the SCOTUS is new; back when the hot topic were worker rights, in the early XX century, those were the battles being fought there, to skip Congressional debates:
https://reason.com/2021/12/02/the-laissez-faire-origins-of-t...
The Supreme Court is like a compiler simply running the instructions it's been told. It doesn't have any input over what's written.
Historically, people have used the Supreme Court to create laws, circumventing the voting process and giving 9 people oligarch-like power. This is not ideal.
There's also the general expectation the Supreme Court should do what's "right" which again, isn't a relevant metric for judging whether something is constitutional. The Supreme Court at its best is an amoral, apolitical institution.
Snark aside, there’s a reasonable case to be made that Congress has been increasingly treating the judiciary as a super-legislature. Far easier to avoid the work of compromise etc. when you can punt it to the USSC. Whether that’s pure laziness or something structural based on a reduction of overall party power is up for discussion.
The politicization of the Court is a completely bipartisan affair going back 4 decades at least.
We might even say it goes back 8 decades, to FDR's threats to pack the court (see "a switch in time saves nine").
And we can find many earlier examples as well.
I’ve never understood why the Democrats are painted as the bad guys interfering in a non-partisan appointment of Bork. Nominating Bork was an insane act.
It is a side-channel for lawyers and activists on all sides of the political spectrum to achieve what they couldn't achieve in the legislature.
Judicial review was a mistake.
Folks: it's not within the Court's authority to decide what is a good idea and what is a bad idea. Their sole job is to interpret laws through the lens of the Constitution. The justices may well agree with your wishes of what Congress could do, but they see that the current laws of our nation won't allow Congress to do it, or at least not in that way.
But even if you believe that a given law is good - that women should have an inalienable right to an abortion, or that there should be tight controls on who can carry a weapon, or whatever - you've got to recognize that sometimes the Constitution does not give the government the power to make that happen. In such events, you can't claim that the Court is corrupt because the justices won't recognize the important of what you value.
Rather, you have to recognize that it's become your moral duty to alter the laws of the land to allow for what you seek. The Constitution's Article V is there precisely for this reason. Granted, it's a really high bar to clear, but there is a built-in mechanism for fixing any such bugs that we find in the Constitution.
It does, though, via the Ninth Amendment, which explicitly notes that the Constitution is not an exhaustive listing of the rights of American citizens.
The whole point of these was to avoid unenumerated rights being completely unprotected. The current court seems to think only the 1st and 2nd amendment exist.
You also ignored my example of 2A, or the current controversy (for which I haven't yet read the argument, but I assume that the 10th Amendment plays into it in exactly the same way you're arguing for the 9th).
> You also ignored my example of 2A
Sure, because everyone does. The number of people arguing bans on personal ownership of nuclear arms are unconstitutional is... small. Even originalist/textualists seem to agree it's by no means absolute.
> Sure, because everyone does.
I don't think this is a winning argument. The fact that one argument - and one thought important enough to enumerate actually explicitly - is frequently ignored doesn't support the idea that another unenumerated one exists, and quite possibly the opposite.
More specifically, most Roe supporters have been ignoring the "bodily autonomy" philosophy all along, and more recently even going directly against it. It would seem that it's no more absolute than you believe 2A to be.
As I wrote elsewhere in this thread:
1. Have you taken to the streets protesting when people, even after consulting with their doctor, have been forbidden the right to use marijuana medicinally?
2. Do you oppose the authority of the FDA to determine what medications Americans should be allowed to use, such that we should be able to use a pharmaceutical even if the FDA says it's too dangerous, or not effective enough?
3. Have you even argued against the authority of the government to force individuals to take covid-19 vaccinations?
If you answer "no" to any of the above, then I assert that your claims to believe in the "bodily autonomy" argument behind Roe is false.
So, how does the government get the authority to take marijuana off the table? How do they get the authority to take any other treatment off the table? And how do they have the authority to say that vaccination is the only acceptable course when covid-19 is rampant?
This all seems to be the same argument, so why don't I hear very many Roe supporters arguing for the freedoms I referenced above, or at least providing answers to my questions? What's the principled line of philosophy that supports a freedom to abortion without also recognizing a right to medicinal marijuana or passing up a covid-19 show (when either is done under doctor supervision)?
Roe also makes it quite clear it's not absolute:
"A State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life. At some point in pregnancy, these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision. ... We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."
> So, how does the government get the authority to take marijuana off the table?
For the same reason as Roe highlights above; that the right to privacy is not absolute. I think you'll find the leftist position on marijuana is fairly similar to the leftist position on abortion, though.
> And how do they have the authority to say that vaccination is the only acceptable course when covid-19 is rampant?
They don't, and they haven't.
I think that's true directionally, but not quantitatively. I haven't seen riots about marijuana, or claims that SCOTUS is corrupt.
And although I can't say this about any particular individual, I think that statistically, the left position regarding covid-19 vaccinations seems to be contrary to the "bodily autonomy" philosophy. Admittedly, there may be differences in scale of risk that lead to this difference. But the rhetoric we're hearing today seems to frame abortion rights as an absolute with no room for such finesse. And I think it is on them to explain how to draw that line.
So? "You can only say it's a right if you riot about it" is a weird position to take.
> And although I can't say this about any particular individual, I think that statistically, the left position regarding covid-19 vaccinations seems to be contrary to the "bodily autonomy" philosophy.
I don't know what you think the leftist position is on this, but no state nor the Federal government has even hinted at the idea of a universal vaccination requirement for COVID-19.
Virtually all states require quite a few vaccinations - measles, mumps, rubella, etc. - in public schools. Once again, Roe doesn't rely on "bodily autonomy", and any such right is very clearly not absolute (as Roe itself makes clear about privacy). My autonomy to swing a knife around ends when it hits your face.
Thought experiment: Do we have a right to poop? Can Congress forbid me from pooping? How would SCOTUS rule on a law banning bowel movements?
A month ago, governmental violations of bodily autonomy were ignored, or grumbled about at most. If you want me to believe that this change is qualitatively different, you need to explain that, or else I'm going to put both violations in the same bucket.
> no state nor the Federal government has even hinted at the idea of a universal vaccination requirement for COVID-19
First, regardless of what they've actually tried to do, there has been a lot of talk about how they should. Such talk comes pretty much exclusively from the same group of people who think that overturning Roe is an apocalypse.
Second, they most certainly have tried to force vaccination as much as they could get away with. That wasn't by a law saying "get vaccinated or go to jail". That was a backdoor coercive thing where the gov't tried to say "if you want to do business with the gov't then all your employees must be vaccinated (leading to employees getting fired)", in conjunction with the fact that the government is already so damned big that they can be the 800lb gorilla in purchasing as a backdoor alternative to legislation. And while this was going on, people who I'm very sure support Roe were nodding their heads saying it's the right thing to do. Again, there may be a principled argument for treating this differently. But I think it's incumbent on the Roe protesters to explain what that principle is, or they appear to be unprincipled hypocrites.
I'll take a stab at one potential explanation.
Pregnancy isn't infectious; you will not get pregnant by sitting next to a pregnant woman on the bus. Rights become more complicated when they impact others.
When it comes to marijuana, it can be more difficult to get past Wickard and Heart of Atlanta Motel when it relates to things like commodities sold on near international markets. Abortion services are often way more local of a law, far more difficult to argue interstate commerce.
I think you're making it sound more black-and-white than it really was. It's true that they weren't talking about coming into your house and holding you down. But they did try to make it as close to "you can't get a job to earn money to buy food" as they could. Pres Biden did issue an EO saying that anybody doing business with the federal government, and anybody in their supply chain, must ensure that their employees are vaccinated. Given the enormous size of the federal government, this covers a huge proportion of the country. (the courts did throw this out, but not before they'd coerced a lot of people to go against their own conscience)
Further, that's as far as the politicians and regulators were able to go. I seem to recall talk in some locales (NYC?) talking about wanting to implement vaccine passports, with which local businesses would deny entry to unvaccinated people, so you can't even go to the grocery store to buy food.
And, of course, my main point was about what the masses were arguing for. I don't think you could seriously deny that a sizable faction of people were arguing that the government SHOULD do all of the above. And that's exactly what I'm saying: people are claiming to back the idea of "bodily autonomy", but for a whole lot of them, their actions demonstrate that this is much less a fundamental inalienable right than they're willing to admit today.
A pregnant woman the next desk over to you doesn't have any effect on your body. A person infected with covid the next desk over does. You do understand how pregnancy works, right?
I imagine most would agree I have bodily autonomy to move my arms. I can't then swing my arms and beat someone to death, right? Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.
You have all the right you want to not get vaccinated so long as your action doesn't impact everyone else around you. Feel free to go live in the woods with everyone else who doesn't interact with the rest of society. Nobody is going to come by and say you need to get vaccinated, just that there are a lot of benefits to being a member of society if you choose to do so.
To argue, "oh whoops you didn't _do the work_ to obtain your RIGHTS" is also simply a distraction. The US is founded on the concept of unenumerated rights. Do not be fooled. We had those rights and now we don't thanks to this new court.
Further, I don't buy that you truly believed the argument behind Roe anyway. I don't know you personally, but it's a good bet that you don't support the philosophy that it described. What Roe said[1] was that a person can make whatever[2] treatment they individual decide (in consultation with their doctor) is most appropriate for their circumstances.
But I'm betting that you don't actually agree with this, as evidenced that you likely haven't pursued other violations of it with such vehemence. So I ask you:
1. Have you taken to the streets protesting when people, after consulting with their doctor, have been forbidden the right to use marijuana medicinally?
2. Do you oppose the authority of the FDA to determine what medications Americans should be allowed to use, such that we should be able to use a pharmaceutical even if the FDA says it's too dangerous, or not effective enough?
3. Have you even argued against the authority of the government to force individuals to take covid-19 vaccinations?
If you answer "no" to any of the above, then I assert that your claims to believe in the argument behind Roe is false.
[1] Believe it or not, I actually support the philosophy of bodily autonomy. But that doesn't change the fact that the actual argument behind Roe was a notably lousy one. This is precisely the point I was trying to make in my original comment: one's opinions about the goodness of something are independent of their judgment about the legality of legislation under the Constitution.
[2] Actually, Roe's text limits itself to just abortions, but it seems clear that such a principle ought to apply to all medical treatments in principle - that's why many of today's protests are framed more broadly as "bodily autonomy".
The justices lied to congress and were always going to overturn Roe. There's no higher judicial ground here.
My response to that seems not to have been popular. It's the job of the Senate to help vet the nominees based on their abilities as judges. I don't think the senators should be making these decisions based on the nominee's adherence to a particular ideology. And to the extent that the senators are deciding based on this, it's those very senators that are making the Court political - don't blame the justices.
It may have started with a certain role, but it is now a political entity. I treat it as such.
People also need to try and understand that not every issue is a federal issue. There are also 50 state governments.
I really don't like having this unelected councils of wizards who get wield god-like "authority"-- it feels a bit gross in a democracy.
I 'get it' w/ respect BrownvBoard, Miranda, etc, but at least in my lifetime the court hasn't done much to expand or protect my rights. Greatest hits from them are weird election cases (Florida 2000) making it easier for really shadowy/fucked organizations to plow $$$ into elections.
If these folks are indeed just umpires & good old legal "scholars" who are there to call balls & strikes, why are hundreds of millions dollars spent promoting + grooming these individuals?
Going forward I'm very much in favor of subtle "judicial humiliation"-- across the board de-sanctify this institution
Step 0-- make 'em take C-SPAN cameras
So you feel the Cabinet posts should also be elected positions?
Start with the Secretary of the Treasury and move on to the Secretary of Defense and HHS.
The sooner the better.
but you are OK with the 'unelected council of wizards' at the EPA wielding their god-like authority instead?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Pr...
When it comes to the Supreme Court - that's it. Congress can't do anything about Supreme Court rulings. Your comparison of the EPA to the Supreme Court is misguided.
Actually, they can, that is the whole point - congress has the power to pass laws - SC does not. That is exactly what the SC just told congress to do - their job.
It is happening at the state level too. In Wisconsin, the gerrymandered (google it for background on Wisconsin) legislature has chosen to not conduct hearings on governor appointees, with the result that holdovers from prior administrations can remain in office indefinitely.
""(T)he expiration of Prehn's term on the DNR Board does not create a vacancy. Prehn lawfully retains his position on the DNR Board as a holdover," wrote Chief Justice Annette Ziegler for the majority. "Therefore, the Governor cannot make a provisional appointment to replace Prehn." [1]
[1] https://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-supreme-court-rules-former-hea...
Ironically, I think you are agreeing with the court right now - They don't want the power that the court has previously taken.
We just happen to have people who have a very... different... idea about what the law means than their predecessors.
The legal trappings of the conservative positions have been explicitly merely legal trappings.