8 ms·

If you ignore the labels here, it's a small group of lawyers giving themselves more power because the large group of politicians can't get their act together an

• matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Congress may be inefficient (by design, basically) but they have one advantage: they're elected. Everyone fantasizes about government by an unelected group of experts, until they wake up one day and find out those unelected experts don't share their values at all -- and there's nothing they can do about it.
  • ElevenLathe 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • psunavy03 2y ago
      The totally reasonable practice of "I lost the game, so I'm going to flip over the table and pull a gun."
      • Arainach 2y ago
        When your opponents are lying, cheating, and breaking their own made up rules (no supreme court nominees during the lame duck session unless nominated by a Republican) your characterization is uncalled for.
      • immibis 2y ago
        Yes, the right have been doing it for a long time and it works. Either make it stop working, or copy the thing that works. Don't just handicap yourself to a guaranteed loss.
        • ElevenLathe 2y ago
          Nothing in the rulebook says a {dog,Democrat} can't {play basketball,appoint liberal judges}.
          • immibis 2y ago
            But they don't.
          • thyrsus 2y ago
            Tell that to Merrick Garland and Mitch McConnell.
      • ElevenLathe 2y ago
        The rules are that the executive can appoint judges. Right wing executives take advantage of this rule. Doing the same from the other corner seems reasonable too. The failure to do so means that the Democratic party is incompetent, uninterested in enacting their own alleged policies, or some combination of the two. Some people say "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" but this is even a level removed. This is a perfectly legal move that they've denied themselves for no material reason.
    • mistrial9 2y ago
      superficially this argument seems reasonable.. but my limited understanding of the history of the Supreme Court of the United States says that there have been substantially different eras, and substantially different rules in those eras, for this same Federal body. Needless to say, in a "two party" political system, the details of what each of those two parties represents has also changed dramatically.. i.e. what is called conservative has changed quite a lot, many times.. same with "liberal"
    • mschuster91 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • immibis 2y ago
        Indeed they have already done so - many left-wing voters are swearing off voting for Biden, over his support for the Gaza genocide. This guarantees a Trump victory.
      • ElevenLathe 2y ago
        The issue is that the "ethics and morals" of the powerful are in reality weapons pointed at working people. If using state power gained through elections to improve the lives of the people who elected you is immoral or unethical, your system of ethics is a farce.
    • wongarsu 2y ago
      Appointing people based on party loyalty is always cited as one of the major reason the Soviet Union became a slow-motion train wreck. It's not something America should emulate. Not to mention that packing the courts could well be interpreted as an open attack against the separation of powers
  • hypothesis 2y ago
    > Everyone fantasizes about government by an unelected group of experts, until they wake up one day and find out those unelected experts don't share their values at all -- and there's nothing they can do about it. Does SCOTUS fit into this hypothetical?
    • db48x 2y ago
      No, because they neither make laws nor execute them.
  • digging 2y ago
    This implies the common false dichotomy though that public officials can only be either: elected in toxic, wasteful campaign cycles every 4 years; or completely independent of public oversight. Those aren't the only two mechanisms that exist to develop an administrative apparatus. They are actually two points on a spectrum, and in fact closer to being at either end of the spectrum. One, quick example: You can have appointed experts who can be recalled by public input but never have to campaign for election. I'm writing this in short minutes with zero research so be assured there are countless possible systems that exist in the infinite space between the two binary options implied by your dilemma. In other words, being elected to office is not the advantage of congress. The advantage we seek is public accountability. Public elections are a pretty fucking poor proxy for accountability though because we end up with single-issue voters acting out of rage and electing people who are specifically inept at their job.
• brookst 2y ago
  > because the large group of politicians can't get their act together and pass well-reasoned and descriptive laws How do you figure? This ruling says that Congress must be domain experts in every area, and agencies must merely implement the specific policies that Congress dictates. Is that even possible? For anyone? Sure, Congress is dysfunctional but so what? This new regime is unworkable, and it doesn't matter if it's dysfunctional politicians or "top lawyers".
  • zaphar 2y ago
    Congress people are supposed to hire and listen to domain experts in the field they legislate on.
  • mike_hearn 2y ago
    People on this thread are talking as if this decision stops Congress delegating powers to the executive, or the executive drafting laws for Congress to pass. It clearly does neither. It's actually constitutionally entirely reasonable to demand that lawmakers are the people who make law, because there's no specific reason to assume that the volume of laws should naturally drown the people responsible for them. But even if you do assume that, nothing in this judgement would restrict the volume of laws passed in any way. It's just not about that at all.
    • andyjohnson0 2y ago
      The "volume of laws" required to regulate a complex modern society is far greater than that required for the US 200+ years ago. Thats why successful nations use rule-making agencies to regulate commerce, environmental protection, workplace safety, etc. Expecting the legislature to do it all is just not going to scale - which I suspect is the objective. The people behind these decisions want an overloaded, ineffectual legal system because that creates the best conditions for unrestricted accumulation of wealth and power.
      • beaeglebeachedd 2y ago
        Excellent. Deregulate then. That's the desired effect of this anyway.
• starkparker 2y ago
  > I would trust the nations top lawyers more than most of the congress members we have If you're referring to the justices, who are approved by those Congress members you don't trust, it is a dramatic stretch to assume they are the nation's best lawyers.
  • TylerE 2y ago
    There’s no requirement for them to be a lawyer at all, or have any legal training.
    • masklinn 2y ago
      Also congress is full of lawyers.
    • jjmarr 2y ago
      There's no federal constitutional requirement for anyone to have legal training or certification to practice law in the USA. The requirements to practice law in the federal system are set by the judiciary itself. This dates back to England where getting "called to the bar" meant the judge giving you permission to go to a physical bar separating the spectators from the court. It wouldn't make sense to mandate judges to be lawyers if they decide who is and isn't a lawyer. That would give the judicial branch control over their own appointments.
      • TylerE 2y ago
        The Supreme Court is explicitly subject to not even that.
• btilly 2y ago
  You may trust the nation's top lawyers more than Congress. But in recent decades those lawyers have been picked for ideological purity in a process that distills what is bad about our political process. As a result I now trust Congress more than the Supreme Court. And not because I trust our broken Congress more than I used to!
• luddit3 2y ago
  This is taking power away from regulator bodies like EPA that enforce the laws and giving it to the courts... taking the enforcement out of the hands of the experts.
  • psunavy03 2y ago
    How is it "taking the enforcement out of the hands of the experts?" Judges are supposed to be experts on law. That's literally their job. If the parties before them feel that they need expert knowledge to render the right ruling, then they need to take those experts and either depose them or have them testify. Expert witnesses are a thing; this is not some new idea.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • adriand 2y ago
      > How is it "taking the enforcement out of the hands of the experts?" Judges are supposed to be experts on law. Because the laws are about particular things in the real world that have nothing to do with the legal system. They are frequently about scientific matters, for example. What constitutes a threat to public health? What constitutes pollution of a waterway? When Congress authorizes an agency to maintain, say, clean drinking water, it entrusts scientific experts to determine, based on the most up-to-date evidence, what constitutes a pollutant that is harmful to human health. We do not need Congress to pass a new law every time we get new scientific evidence that a particular chemical (say, PFAS), is harmful.
      • psunavy03 2y ago
        > Because the laws are about particular things in the real world that have nothing to do with the legal system. The laws have nothing to do with the legal system? That's a new one.
      • stale2002 2y ago
        Thats great and all. But if congress wants that power to be delegated to those agencies, then they should write a law to do so. Thats all people here want. Whatever power it is that you think that agencies should have, try to pass a law to do that first.
• saveferris 2y ago
  But, this decision didn't take those powers from Congress. It took those powers from federal agencies. Congress empowers the agencies, yes. But, Congress also deferred any technical decisioning to the agencies. Those agencies are filled with actual experts who are fully committed to their field. Now, the court just said that those experts aren't the right place to enforce anything but judges are.
  • megaman821 2y ago
    These could easily by Donald Trump's experts soon. And if so, will you hold true to this line of reasoning?
• dilawar 2y ago
  >Personally, I would trust the nations top lawyers more than most of the congress members we have. However, it doesn't take much imagination to see the new issues that could arise) Good luck with this. At least these corrupt politicians come to face the music every four years.
• datavirtue 2y ago
  These judges need to face election like most judges, and we need more. I agree.
• mlsu 2y ago
  This might be a cynical view of things, but I think it's planned, rather than a happenstance result of dysfunction. Gosh gee Willikers, the fellers in congress just can't get anything done ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's no coincidence that Republicans simultaneously obstruct congress AND have a well-oiled machine to get their political allies on the bench. The playbook is like this: - The Federalist Society establishes a pipeline of ideologically consistent judges. From law school to the supreme court. - Congress blocks anything and everything on the legislative, so that any actual new change to the laws of the land come from new interpretations by the courts. - This bloc in the lower courts works to bubble up good cases when they come, to get them before the higher courts. - Every time there is a Republican in the executive, they appoint as many judges as they possibly can from this ideological bloc [1]. This ensures that a good case, when it comes, has a clear path from the bottom (local) courts to the top (supreme) court. The merits of appointees do not matter in the selection process - only a pledge of ideological fealty. This project has been actively working for decades to change policy. There is nothing like this on the other side of the aisle. These are lifetime appointments. You cannot win on "good faith" against tactics like this. "Good faith" is insisting that the Judicial is "not political," it's not stepping down when it's politically opportune to do so. [1] "At the 2018 Federalist Society gala, Orrin Hatch, the former Republican senator from Utah, declared, to the crowd’s delight, “Some have accused President Trump of outsourcing his judicial selection process to the Federalist Society. I say, ‘Damn right!’” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/opinion/trump-judges-federalist-society.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/opinion/trump-judges-fede...