8 ms·

The headlines aren’t entirely wrong. If you look at the conservative majority opinions, you’ll find that indeed, it’s about the relevant legal issues, ie. what

• belltaco 4y ago
  Trivially disproven by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31940815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31940815
• JamesBarney 4y ago
  The roe v Wade decision seemed to follow a similar pattern with the conservative opinion being about how there isn't really a basis for a constitutional right to an abortion up to viability (seems true) and the liberal dissenting opinion was about how the decision was going to be bad for women (also true) and how this opens up the floodgates to reversing a lot of other important supreme court decisions ( not sure how true that is)
  • TylerE 4y ago
    I’m waiting for the first lawsuit against the DEA. What in the constitution gives the right for the Fedwral Government to regulate what we voluntarily put in our bodies or grow in our back yards?
    • bashinator 4y ago
      Why stop at “grow”? I don’t see why the federal government should have any say over in what chemicals I might want to purchase or manufacture.
      • TylerE 4y ago
        There is a bit of a your fist/my face issue. I don’t want my neighbor operating a meth lab in his shed or building an atomic pile.
        • bashinator 4y ago
          Devil's advocate: (I won't take on the atomic pile question since we're talking about consumables) Operating a meth lab is dangerous _because_ it's illegal. If it were regulated and licensed, it would be no more dangerous than say operating an 18-wheel rig.
          • Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
            Your comparison only holds if the rig is filled with the dangerous constituent chemicals, which are also regulated by government.
            • bashinator 4y ago
              Exactly. Regulated, not banned.
    • tablespoon 4y ago
      > I’m waiting for the first lawsuit against the DEA. What in the constitution gives the right for the Fedwral Government to regulate what we voluntarily put in our bodies or grow in our back yards? My bet? "Interstate commerce."
      • giantg2 4y ago
  • specialist 4y ago
    More specifically, the dissenting opinion argues that the right to abortion logically follows from all the prior rights granted to women, eg own property, voting, divorce.
    • JamesBarney 4y ago
      It's my understanding it's argued the right to an abortion is given from the 14th amendment. I didn't really see anything from the dissenting opinion about how the right to an abortion is given by women's right to voting, property or divorce (?).
      • specialist 4y ago
        How could they have been more explicit? From the dissent (emphasis mine): JUSTICE BREYER, JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, and JUSTICE KAGAN, dissenting. For half a century, Roe v. Wade, and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, have protected the liberty and equality of women. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that the Constitution safeguards a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to bear a child. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions. ... Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens. Yesterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy could (within reasonable limits) make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act involves. And in thus safeguarding each woman’s reproductive freedom, the Constitution also protected “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in [this Nation’s] economic and social life.”. But no longer. As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare. Some women, especially women of means, will find ways around the State’s assertion of power. Others—those without money or childcare or the ability to take time off from work—will not be so fortunate. Maybe they will try an un- safe method of abortion, and come to physical harm, or even die. Maybe they will undergo pregnancy and have a child, but at significant personal or familial cost. At the least, they will incur the cost of losing control of their lives. The Constitution will, today’s majority holds, provide no shield, despite its guarantees of liberty and equality for all. ... The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    Is there a constitutional right to marry someone of another race? (Loving vs Virginia). Is there a constitutional right for gay people to get married (Obergefell vs Hodges)? Is there a constitutional right to buy contraceptive? Guess which two of those Thomas wants to revisit and the one he probably doesn’t?
• brandonr49 4y ago
  I suspect there are a great many existing laws that congress would not pass today.
• ceejayoz 4y ago
  > If you look at the conservative majority opinions, you’ll find that indeed, it’s about the relevant legal issues, ie. what the law actually says. Qualified immunity and asset forfeiture would like a word.
  • drewrv 4y ago
    This term alone the "conservative majority opinions" have been downright contradictory on "relevant legal issues". Women now have a right to defend their life with a gun but cannot defend their life with healthcare. It's clear that they are simply using "originalism" to cherry pick what falls in line with their personal opinions.
    • xyzzyz 4y ago
      > Women now have a right to defend their life with a gun but cannot defend their life with healthcare. You are just illustrating my exact point. Right to keep and bear arms is explicitly secured in the Constitution that it “shall not be infringed”, whereas nothing of this sort is clearly and explicitly said about abortion rights. Here, again, conservatives focus on what the law actually says, and liberals focus on their preferred policy, and if their preferred policy is not to be clearly and explicitly found in the law, it is instead found in the “emanations of the penumbra”.
      • joshuamorton 4y ago
        > Right to keep and bear arms is explicitly secured in the Constitution that it “shall not be infringed”, Only in the context of a well-regulated militia, at least until Scalia amended the Constitution in Heller.
      • ceejayoz 4y ago
        > Right to keep and bear arms is explicitly secured in the Constitution An individual right to keep and bear arms was newly discovered in 2008, in a 5-4 decision. It took 220 years for a single vote majority to find evidence of it. > it is instead found in the “emanations of the penumbra” That's a funny way of describing the Ninth Amendment.
• syrrim 4y ago
  If congress disagreed with this interpretation, they could pass a law explicitly ruling it out. The power of the supreme court in this regard relies on the fact that congress has great difficulty passing any law at all, and thus whatever interpretation given by the supreme court is likely to persist. >If you look at the conservative majority opinions, you’ll find that indeed, it’s about the relevant legal issues, ie. what the law actually says. The dissertation focuses on that. The actual reasoning might be based on something else. The court is strongly interested in projecting an image of being neutral, and of only going off of the wording of laws, rather than involving their own biases. Thus, the majority opinion should be read as an attempt to assign such a motive to their decision, whereas the dissenting opinions attempt to assign the opposite motive. That is, they attempt to suggest that the majority ruled this way because they are insufficiently worried about climate change.
  • tablespoon 4y ago
    > If congress disagreed with this interpretation, they could pass a law explicitly ruling it out. But that would be backwards and wrong (like a default-allow firewall rule).
    • xyzzyz 4y ago
      In fact, it would be even worse than you say, because it would not be applied in a principled and consistent way. In actual practice, it would be default-allow if convenient, and default-forbid if not.
    • rat87 4y ago
      No that would be correct. Congress delegated the power of they don't want to do that anymore they should take it away
      • tablespoon 4y ago
        > No that would be correct. Congress delegated the power of they don't want to do that anymore they should take it away No, they didn't. Congress delegating to the EPA (for instance) the power to regulate CFCs to save the ozone layer, does not also delegate the power to the EPA to regulate CO2 to solve global warming.
• remarkEon 4y ago
  Indeed, the reaction to this from lawmakers is really perplexing. They're claiming that the Court is "rogue" or something, but if you actually read what they wrote they are returning power from the executive to congress (or making it clear that Congress always had this power, not the executive). The reaction makes me think there are many lawmakers who are rather uninterested in making laws, and instead actually do want to see unelected Judges and executive bureaucrats implement their preferred policy options instead of doing the (hard) work of writing and passing those policies themselves.
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    If lawmakers leave the legislation to the Court, they can't be blamed for the outcome, and they remain free to grandstand for the cameras.
• DFHippie 4y ago
  > if the Congress wants EPA to regulate emissions the way they tried to do, all it needs to do is to pass a law explicitly instructing it to do so. Of course, it won’t, because there is no political will in Congress to pass this. This doesn't accurately represent the present situation on this or really any topic. It makes is sound like members of Congress simply don't care. Unless the filibuster is removed or reformed, a party wishing to legislate on any controversial issue needs a super majority in the Senate to pass the legislation just in that chamber of Congress. They also need control of the House and the presidency. There is plenty of political will in the Democratic caucus to pass this legislation, but due to gerrymandering in the House and the inherently unrepresentative nature of the Senate they cannot get enough votes to pass legislation, however much they may wish to, on the rare occasions the stars align and they have control over both the executive and legislative branches. The Republicans need control over only one of these three choke points to stop legislation. And now that they have a generation of control over the Supreme Court, and the Court has demonstrated that they regard legal argument as post facto justification for political decisions, the Democrats are well and truly screwed. There may be some Republicans who secretly would like to do something about any one of the major catastrophes facing the nation and the world, and some may claim this in public, but because their co-partisans are making total political war on non-conservatives at the moment they can't actually do anything or they face the mob. Basically, "political will" isn't the issue. It's our crappily designed "democracy" mixed with total political war, strident propaganda, and millennialists who are happy to let the world go to hell because they think they're going to heaven.
  • idontpost 4y ago
  • efitz 4y ago
    In my mind all this means that things are working as intended. The Constitution was set up to limit what the federal government can do, and the Congress (particularly the senate) was set up to make it hard to do things that did not have significant support over and above a simple majority. FDR set up a bureaucratic state to try to get around this, but it’s not what the constitution envisioned. I for one am happy that unelected bureaucrats (who the voters have no way to get rid of) now have less power, and that politicians who can be held accountable now have to act explicitly to make big changes. Again, working as designed.
• johndhi 4y ago
  Congress wouldn't ratify 99% of court decisions even when the text of their bill is very clear l. The argument you make in the last sentence of your post is very weak.
• gernb 4y ago
  Are you just repeating that the OP said? > On the other hand, if you read liberal dissents, they’re mostly about what they think appropriate policy should be. The Supreme Court is not supposed to set policy. It's only supposed to rule on if the policy set by others (Congress) is constitutional or not. If the EPA could do anthing to stop emmisions, banning power plants from existing at all would satisfy "do anything to stop emmisions", so would "depopulating the planet" (no people, no need for power plants). Those seems like they make it pretty clear they need specific limits. They were given specific limits. The court confirmed that. Congress needs to increase what they're allowed to regulate and how if they want more power. It's frustrating that that's so hard to come by but it's hard to imagine how else it could be
• aaron_m04 4y ago
  > [...] if the Congress wants EPA to regulate emissions the way they tried to do, all it needs to do is to pass a law explicitly instructing it to do so. Of course, it won’t, because there is no political will in Congress to pass this. At this stage in the climate crisis, we really need to be focused on direct results of political actions. The majority of the US population wants regulations to fight climate change, and the consensus among climate scientists is that if we don't aggressively cut carbon emissions immediately, things will get really out of hand. Therefore, if the Supreme Court is reducing the EPA's ability to help this, it is both anti-democratic and massively harmful to the public good. It really doesn't matter that the EPA is executive overreach according to some document written 230 years ago.
  • native_samples 4y ago
  • xyzzyz 4y ago
    No, I strongly disagree. If elected representatives cannot agree on what is proper policy and pass it as law, I for one do not want some nameless bureaucrats be the ones calling the shots. Unelected bureaucrats creating policy as they wish, unconstrained by what the law actually says, is what actually is undemocratic. Look, even as there might be general agreement among the people to fight climate change, there might be little to no agreement among the people as to how to actually proceed doing that. Because of this, you cannot say that blocking EPA here is undemocratic, because “ majority of the US population wants regulations to fight climate change”: it is very much untrue that majority of people want the exact policy that EPA tries to introduce, and have it be executed by EPA. It’s like saying that majority of US population want regulations to improve their commute times, so SCOTUS cannot block DoT from eminent-domaining land through cities and building 10 lane highways on it. Some people want that, sure, but others want more trains or zoning regulations to improve walkability, and there is no majority agreement here on the details of the policy. You certainly don’t want unelected bureaucrats with no accountability to voters be deciding major issues like that.
    • aaron_m04 4y ago