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Agree completely. Another related problem is that both parts of the judicial system (the agents looking for crimes, and the courts, and now also the prison/par

• javajosh 10y ago
  >both parts of the judicial system (the agents looking for crimes, and the courts, and now also the prison/parole system) are all in bed with each other, when they should be balancing each other out. Ha, this actually means that we should have a self-similar separation of powers. I'm not sure that's what the framer's had in mind - I suspect they wanted the top-level powers to act coherently to balance each other out. Partly, though, I think it's about a misunderstanding about the nature of the "justice system". The police are, essentially, an extension of the Executive. This is true because police are not just "reactive", they execute. In the same way, any part of the government that "does stuff" is part of the executive. The DMV is Executive. Only the court itself, and the judges and support staff in the court, are Judicial. The blurred line is the "district attorney", who is responsible both for prosecuting on behalf of the state, and defending the state from action. Remarkably, the Executive has acquired a truly enormous amount of special treatment under the law. First, because the law itself exempts Executive workers from a wide variety of the law, and second because of the way the system works, the way Justice moves cases toward conclusion, which is filled with conflicts of interest that erode the separation between Justice and Executive, specifically within local law enforcement. Frankly, I really love the idea of self-similar separation of powers, even at the local level, where there is an adversarial tone between the Justice, Executive, and Legislative branches! Justice should be incentivised to dig up dirt on the Executive; the Executive should pride itself on knowing (and following) the law exactly (not "getting the bad guys"). The Legislative, in the end, should work to maintain rules that are simple, easy to understand, and which above all, maintain the adversarial relationship between powers at every level, federal, state, and local. This is also a good, strong foundation to discuss secrecy in government action - which is Executive action. What has happened with the introduction of the secret courts is the spreading of the secrecy between powers. This should be rejected for weakening the separation of powers, but also undermining the root of strength for each branch: validation by the people's opinion. The people cannot have an informed opinion if they do not know what their government is doing. (As a practical matter, this is non-trivial. The "Government's Understanding" of the world drives operations, which are often handed off to a team specializing in "doing stuff". So you have a large sea of (presumably fairly competent) analysts and operations staff working thousands, if not millions, of projects in every field in which the government interacts, which is essentially every field. It helps to start dividing the behavior into categories, which may or may not match up well with the USG org chart.) Sigh. Maybe complexity itself limits the size of a legitimate democracy, because how can we be good citizens without understanding fully the doings of our government, and how can we know that even without secrecy in place?