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It probably is these days. A while ago we passed into a dystopia where the constitution protects corporations from the imposition of the interests of the citiz

• ncr100 3y ago
  Does this mean that we the People of the USA cannot overcome lobbying of the Corporate world, and no longer make changes to our Constitution to allow such regulation of business?
  • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    You don't need to change the constitution, all you'd have to do is pass the rules you want through Congress instead of having them created by an unelected administrative agency.
    • eli 3y ago
      SCOTUS strikes them down anyway if they don’t like them. And we all know Congress is broken. It cannot possibly make the decisions currently delegated to agencies.
      • rpmisms 3y ago
        If Roe was an actual law, it wouldn't have been overturned. The current Supreme Court is simply remedying years of lazy legislating from executive agencies and the bench, instead of making laws the way we're supposed to. Everyone should support this.
        • vkou 3y ago
          > If Roe was an actual law, it wouldn't have been overturned It would have been overturned at any point that the reps had both the legislature and the executive. 2002-2006, and 2016-2018.
          • rpmisms 3y ago
            Maybe, but not by the court system. That's called a repeal.
            • vkou 3y ago
              You're splitting hairs. There's not a single human being in this country who actually cares about whether it's been overturned or repealed or froozed. All that they care about is that they've been protected from their state governments one morning, and not protected the next.
              • rpmisms 3y ago
                Then maybe they should live in a state that agrees with them. That's sort of the entire point of being organized the way we are as a nation.
                • eli 3y ago
                  Yeah that’s not how human rights are supposed to work
                  • rpmisms 3y ago
                    I don't have a right to self-defense in several states, either, so I left those states. It's pretty simple.
                    • mindslight 3y ago
                      Where is this state where you have the right to self defense? From what I can gather, the police can generally execute and otherwise harm commonfolk with impunity nation wide. Some states let you buy more equipment to go out in a blaze of glory with, but that's a pretty poor consolation prize.
                      • rpmisms 3y ago
        • eropple 3y ago
          > If Roe was an actual law, it wouldn't have been overturned. Nonsense and worse words. They aren't originalists, they don't care about the executive/legislative distinction. It's embarrassing farce to pretend that there is constitutional principle behind achieving their desired political goals. Roe would've been gutted were it law and the general incoherence of Alito and Thomas would have led the way.
          • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
            Have you actually read Roe itself? It struggles to find any real basis for what it was doing in the constitution and the same logic should have rendered unconstitutional e.g. the Controlled Substances Act as well as any equivalent law at the state level, because the government is interfering with what people put into their own bodies in private. People liked it because they liked the outcome, not because it was ever coherent. The real problem is that a lot of people want there to be a right to abortion in the constitution but they don't have enough votes to actually put it there, and they also don't want to read the constitution's general constraints on government power to be restrictive enough to limit this using coherent logic because that would also limit the government from doing many other things they want it to do.
          • rpmisms 3y ago
            Roe is simply a bad court decision. Congress has the right to codify Roe into law. The Supreme Court does not have the power to create law out of whole cloth. Overturning Roe was the Supreme Court taking presumptive power away from itself. Also, the current court absolutely has an originalist majority, even if you happen to disagree with the originals. The Constitution is a very restrictive document for the Federal Government.
        • eli 3y ago
          Who said anything about Roe? The student debt case: perfectly clear law passed by Congress and overturned by SCOTUS in very tenuous grounds with a plaintiff that never even had proper standing.
          • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
            If Congress actually passed a law clearly forgiving student debt, it's very unlikely they'd have overturned it.
            • eli 3y ago
              I see no reason to believe that. There is a law. It authorized the education dept to “waive or modify” loan provisions. But somehow the court ruled that that means only minor changes are permitted. Obviously this isn’t what Congress intended - waiving entire provisions could of course result in major changes. The entire “major questions” doctrine is a farce. It’s not in a law. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s an invention of the court. And again: the case never should have been heard. The litigant had no standing. The motivation here is SCOTUS striking down a policy they don’t like.
              • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
                > I see no reason to believe that. Conservatives don't really like the federal Department of Education, but there is no question that Congress passed a law creating it. Why do you think they would strike down this but not that? > There is a law. It authorized the education dept to “waive or modify” loan provisions. But somehow the court ruled that that means only minor changes are permitted. Obviously this isn’t what Congress intended - waiving entire provisions could of course result in major changes. Under that reading they could waive the entire law and forgive everybody's loans, making any other provisions moot. If that's what Congress wanted then why would they pass a law allowing them to "waive or modify" loan provisions, implying that they contemplated the continued existence of loans, rather than just passing a loan forgiveness bill to begin with? > The entire “major questions” doctrine is a farce. It’s not in a law. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s an invention of the court. The Court interprets the law. The "major questions" doctrine announces how they intend to interpret the laws Congress passes. It was already a thing when the bill in question was passed. Congress therefore knew that if they intended the law to grant the power to do something like that, they would have to spell it out explicitly, and then they didn't, implying that wasn't what they intended. Also, just think about it. If that bill had the words "including the power to forgive all student loans" appended to the bottom, do you think it would have passed? If not, it's because those words would have changed the expected consequence of the law, right?
      • pclmulqdq 3y ago
        If it were congress's job to pass these rules and regulations instead of pawning off their authority to someone else, I would assume that congresspeople would have to generally take the job a lot more seriously.
        • shevis 3y ago
          That’s a bold assumption given they don’t even take their current responsibilities seriously…
          • pclmulqdq 3y ago
            For one thing, they would have a lot less time to go fuck around on Twitter if they had to actually pass laws.
        • eli 3y ago
          It’s their job to pass a budget and yet
    • sheepscreek 3y ago
      That’s an interesting perspective. What’s problematic is the level of corporate lobbying which can interfere with peoples’ (not shareholders, but those who work there) interest. They cannot afford lobbyists. Not without a union.
      • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > They cannot afford lobbyists. Not without a union. All of the union's money comes from the workers. If they wanted to they could form a PAC regardless of whether they form a union. Which might even do them more good because then the PAC would be directly representing the workers instead of having an indirect layer of union leadership with potentially different incentives.
        • sheepscreek 3y ago
          How do they communicate to form a PAC? Would a less educated blue collar worker ever fund a PAC? How do you convince them it’s for their own benefit? Will you do it again for a different agenda? There may be some merit in exploring a new approach that uses modern technology to organize workers. Until we figure something out, the current structure is better than zero protections for workers.
          • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
            > How do they communicate to form a PAC? Email? Text messages? However they want. How does anybody communicate about anything? > Would a less educated blue collar worker ever fund a PAC? They would do it if they thought it was a good idea. > How do you convince them it’s for their own benefit? How do you convince them that paying union dues is for their own benefit? > Will you do it again for a different agenda? People can do whatever they want. > Until we figure something out, the current structure is better than zero protections for workers. Most workers aren't in a union. You're proposing a change one way or another.
  • bullfightonmars 3y ago
    Time to find corporations unconstitutional?
  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    It appears to me to be the case unfortunately Just think about it from an energy use standpoint. The average citizen has very little energy they dedicate to community and social system support. This includes education, voting, lobbying etc… This is a basic requirement for an electorate to self govern, everyone has to give input and that input should align with their well considered interests. The amount of work that takes is relatively immense for the amount of impact that people feel they have as a result. On the other hand you have in effect every for profit entity putting as much possible energy into rent seek and increase margins for the majority owners by offloading any possible externalities of inequitable ownership or resource hoarding. Corporate lobbies have perfectly captured the political process to the extent that nobody even questions it anymore. Including legislators.
    • armchairhacker 3y ago
      Putting in the bare minimum like voting isn’t “a lot of work”. Mail-in ballots are available everywhere.
      • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
        Unfortunately its hard enough that almost half of the nation doesn’t do it for even the biggest election and only a minority of voters actually vote in local elections
• AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  "The constitution protects you against the government" is pretty much the entire point of having a constitution.
  • 0xEF 3y ago
    That all kinda falls apart when you change the rest of rules to treat corporations like people, though, which was the point of the 14th Amendment.
    • gweinberg 3y ago
      Corporate personhood isn't some reason invention, it's older than the United States. Blackstone talks about it.
      • jmull 3y ago
        I think a lot of people understand the legal justification, but the question is whether it's right. Blackstone and other legal ancient history is hardly relevant though, since modern corporations bear little resemblance to companies of the past. The original purpose of the constitution was to protect the interests of the people from the tyranny of the government. And, of course, there's no reason people can't band together and pursue their interests as a group. Well, corporations are composed of people. So far, so good. However, publicly traded corporations are specifically designed to allow only a profit motive to be shared by the group. By design, shareholders do not have other shared interests and anyway the board and executives have a legal duty to the financial interests of the shareholders, not other shared interests. The people working at the company below the executives are constrained by them, of course. So a corporation specifically does not share the general interests of the individuals of which it is composed, except where it comes to money (also, that interest in money tends to be in the short term). To the extent we treat corporations as people with the protections of the constitution, the constitution now works for the (short term) financial interests of corporations. Not the original purpose. And probably not a very good idea for society at large. (However, with the money spigot wide open, it's very unlikely to change.)
• csdreamer7 3y ago
  They left out the part where you can appeal their findings to a federal appeals court. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/decide-cases https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/decide-cases You do see a judge, and you can have that trial by jury.