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It's not going away with a whimper, the supreme court is killing it on purpose. There are laws that created departments that the president does not have the pow

• loeg 1y ago
  > If Dems don't try to do something about to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit. Uh. What are they supposed to do with a Republican trifecta? Do you mean "win votes in future elections so they can govern?"
  • guelo 1y ago
    When they get power again they need to challenge the court's extremism. I've seen ideas like term limits or packing the court with more than 9 judges.
    • nerdsniper 1y ago
      Ideally there will be enough representation in congress to remove justices like Thomas for blatant corruption / conflict of interest.
      • exoverito 1y ago
        It'd be nice if we could remove congress members for blatant corruption too, e.g. Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. Or prevent further Weekend at Bernie's politicians like Diane Feinstein and Joe Biden.
    • loeg 1y ago
      > When they get power again Hard to see a path to Dems winning a Senate majority.
      • burnt-resistor 1y ago
        Yep. And the House is functionally irrelevant and basically a passive onlooker. SCOTUS legislate from the bench as instructed and POTUS decrees from a throne.
        • galangalalgol 1y ago
          A majority isn't impossible, but they would have to remove the filibuster. Ideally I'd want the filibuster removed right this instant, but reinstated for judicial and really any confirmations. Let the party in power make their laws and remove old ones, but keep the judiciary independent. Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
          • SwamyM 1y ago
            > Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state. While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that: “In the history of the Republic, there have been 168 filibusters of executive and judicial nominees. Half of them have occurred during the Obama administration — during the last four and a half years,” Reid said. Source: https://apnews.com/united-states-government-united-states-congress-758404261694445eb50917294c260c73 https://apnews.com/united-states-government-united-states-co... As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame. Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
    • tmountain 1y ago
      They won’t get power again in a meaningful way. The last election was their “last stand”. The U.S. has a rigged court and gerrymandered senate. Kamala was right about one thing, “we’re not going back”. Unfortunately, the context was wrong. In this case, it’s, “we’re not going back to being a functional democracy”.
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • yareally 1y ago
        How is the Senate gerrymandered? They're elected statewide.
        • overfeed 1y ago
          As an example: in Texas, there are laws and processes that discourage voting in high-population-density areas that trend less conservative. Can you think of benign reason for a law that bams providing water for people waiting in line to vote in a state that gets really hot?
        • guelo 1y ago
          The state borders themselves were gerrymandered in the 19th century to influence the electoral college. That's why for example there's all these very empty northern states like the two Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming that collectively have fewer people than LA but between them they get 8 senators.
    • pjmlp 1y ago
      That is being naive, the way it is going, elections will be as free as in any other authoritarian country.
• mandeepj 1y ago
  > One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years. Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
  • crucialfelix 1y ago
    Good people follow laws, bad people don't. That's the core problem. The game is rigged
    • nielsbot 1y ago
      I think it’s rather that good (effective) politicians wield the law and power effectively and creatively. Good people don’t follow bad laws, for example. The Democrats are not good, but it’s intentional. They work for their donors not their voters.
      • mandeepj 1y ago
        > The Democrats are not good You are commenting on a thread about Republican Party gutting one more scientific research department. But you have audacity to say Democrats are bad. One of the commenters on this thread had described very appropriately the current political environment- mass weaponization of stupidity. Those people are running at a very high speed in the opposite direction that there’s no coming back for them. > They work for their donors not their voters Voters are donors too. Maybe you meant big donors like Musk. You know how that turned out.
        • nielsbot 1y ago
          Let me clarify. I’m saying Democrats are ineffective at doing good and are therefore part of the problem. If the Democrats do not effectively wield power to solve people’s real world (economic) problems the country will slide further to the right. I obviously meant wealthy donors and corporations (the ownership class) — the minority or entities that the Democrats are beholden to as opposed to the bulk of their voters.
• Aloha 1y ago
  I'm not a fan of this court - but what thing that was 100's of years of precedent was torn down by this court? Yes, they've refused to do certain things until lower courts rule, but I dont see that as a huge incongruence.
  • anigbrowl 1y ago
    Birthright citizenship would be the issue to watch, because a previous Supreme Court ruled on the scope of the 14th amendment back in 1888 and conservatives have been aiming to reverse this for decades.
    • rayiner 1y ago
      Just five years after the 14th amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court said: > The first observation we have to make on this clause is that it puts at rest both the questions which we stated to have been the subject of differences of opinion. It declares that persons may be citizens of the United States without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States. That its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase, "subject to its jurisdiction" was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/83/36/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/83/36/ Wong Kim Ark, meanwhile, is a weird fucking case that spends a huge number of pages analyzing everything except the 14th amendment.
      • nradclif 1y ago
        From Gemini: The Original Intent of the 14th Amendment The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, primarily to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that decision, the Court had held that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a U.S. citizen. The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to create a clear constitutional rule that would prevent this from ever happening again. Senator Jacob Howard, a key drafter of the amendment, stated that its citizenship clause "will, of course, include the children of all parents... who may be born in the United States." He specified only two exceptions: children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces. The language of the amendment was a direct refutation of the racist rationale of the Dred Scott decision. While the concept of "undocumented immigrants" as we know it today did not exist, the amendment's framers used broad language to ensure that citizenship was based on a principle of birth on American soil, not on race or the legal status of one's parents. The Role of Wong Kim Ark The Wong Kim Ark case became necessary because the government's interpretation of the 14th Amendment had narrowed. Following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. government began arguing that Chinese people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. They claimed that Wong Kim Ark was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because his parents were still subjects of the Emperor of China. The 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark was a crucial reaffirmation of the original intent. The Court's 6-2 majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, systematically dismantled the government's arguments. The Court looked to the history of English common law and the intent behind the 14th Amendment. It concluded that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" applied to all persons who are subject to U.S. laws and not under the authority of a foreign government, such as diplomats. The Court found that Wong Kim Ark's birth in the U.S. automatically made him a citizen, despite his parents' ineligibility for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act. In short, the Wong Kim Ark decision did not create a new standard; it prevented the government from creating a new, more restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It affirmed the foundational principle that birth on U.S. soil is the basis for citizenship, a principle that has been a cornerstone of American law ever since.
• parineum 1y ago
  > There are laws that created departments that the president does not have the power to destroy. That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch. Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive. Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out). > One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept. Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
• deleted 1y ago
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• rufus_foreman 1y ago
  >> tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court The Roberts court has overturned precedent less often than any other recent court. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/us/supreme-court-precedent-chevron.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/us/supreme-court-preceden.... By your definitions, the Roberts court is the most conservative court, and the Warren Burger court from 1969 to 1986 was the most extremist. You don't care about overturning precedent. The above facts will not change your mind about the Roberts court. The real issue is there in the article I linked to: "What distinguishes the Roberts court is ideology. In cases overruling precedents, the Warren court reached a liberal result 92 percent of the time. The Burger and Rehnquist courts reached liberal outcomes about half the time. The number dropped to 35 percent for the Roberts court. Since 2017, it has ticked down a bit, to 31 percent" The Roberts court is in fact conservative. It does not often overturn precedent, but when it overturns precedent it does so with conservative results. That's why you and other liberals don't like it.
  • wan23 1y ago
    Liberal vs conservative is not the binary that you should be looking at here, but rather just vs corrupt. It's okay if a ruling ideologically favors one side or the other, but it's not okay if it the court trends toward "our guy can do whatever he wants".
  • nobodyandproud 1y ago
    That’s from 18 months ago. I wonder what the trend is now.