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U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#271

Post by int_19h »

CharlesColeman wrote: post #245
dragonwriter wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes a lifetime of respect to earn a seat on the Supreme Court bench. No, it just takes the support of the President and a sufficient number of Senators. Of which, by your own argument, anyone can become either; there is either more of a filter than you’d like to pretend on the political branches, or less than you’d like to pretend on the judiciary.

>> It takes a lifetime of respect to earn a seat on the Supreme Court bench. > No, it just takes the support of the President and a sufficient number of Senators. You're kinda both right. The legal mechanism says that "a lifetime of respect" isn't necessary, but the norms that have evolved around its use say otherwise. Recent history demonstrates (in the extreme) that norms aren't inviolable, but I think the ones aro…

The problem with SCOTUS is its reputation, which is dragged down by basically everything else in our politics. When politicians (on both sides of the aisle) openly talk about "liberal judges" and "conservative judges", and promise to appoint the kind that will rule the way they and their constituents want (as opposed to ruling according to what the law says) - and then those same people actually nominate or confirm appointees - it's hard to treat SCOTUS as some kind of cathedral where everybody is beyond reproach. Now it's just politics.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#272

Post by int_19h »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #232
sathackr wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a welcome check on the Executive and Legislative branches. Anyone can become President, and anyone can become a lawmaker. It takes a lifetime of respect to earn a seat on the Supreme Court bench.

I am from India and Indian courts are nothing but bunch of old men sermonizing everyone else. They often have barely read law, believe in extraordinary processes and completely arbitrary legal doctrines such as "constitutional morality" that compels them to actually ignore the law. Digging deep I realize that this is because most of them will retire at 60 after which they either seek lucrative jobs from their politic…

Look up "the switch in time that saved the nine".

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#273

Post by stale2002 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #229
stale2002 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> corporations are 'people' A corporation, is, by definition, a group of people, yes. And those people who make up the group have rights that are protected by the constitution. Or in other words, a corporation is the plural form of the word 'person', in many situations.

> A corporation, is, by definition, a group of people, yes. No, it's not. It is, legally, a single person. It is not a group of people, though one or more other people (all or some of which may also be corporations, governments, or other legal persons that are not natural persons) have authority to direct it as laid out in its charter. But the corporation is not, and is clearly and legally distinct from, any and all…

What I am saying is, that a corporation does not have a mouth. Only people have mouths.

Therefore any time you a preventing an entity with a mouth from speaking, you are by definition preventing a person from speaking.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#274

Post by int_19h »

dragonwriter wrote: post #109
whatshisface wrote: post #6

> Justice Thomas agreed with the result in the case, Timbs v. Indiana, No. 17-1091, but said he would have gotten to the same place by a different route. While the majority relied on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, Justice Thomas said he would have ruled “the right to be free from excessive fines is one of the ‘privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States’ protected by the 14th Amendment.”…

No, the rest of the court found the the excessive punishment protection of the eighth amendment was applied to the states through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment as an essential right and therefore a component of “liberty” as used in the due process clause. Thomas disagrees with this fairly conventional incorporation argument and the idea of the protection as a fundamental right, but feels instead that a…

> This distinction isn't merely semantic, though the end result in the present case is the same: under the majority view, the prohibition against excessive fines is a limitation on state government in all cases; in Thomas's view, it would not be a limit if the target of the state action were not a US citizen, since noncitizens necessarily do not enjoy the privileges and immunities of citizens.

That's the outcome, but I don't think that's the intent. The reason why Thomas wanted to go via the Privileges Clause rather than the Due Process Clause is because he represents a faction in jurisprudence that believes that the latter was historically inappropriately used in lieu of the Privileges or Immunities Clause in general.

If you dig into the history of that argument, it does kinda make sense - we have plain language in 14A speaking about states not allowed to deny rights to citizens, and we have historical record of the intent behind it. The reason why it's not used as intended is because in the infamous Slaughter-House Cases, SCOTUS essentially ruled it to be a nullity. Later, when the pendulum swung towards instead of reverting that decision and giving teeth to the Privileges or Immunities Clause, they made an elaborate construct of substantive due process from the Due Process Clause to allow for incorporation without a reversal.

The mainstream argument is that it's good enough, and that trying to revive the Privileges or Immunities Clause is simply not worth it - which is why it hasn't been referenced by SCOTUS in decisions for a long time. Nevertheless, there have always been judges that believe it to be wrong, and those judges would supply minority opinions referencing it. This generally correlates with textualism (and hence opposition to substantive due process, which is an inherently anti-textualist notion) - which is the case for Thomas as well - but is not limited to that crowd.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#275

Post by solveit »

keko039ndnfm wrote: post #238
sathackr wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a welcome check on the Executive and Legislative branches. Anyone can become President, and anyone can become a lawmaker. It takes a lifetime of respect to earn a seat on the Supreme Court bench.

The second statement is false. How much a candidate raises has been correlated to ability to win. That eliminates anyone that can’t raise money. And Kavanaugh’s nomination casts doubt on the third statement. You can be a vile POS, but become a SCOTUS judge so long as you’re networked with the right people.

>How much a candidate raises has been correlated to ability to win.

Key word being correlated. Winners raise more money in large part because people donate to candidates they think will win. So your third statement is technically true, but in a very uninteresting way that you probably didn't intend.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#276

Post by cmurf »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #262
CharlesColeman wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It takes a lifetime of respect to earn a seat on the Supreme Court bench. > No, it just takes the support of the President and a sufficient number of Senators. You're kinda both right. The legal mechanism says that "a lifetime of respect" isn't necessary, but the norms that have evolved around its use say otherwise. Recent history demonstrates (in the extreme) that norms aren't inviolable, but I think the ones aro…

Convention has proven, especially recently, not to be a great thing on which to stand the propriety of a nation.

I think that's the wrong conclusion. Norms and conventions are expedients. To have to put such things into law is really inefficient and even questionable whether they too would hold up in the face of systemic corruption. The right conclusion is the importance of character assessment skill in an electorate.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#277

Post by alasdair_ »

sathackr wrote: post #205
KorematsuFred wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this very remarkable about American legal system. The supreme court could have technically showed some bleeding heart by not showing judicial restraint. Instead they just did their job. Americans must thank this judicial culture.

It's a welcome check on the Executive and Legislative branches. Anyone can become President, and anyone can become a lawmaker. It takes a lifetime of respect to earn a seat on the Supreme Court bench.

>Anyone can become President

Somewhat irritatingly, I (and a large number of other American Citizens) cannot ever become president because we were not citizens at birth.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#278

Post by int_19h »

da_chicken wrote: post #180
vonmoltke wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, a lot of the constitution is actually phrased as limits on the government rather than rights as citizens. This is because the Constitution is supposed to be an enumeration of what the government is allowed to do. The limitations are there to narrow the scope of those enumerated powers. In this context, enumerating most rights of citizens would have been redundant. The enumerated citizen rights were th…

> Unfortunately, Commerce Clause abuse and the effective neutralization of the 10th Amendment has created the opposite situation where the government can do anything it wants as long as it isn't specifically prohibited, and citizens are only guaranteed rights if they are specified. I mean, that's true, but it's also true that it's extremely difficult to get 50 states to jump forward at the same time, particularly whe…

> I mean, that's true, but it's also true that it's extremely difficult to get 50 states to jump forward at the same time

To what extent do we actually need to have all states do exactly the same? It's a common argument, but there are many independent sovereign states out there that are smaller than many of US states, and they're doing fine solving their national problems despite their size. Sometimes - quite often - that happens with cooperation with other states, but such cooperation does not require an overarching government entity.

Sure, that means that US would not be a state in a sense that, say, France is a state, with a strong national identity and uniform politics. But does it have to be? I would argue that there is no truly democratic way to rule 300 million people from a single center, and decentralization is key to real democracy. Conversely, I don't see why my ideas and values have to be pushed on someone in the opposite corner of the country, but not, say, across the border into Canada.

> As the saying goes, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

Whose saying? Last time I remember hearing that everywhere, it was to justify stuff like the PATRIOT Act and other post-9/11 abuses.

> Our Constitution wasn't written with the management of 50 states and citizens numbering nearly 350 million in mind. Our founding fathers expected that there would have been multiple constitutional conventions by this time. It's easy to see the dilution of individual voices[0]. Our founding fathers though that one representative for every 40,000 individuals was inadequate, and changed it to be closer to one for every 30,000. Today, it's one for every 700,000 on average.

The even bigger difference is that those representatives then go and vote on far more issues than they did when the system was originally devised, which increases the dilution of individual voices, by bringing more important issues to the level where their vote is at it most diluted - as opposed to state level. Of course it's going to be overwhelmed.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#279

Post by int_19h »

gamblor956 wrote: post #219
vonmoltke wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, a lot of the constitution is actually phrased as limits on the government rather than rights as citizens. This is because the Constitution is supposed to be an enumeration of what the government is allowed to do. The limitations are there to narrow the scope of those enumerated powers. In this context, enumerating most rights of citizens would have been redundant. The enumerated citizen rights were th…

This is because the Constitution is supposed to be an enumeration of what the government is allowed to do. This is simply not true. The Founders lived through the Articles of Confederation, in which the founding document explicitly enumerated the only powers the government would have. The Constitution was an explicit rejection of that philosophy, and was intended to create a government with broad powers. The point of…

That's only true if you use the definition of "broad powers" that was used back when the Constitution was written - which is very different from what it is today.

And all of those broad powers they wanted the government to have, were explicitly written into the text of the Constitution. Sometimes it was deliberately vague, like the Commerce Clause (although if you showed our modern jurisprudence on that to people who wrote it, they would be horrified). And in the Federalist Papers, there are several instances where some bit in the Constitution is explained as, "yes, this is rather broad, but the government needs it for real world reasons". But it is always enumerated.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#280

Post by hannasanarion »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #193
da_chicken wrote: post #125

The important thing to understand about this case is the background and what the SCotUS actually ruled on. It's actually rather narrow ruling even if it is extremely important. The court exercised judicial restraint here, and made the minimum ruling necessary. Timbs was convicted of possession/sale/whatever, jailed for a year, and fined $1,200. The state confiscated his Range Rover as well. Timbs sued or appealed the…

I find this very remarkable about American legal system. The supreme court could have technically showed some bleeding heart by not showing judicial restraint. Instead they just did their job. Americans must thank this judicial culture.

And why is it a good thing that they didn't rule on the other merits of the case, such as clarifying that a confiscation of a $45000 car is "excessive" for a crime with a maximum fine of $1200?
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