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There's a tendency among certain people on HN to act like the conservative justices have no rhyme or reason and are just a bull running mindlessly through the c

• rootusrootus 2y ago
  It would be somewhat amusing if Congress took the bait and wrote some legislation telling the Court to get back in its lane. Maybe the majority of justices would actually be okay with that.
  • kyrra 2y ago
    SCOTUS is governed by the constitution. All congress has control over is the purse (money paid to the justices), number of justices, and appointment of justices. SCOTUS rules are set out in Article III. If congress wants to change the rules of SCOTUS, they will need to amend the constitution. Note that congress does have power over all lower federal courts, as they were created by congress. SCOTUS is special here though.
    • colejohnson66 2y ago
      The ability for SCOTUS to rule on Chevron isn't even in the Constitution! Marbury v. Madison was SCOTUS saying "we can overturn your executive and legislative choices" and no one bothered to stop them.
      • trealira 2y ago
        > Marbury v. Madison was SCOTUS saying "we can overturn your executive and legislative choices" and no bothered to stop them. Are you implying the establishment of judicial review was a mistake?
        • colejohnson66 2y ago
          Hell no. I'm just taking issue with the claim that SCOTUS is just "following the constitution". They are actually governed by whatever they say they're governed by. The Roberts Court loves to act they're "textualist" interpreters, but only when it benefits them. They claim stare decisis to avoid overturning precedent, but only if said precedent is something they agree with.
          • trealira 2y ago
            Got it, that makes sense. I think I completely misinterpreted the comment due to the context.
        • taylodl 2y ago
          The way judicial review was established is the mistake.
    • LargeWu 2y ago
      Congress doesn't amend the constitution unilaterally. The best they can do is propose an amendment. Amending the constitution today is effectively impossible.
    • gpm 2y ago
      SCOTUS's appellate jurisdiction is subject to "such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make" (Article III section 2 end of second paragraph) . Congress clearly and explicitly has the right to govern their powers as far as cases like this one go.
    • rootusrootus 2y ago
      > SCOTUS is governed by the constitution. It seems unpopular to point out this morning, but the vast majority of the power SCOTUS currently exercises is not enumerated anywhere in the Constitution. They gave it to themselves. Congress is by design the most powerful branch of the government and they absolutely can dramatically curtail the power of the judiciary if they want to. I'd advise the folks who are quick with the downvote button to go learn more about the Constitution and in particular Article III. It is really fascinating and you can go down quite the rabbit hole learning about it.
      • taylodl 2y ago
        With a 2/3 majority, Congress has the power to do just about any damned thing they want. They have the power to remove any federal judge they want from the bench, they have the power to remove any SCOTUS judge they want from the bench, they even have the power to determine how many justices will serve on SCOTUS. They just need a 2/3 majority vote (Majority in the House, 2/3 in the Senate). The Founders new that the buck had to stop somewhere and if mistakes were made, someone had to be able to correct them. That entity is Congress. To keep "hanky panky" out of it, they demanded a 2/3 majority - wisely realizing if you can get 2/3 of Congress to agree on anything, then it's probably something extremely important!
    • leotravis10 2y ago
      This ruling effectively makes SCOTUS in charge of everything, most notably every federal agency really, even Congress.
• EricDeb 2y ago
  Yes anyone who's paid attention knew this was coming. I'm not sure the average American voter understands the consequences of the supreme court veering to the right however
• mikeyouse 2y ago
  Nobody doubted this is where it would end up - but it's a terrible place at complete odds with judicial restraint and precedent. The courts are going to be the de facto regulatory body in the US going forward, a responsibility they granted themselves out of thin air.
  • lolinder 2y ago
    > a terrible place at complete odds with judicial restraint On the contrary, they see themselves as them undoing many decades' worth of lack of judicial restraint. It's a change only because judicial activism has been the norm.
    • arcticbull 2y ago
      They can see themselves however they want, that doesn’t make it any less at odds with precedent.
    • kasey_junk 2y ago
      If nothing else it is further evidence that they themselves aren’t concerned with slow and moderate change. This court is only conservative in their political positions. In their actions they are extreme.
      • lolinder 2y ago
        Conservatives don't believe in slow change, they believe that the way things were is generally speaking the way that things should stay. Rapidly undoing changes that were accreted since the "set point" is the entirely rational response to those accreted changes if you have picked a set point where things were supposedly ideal.
        • TylerE 2y ago
          None of that is rational. We know the past sucked.
        • kasey_junk 2y ago
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  thank you, I’m thinking of joining some of the groups that construct and bring cases because I’m tired of debating with people about this exact thing. time to just work with the people that understand it, this is what we have for the next few decades
• deleted 2y ago
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• jhp123 2y ago
  who says that conservative justices have no rhyme or reason? Everyone knows they work shamelessly to advance their conservative political goals.
  • rayiner 2y ago
    What do you call Griswold, which found new constitutional rights in “emanations from penumbras” in the constitutional text, if not “shameless?” By contrast, you’re calling it “shameless” for the Court to decide that the judicial branch should be the final interpreter of statutes, not the executive branch. You’re literally engaging in Orwellian doublespeak.
  • lolinder 2y ago
    That's the same kind of argument I'm talking about, though. If you just frame it as "to advance their conservative political goals" then you fail to fully understand this court and will continue to be surprised by what they decide. This court has more than once ruled in a direction that conservatives would not like because the letter of the law required them to do so. Those instances just fail to make headlines and draw ire on social media.
    • jhp123 2y ago
      continue to be surprised? I have not been surprised by this court whatsoever
      • TylerE 2y ago
        Yes, it's quite simple. Whatever ruling helps the powerful is the one they make. It's incredibly blatant regardless of recent (post 1980s) manufactured from whole cloth "originalism", which is in sharp contrast with the actual views of the founders who expected the constitution to be rapidly and frequently amended to account for new factors.
        • lolinder 2y ago
          > the founders who expected the constitution to be rapidly and frequently amended Do you have any evidence to support this claim? The Constitution spells out that any amendment requires first an agreement of 2/3s of both houses of Congress and then ratification by 3/4 of the states. Even back when there were 13 states I'm having trouble imagining them setting it up like that if they were targeting rapid and frequent iteration. If that was their intention they obviously did a very bad job setting it up for that.
• TylerE 2y ago
  They've been very consistent. They ram through whatever the Heritage Foundation (boy, if there was ever a truly evil org with a misleading name) tells them to. That's how they got selected. Heritage literally gave Trump a list of acceptable names, all members.
  • jibe 2y ago
    You are confusing Heritage and Federalist Society. Federalist put together the list of judges that was used for nominations in Trump’s first term.
    • TylerE 2y ago
      No I'm not. https://www.heritage.org/impact/supreme-court-nominee-brett-kavanaugh-was-included-the-list-the-heritage-foundation-helped https://www.heritage.org/impact/supreme-court-nominee-brett-...
      • jibe 2y ago
        “There was obviously overlap between the Supreme Court list that Heritage put out, which I compiled and which was available to all the candidates who were running, and the list Donald Trump put out,” They really are congratulating themselves on Federalist Society's work. Leonard Leo was the one working the list.
• Spooky23 2y ago
  I think you’re not reading the room on this. There’s a rhyme and reason - this court has decided push an agenda in favor of a particular type of executive power and a dramatic increase in the power of the judiciary. Judicial review has been the hallmark of judicial power since John Jay. Now, in the name of strict construction, the court has decreed that Federal courts shall be in the middle of routine executive operations. It’s absurd and gross. Unfortunately, the dire predictions made after citizens united were spot on. A court of craven ideologues, with at least one openly in the pocket of a friendly billionaire, is shifting power to an unaccountable judiciary. It sucks, we’re witnessing the slow death of the republic.
• Brybry 2y ago
  I think it's fair to say that the conservative justices have not been consistent with their professed ideologies. For a recent example, in SNYDER v. UNITED STATES the dissent appears to say, to me, that the majority opinion was neither originalist nor textualist in deciding that 18 U. S. C. §666 applies only to bribes and not gratuities. [1] [1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-108_8n5a.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-108_8n5a.pdf
• jjk166 2y ago
  That legal philosophy is a dog whistle. The fact is congress did write these laws, and they wrote them in this way with the understanding that they would be executed by the executive branch and interpreted by the courts as they have been for generations. Telling congress to go back and rewrite the laws, and to specifically rewrite them in a way that is wildly impractical, is simply striking laws from the books that the courts have no authority to actually strike down.
• deleted 2y ago
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• psunavy03 2y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but I worked in a lawyer-adjacent job while in the military once and ever since I've followed the law as a bit of a hobby. Even with a small bit of training and experience, I'm not exaggerating by much when I say that the average person has absolutely no idea how the law is interpreted or how legal procedure works. I really believe a large number of people view lawyers as the real-world equivalent of wizards or sorcerers from D&D. You say the right incantations, and then through either knowledge or force of will, something you want to happen happens through the force of magic. In reality, even the six in the majority are still (for the most part) interpreting the law, not forcing their policy preferences on it. But people who don't understand how the whole system works (or that the Justices more often than not rule unanimously, if not 7-2 or 8-1) just see the policy outcome and either go "I like it, Court good," or "I hate it, Court bad and illegitimate."
  • twelfthnight 2y ago
    The article mentions Clarence Thomas has been courted (even bribed?) by the very people paying the lawyers trying to overturn Chevron. I think it's naive to believe the judges don't have policy preferences that are strongly reflected in their rulings... If that wasn't the case the GOP wouldn't have blocked nominations from Obama to get their preferred judges in.
    • psunavy03 2y ago
      For sure, the President and Congress try to get Justices who agree with them. But you only have to go back to Anthony Kennedy and David Souter to realize that once they're on the Court, the Justices don't seem to ever feel beholden to the party or President that appointed them. George H. W. Bush appointed Souter, who ended up as one of the most reliably liberal Justices on the Court. Trump has been consistently smacked down by the very Justices he appointed. And as sketchy as some of Thomas's dealings look, he's one of nine. Assuming for the sake of argument that he IS bought and paid for, you still need at least four other people to sign on to anything he says for it to be a ruling.
      • 2y ago
• Simplicitas 2y ago
  In an ideal world, maybe. In the US, where business mostly already owns government, this decision will further erode the little control citizens have over them.
• eyelidlessness 2y ago
  There’s also a tendency, among those persuaded by particular philosophies of governance, to ignore decades of electoral strategy which has married control over the courts with political priorities where these harms are exactly the desired outcomes. There’s probably a case to be made that the model of governance and the specific political harms are more intrinsically linked than mere strategy. But putting that aside… conservatives writ large are all too eager to abandon that model of governance when it doesn’t have the desired political effect. And it’s easy enough to imagine the conservative movement losing love for even this highly favorable court if certain high profile cases don’t go the way they expect.
• efsavage 2y ago
  Predictable, certainly. Consistent, not so much. They seem to start with a decision and work their way backwards through the reasoning, cherrypicking from a versatile and whimsical set of "principles". Originalism not cutting it, try textualism, conservatism, or maybe even a little liberalism if you want to spice things up! If none of those are really doing the trick, there's always the "tradition" sledgehammer that you can use for anything you want.
• alex_young 2y ago
  Isn’t this really an argument about delegating authority? Chevron deference is about congress creating administrative agencies and delegating rule making to those agencies. There isn’t some separation of powers issue here, the idea is that where congress does legislate and an agency makes a reasonable interpretation of a nuance implicit in the law, these rules carry the weight of the law. For instance, congress mandates that the EPA enforce clean water standards, and the EPA sets parts per million for various dangerous substances. Would it make sense for congress to have to pass new laws each time a new chemical is introduced to our environment?
  • relaxing 2y ago
    It makes sense if you want to be able to dump new chemicals in the environment and count on your “small government” representatives to do nothing about it.
  • ndriscoll 2y ago
    In a sane world, if Congress were okay delegating their responsibility, presumably they'd be okay rubber stamping whatever agencies sent their way (with the advantage that they could more thoroughly review something controversial). If they're not okay rubber stamping, then I suppose they weren't actually okay with delegating their responsibility. Like surely the EPA could send them a 1 sentence bill saying "amend section H paragraph III to add chemical X at 30 ppb", and they could have it passed in a day if they have that trust.
• caustic-view 2y ago
  [flagged]