6 ms·

I am sure you meant well but I found your write-up somewhat scattered and lacking a logical conclusion supported by prior points. This is easy to do if one is

I am sure you meant well but I found your write-up somewhat scattered and lacking a logical conclusion supported by prior points. This is easy to do if one is writing with passion. I've done it too. If your point is that we will ultimately be protected by the Supreme Court, I think you are wrong. This is the same Supreme Court that enabled Obamacare, a law that allows the Federal Government to force every american to buy something. And, if you don't or don't pay a penalty the IRS will come after you. Beyond that, this is a law virtually nobody read and, per Nancy Pelosi we had to "pass it to find out what's in it". I can't remember a greater perversion of authority in my adult life. I am sure there are other examples but IANAL.

mpyne 13y ago
> This is the same Supreme Court that enabled Obamacare, a law that allows the Federal Government to force every american to buy something. That's exactly like saying the Federal Government forces everyone to get married and have children, since they'll charge you higher taxes if you don't. As it stands, I can remember a greater perversion of authority: the USA PATRIOT Act...
- graycat 13y ago
  I've been guessing that W, Cheney, etc. knew quite well that the Patriot Act was unconstitutional but estimated, apparently correctly, that it would take years for the SCOTUS to strike down the law and in the meanwhile W, Cheney, etc. could "take the gloves off", go after the Jihaders, and teach them a lesson, not to mess with the big, bad US, that would last 1000 years. Why is it always 1000 years? However at this point it appears that W and Cheney were not the brightest bulbs on the tree because we really have not exactly roasted all the Jihaders. Indeed, OBL could laugh that just a few wacko Muslims sucker punched the US into wrecking its commercial airline system, trashing its Constitution, blowing $3 trillion (net present value) on absurd foreign adventures, killing 4000+ US soldiers and seriously wounding tens of thousands more, and still got run out of Afghanistan like so many before. You know, there's good liberal stuff, good conservative stuff, some places for genuine argument, and then there's just plain dumb stuff. We blew it.
jarrett 13y ago
There is a stark difference, though, between a law which merely (allegedly) distorts economic behavior, and one that affects privacy. The former is only vaguely addressed in the Constitution, in the form fo the 9th and 10th Amendments, and even then the Commerce Clause gives the federal government much power in this arena. The latter, however, is very specifically addressed in the 4th Amendment, and there is no catch-all like the Commerce Clause that would undermine it.
- graycat 13y ago
  Nice.
- robomartin 13y ago
  True enough. However, something like Obamacare has the potential to cause both massive economic destruction and massive violations of privacy. I mean, the government --the IRS!!!-- will have access to your health data. Sit down and think about what they could learn about anyone by connecting the dots between your Internet, phones and health databases as well as those of the people connected to you. I don't see much good coming from this. I hate to take a paranoid stance but I sure feel, rightly or not, we are living through a pole shift. Our country is being mutated into a beast few of us might recognize as the USA in the future. This really saddens me. I hope I am wrong.
  - graycat 13y ago
    You see clearly, like seeing Godzilla rising from the East River and about to come ashore. And you are 100% correct. "All we need is another man like Richard Nixon again" -- sung to the theme song of 'All in the Family'. So, Tricky Dicky had an "enemies list" and wanted to use IRS data. If he had had IRS data, NSA data, CIA data, FBI data, and Obamacare data, we might not have a country now.
niels_olson 13y ago
> We had to pass it to find out what's in it Er, is it so amazing that you have execute code and see the results of the running process before you can really find the bugs?
- graycat 13y ago
  When people see how bad it is, e.g., the IRS grabbing money out of their bank accounts, the people will understand "what's in it". The people who passed it had their fun and, due to the delay in implementation, so far have not had to pay for their fun. When people don't like it, Congress can repeal it, and the next president can sign the repeal. Mostly the waste will have been however many paper pushers wrote 10^10th pages of bureaucratic nonsense no one will ever read.
- robomartin 13y ago
  No, the right analogy is to have someone write mission critical aircraft embedded code; don't have anyone review it; run no simulations; hell, don't even debug it; load it on a 787 and say "we have to fly it to see if it works". That's what our representatives did. Ready for takeoff?
  - graycat 13y ago
    Nice! And then we will debug the code while flying at 0.75 Mach at 35,000 feet!
graycat 13y ago
> I am sure you meant well but I found your write-up somewhat scattered and lacking a logical conclusion supported by prior points. This is easy to do if one is writing with passion. I've done it too. IANAL! But my 'point' is that there is a process of bringing cases, claims of unconstitutionality, to the SCOTUS and now that process has started. There will be the issue of a plaintiff having 'standing' to bring the case, but maybe now 120 million Verizon customers have such standing; if not, likely still Google does. At this point, someone's gotta have enough standing. Then the 'conclusion' is that in 1-2 years we will find out what the SCOTUS wants to do about what appear to be laws enabling serious violations of at least the Fourth Amendment. To respond to much of the discussion in this thread, I made a side point that it is the job of the SCOTUS to defend the Constitution and not to permit bending the Constitution so that the Executive branch can find it easier to go after bad guys. So, in particular, a lot of the discussion here about just how we will get the bad guys will mostly just be set aside during this process and mostly the SCOTUS will not be much influenced by that consideration. Sure, maybe some Admin lawyer can argue something about 'treason' or "the Constitution is not a suicide pact", but my guess is that the main issue will be just a simple, clear protection of at least the Fourth Amendment. SCOTUS is interested in defending the Constitution and not much interested in how to stop Boston wackos with pressure cookers. For a longer term 'conclusion', I pointed out that if after the SCOTUS decision the citizens still want NSA listening in on pillow talk, steamy e-mails, tracking people to their romantic meetings, etc., then we can try to amend the Constitution. > If your point is that we will ultimately be protected by the Supreme Court, I think you are wrong. No, in simplest terms the process has started; likely nothing can stop it; SCOTUS will make a decision, in all likelihood defending the Constitution; and then we will see where we stand. That this process will move inexorably to a solid (the other two branches won't argue with it) conclusion is, in the context of much of the discussion in this thread, quite significant: Or, we can discuss this and that issue and fine point and what if, but, still, this unstoppable process will move to its conclusion which promises to be quite meaningful. For being "protected", I see no alternative to the usual from Jefferson "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance". For Obamacare, I don't know what the legal status is or what cases have been decided. For me, my guess is just that Obamacare is so poorly designed that too soon so many people will be screaming bloody murder, especially appropriate in the context, that Congress will just repeal it. I don't think that Obamacare was ever a serious attempt to help the US healthcare system but just some political posturing -- Nancy had a really good time, a lot of fun. She had the smile of a Homecoming Queen. Now that she's had her good time, we can go back to reality. Obama? He knows nothing about Obamacare: How do we know? Because during his efforts at helping it pass, too soon he said things that were really dumb, got slapped down hard, and then just shut up. In particular, at one point the US College of Surgeons put out that what Obama said was "uninformed, misinformed, just plain wrong, and dangerous". And that caused Obama to shut up. One more point was, one of his tear jerk cases said that due to her existing bad health she couldn't get insurance. Nonsense: All she had to do was move to a state with 'community rating', e.g., as I've been told, NYS. Obama's interest in Obamacare was about political posturing, not healthcare. Also someone from Arkansas, maybe Bill Clinton, said that Arkansas had a program for people like her. If the IRS comes after many people, Obamacare will go down in flames. But for SCOTUS and Obamacare, that case is less clearly about the Constitution than the attack on the Fourth Amendment by grabbing all that Verizon data.

mpyne 13y ago

> This is the same Supreme Court that enabled Obamacare, a law that allows the Federal Government to force every american to buy something. That's exactly like saying the Federal Government forces everyone to get married and have children, since they'll charge you higher taxes if you don't. As it stands, I can remember a greater perversion of authority: the USA PATRIOT Act...

graycat 13y ago
I've been guessing that W, Cheney, etc. knew quite well that the Patriot Act was unconstitutional but estimated, apparently correctly, that it would take years for the SCOTUS to strike down the law and in the meanwhile W, Cheney, etc. could "take the gloves off", go after the Jihaders, and teach them a lesson, not to mess with the big, bad US, that would last 1000 years. Why is it always 1000 years? However at this point it appears that W and Cheney were not the brightest bulbs on the tree because we really have not exactly roasted all the Jihaders. Indeed, OBL could laugh that just a few wacko Muslims sucker punched the US into wrecking its commercial airline system, trashing its Constitution, blowing $3 trillion (net present value) on absurd foreign adventures, killing 4000+ US soldiers and seriously wounding tens of thousands more, and still got run out of Afghanistan like so many before. You know, there's good liberal stuff, good conservative stuff, some places for genuine argument, and then there's just plain dumb stuff. We blew it.

jarrett 13y ago

There is a stark difference, though, between a law which merely (allegedly) distorts economic behavior, and one that affects privacy. The former is only vaguely addressed in the Constitution, in the form fo the 9th and 10th Amendments, and even then the Commerce Clause gives the federal government much power in this arena. The latter, however, is very specifically addressed in the 4th Amendment, and there is no catch-all like the Commerce Clause that would undermine it.

graycat 13y ago
Nice.
robomartin 13y ago
True enough. However, something like Obamacare has the potential to cause both massive economic destruction and massive violations of privacy. I mean, the government --the IRS!!!-- will have access to your health data. Sit down and think about what they could learn about anyone by connecting the dots between your Internet, phones and health databases as well as those of the people connected to you. I don't see much good coming from this. I hate to take a paranoid stance but I sure feel, rightly or not, we are living through a pole shift. Our country is being mutated into a beast few of us might recognize as the USA in the future. This really saddens me. I hope I am wrong.
- graycat 13y ago
  You see clearly, like seeing Godzilla rising from the East River and about to come ashore. And you are 100% correct. "All we need is another man like Richard Nixon again" -- sung to the theme song of 'All in the Family'. So, Tricky Dicky had an "enemies list" and wanted to use IRS data. If he had had IRS data, NSA data, CIA data, FBI data, and Obamacare data, we might not have a country now.

niels_olson 13y ago

> We had to pass it to find out what's in it Er, is it so amazing that you have execute code and see the results of the running process before you can really find the bugs?

graycat 13y ago
When people see how bad it is, e.g., the IRS grabbing money out of their bank accounts, the people will understand "what's in it". The people who passed it had their fun and, due to the delay in implementation, so far have not had to pay for their fun. When people don't like it, Congress can repeal it, and the next president can sign the repeal. Mostly the waste will have been however many paper pushers wrote 10^10th pages of bureaucratic nonsense no one will ever read.
robomartin 13y ago
No, the right analogy is to have someone write mission critical aircraft embedded code; don't have anyone review it; run no simulations; hell, don't even debug it; load it on a 787 and say "we have to fly it to see if it works". That's what our representatives did. Ready for takeoff?
- graycat 13y ago
  Nice! And then we will debug the code while flying at 0.75 Mach at 35,000 feet!

graycat 13y ago

> I am sure you meant well but I found your write-up somewhat scattered and lacking a logical conclusion supported by prior points. This is easy to do if one is writing with passion. I've done it too. IANAL! But my 'point' is that there is a process of bringing cases, claims of unconstitutionality, to the SCOTUS and now that process has started. There will be the issue of a plaintiff having 'standing' to bring the case, but maybe now 120 million Verizon customers have such standing; if not, likely still Google does. At this point, someone's gotta have enough standing. Then the 'conclusion' is that in 1-2 years we will find out what the SCOTUS wants to do about what appear to be laws enabling serious violations of at least the Fourth Amendment. To respond to much of the discussion in this thread, I made a side point that it is the job of the SCOTUS to defend the Constitution and not to permit bending the Constitution so that the Executive branch can find it easier to go after bad guys. So, in particular, a lot of the discussion here about just how we will get the bad guys will mostly just be set aside during this process and mostly the SCOTUS will not be much influenced by that consideration. Sure, maybe some Admin lawyer can argue something about 'treason' or "the Constitution is not a suicide pact", but my guess is that the main issue will be just a simple, clear protection of at least the Fourth Amendment. SCOTUS is interested in defending the Constitution and not much interested in how to stop Boston wackos with pressure cookers. For a longer term 'conclusion', I pointed out that if after the SCOTUS decision the citizens still want NSA listening in on pillow talk, steamy e-mails, tracking people to their romantic meetings, etc., then we can try to amend the Constitution. > If your point is that we will ultimately be protected by the Supreme Court, I think you are wrong. No, in simplest terms the process has started; likely nothing can stop it; SCOTUS will make a decision, in all likelihood defending the Constitution; and then we will see where we stand. That this process will move inexorably to a solid (the other two branches won't argue with it) conclusion is, in the context of much of the discussion in this thread, quite significant: Or, we can discuss this and that issue and fine point and what if, but, still, this unstoppable process will move to its conclusion which promises to be quite meaningful. For being "protected", I see no alternative to the usual from Jefferson "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance". For Obamacare, I don't know what the legal status is or what cases have been decided. For me, my guess is just that Obamacare is so poorly designed that too soon so many people will be screaming bloody murder, especially appropriate in the context, that Congress will just repeal it. I don't think that Obamacare was ever a serious attempt to help the US healthcare system but just some political posturing -- Nancy had a really good time, a lot of fun. She had the smile of a Homecoming Queen. Now that she's had her good time, we can go back to reality. Obama? He knows nothing about Obamacare: How do we know? Because during his efforts at helping it pass, too soon he said things that were really dumb, got slapped down hard, and then just shut up. In particular, at one point the US College of Surgeons put out that what Obama said was "uninformed, misinformed, just plain wrong, and dangerous". And that caused Obama to shut up. One more point was, one of his tear jerk cases said that due to her existing bad health she couldn't get insurance. Nonsense: All she had to do was move to a state with 'community rating', e.g., as I've been told, NYS. Obama's interest in Obamacare was about political posturing, not healthcare. Also someone from Arkansas, maybe Bill Clinton, said that Arkansas had a program for people like her. If the IRS comes after many people, Obamacare will go down in flames. But for SCOTUS and Obamacare, that case is less clearly about the Constitution than the attack on the Fourth Amendment by grabbing all that Verizon data.