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Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

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Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#181

Post by erik_seaberg »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #139
akudha wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw parts of the speech and it was crazy. This is why appointing judges for life makes zero sense to me. If I become a supreme court judge at 45 and live to 75, I have a full three decades to change the direction of the country forever. This is very very scary. There should be a term limit for everyone in government like presidents do - mayors, congressmen, senators, judges...

Not to mention it'd make the majority of turnovers in the supreme court an orderly scheduled event fair between parties.

They are meant to be appointing an independent judiciary applying precedent and law as written, not delegates whose votes are pledged to parties. Activists belong in Congress where the voters have some say.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#182

Post by gruez »

karaterobot wrote: post #155
akudha wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw parts of the speech and it was crazy. This is why appointing judges for life makes zero sense to me. If I become a supreme court judge at 45 and live to 75, I have a full three decades to change the direction of the country forever. This is very very scary. There should be a term limit for everyone in government like presidents do - mayors, congressmen, senators, judges...

The reason Supreme Court justices are appointed for life is so they are independent. That cuts both ways, protecting both people I agree with, and people I disagree with from having their verdicts influenced by outside forces. Sometimes this is inconvenient for me, but on the whole I prefer it over the alternative. The key is to hold the people who nominate and confirm these justices to account, since they are electe…

>The reason Supreme Court justices are appointed for life is so they are independent

Can't you just make it so it's x years appointment, but you can't be reappointed?

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#183

Post by a1369209993 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #96
andrewmg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Longtime HN lurker and FedSoc member/leader, although speaking for just myself here.) The Federalist Society's entire annual convention was just broadcast online this past week,[0] and it's pretty typical of the Society's activities: hosting panels, debates, and speeches on the law featuring a wide breadth of views. If the Federalist Society is some kind of "conspiracy"—one that you can join today, for fifty bucks!—…

It isn't a conspiracy. It is the organization most at fault for mitch's anti-democratic actions regarding the supreme court that I honestly believe has the potential to completely undermine our government. The supreme court's move to a completely partisan institution is a huge step toward a populist dictatorship. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/supreme-revenge/

It depends pretty much entirely on how you define "conspiracy". Eg "conspiracy to commit murder" (or election fraud or something, more topically) doesn't require secrecy at all (except in order to be successful, maybe) while "conspiracy theory" (when it's not being abused to the point of meaninglessness to dismiss legitimate accusations) is specifically based on the implausability of many thousands of people not just keeping a secret, but concealing any evidence that there even is a secret.

Plenty of things are conspiracies in the "conspiracy to commit murder" sense, without being conspiracies in the "conspiracy theory" sense.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#184

Post by pfdietz »

medium_burrito wrote: post #91
flavor8 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's 85, his brother died recently, and he's very likely concerned about "legacy". According to Greenpeace, these assholes have poured $145,555,197 into groups that worked counter to climate policy changes being enacted (from 1997 to 2018). _Partisanship_ should be the least of his worries - he'll be remembered as a key figure who spurred inaction at the exact time that we should have been taking drastic action.

Greenpeace is directly working against nuclear energy, which is the best way to have clean energy in the future for a large portion of humanity.

Nuclear energy is working against nuclear energy, by being far too expensive to compete.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#185

Post by jaggederest »

chmod600 wrote: post #165
jaggederest wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of them advocating the seizure of the means of production for the workers? Abolish the state or private property? Devolve control into local worker's councils or other non-hierarchical means of decision-making? The US, in general, does not have any non-conservative judiciary. Stare decisis by itself ensures that there is a strong conservative streak in the available pool of jurists. So yes, the Supreme court…

The original claim was that thr Supreme Court has become highly partisan. The fact that justices switch sides and join with appointees of the opposite party is evidence against that claim. Now you're bringing up a different claim, which is that the two major parties don't really represent a variety of ideas. That's a fine claim to make, but it doesn't contradict my point.

My point is that there is no "switch sides", because there are only 1.5 sides. Also, partisanship isn't the only force determining outcomes in the supreme court, it's just the most important one for many purposes.

The other major shift is actually more along the axis of social libertarian vs authoritarian, which is not as clearly divided as "republican vs democrat", especially considering the late RBG was clearly an authoritarian in some respects, despite being fairly left of center.

Taking any of this as evidence that the court is non-partisan is pretty incorrect: They're consistently partisan in clearly obvious ways, even controlling for other issues.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#186

Post by nobodyandproud »

dragonwriter wrote: post #126
pnw_hazor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Army has nothing to with personal self-defense or protection of civil rights. Standing armies were the part of the motivation for the 2nd Amd. There is plenty of 2nd Amd. scholarship that goes over all of this. Not saying you need to agree with the scholarship, but a lot of people have thought about his stuff and researched it deeply. Gotchas statements re: "...well regulated...", cars are registered why not guns…

> The Army has nothing to with personal self-defense or protection of civil rights In the view of the theory underlying the second amendment, it is an existential threat to the latter which makes assuring that the State can meet it's internal and external security needs solely through small permanent cadres plus mobilization of the citizen militia of paramount importance. > Standing armies were the part of the motiva…

> Preventing standing armies was, which is presumably why the statement was that having one (and also standing paramilitary forces for internal security, which was actually the abuse that was the biggest fear motivating fear of standing armies) rendered the second amendment irrelevant.

This is inaccurate?

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Federalist_(Dawson)/45

James Madison argues from the assumption of having an standing army, and why an armed populace makes a Federal tyranny unlikely.

There are many (most) things I don’t like about Republicans, but making THIS an issue is something I just don’t understand about Democrats.

Pick your battles.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#187

Post by aniro »

forest_dweller wrote: post #135
colinmhayes wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that changes how much the Koch's donated to climate change deniers.

It highlights the very important point that activist groups will quite often ignore viable solutions. This is usually because they wish to keep on being activists and keep on continuing the fight. Thus it brings into question anything they claim and all claims should be treated with skepticism.

Have you seen how big the Chernobyl exclusion zone is? are to move your family there?

Have you paid any attention to the after effects at Fukushima? Do you care to realize that we are pushing radiation with unknown effects into the largest body of water (and one of the greatest repositories of life) on Earth? That the effects will likely reverberate for a 1000 years or more?

What is your solution to the problem of accumulating Nuclear waste?

Has it occurred to you that life has succeeded on the planet primarily by a fantastical luck of getting dosed with EXACTLY the right amount of radiation, carefully controlled by an atmosphere that literal took a millennia of millennia in order to develop? That fucking with that balance by inviting disastrous and unknown consequences into that careful envelope might turn some people off?

No. You must be right.. just a bunch of loony activists that are clinging desperately to the activist identity.

How shallow and unconsidered an opinion. Did it make you feel as smug as it sounded when you typed it out?

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#188

Post by lostdog »

karaterobot wrote: post #155
akudha wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw parts of the speech and it was crazy. This is why appointing judges for life makes zero sense to me. If I become a supreme court judge at 45 and live to 75, I have a full three decades to change the direction of the country forever. This is very very scary. There should be a term limit for everyone in government like presidents do - mayors, congressmen, senators, judges...

The reason Supreme Court justices are appointed for life is so they are independent. That cuts both ways, protecting both people I agree with, and people I disagree with from having their verdicts influenced by outside forces. Sometimes this is inconvenient for me, but on the whole I prefer it over the alternative. The key is to hold the people who nominate and confirm these justices to account, since they are electe…

Give them a term limit, and then send them back to their life appointment on the district courts (with a higher salary if you want to sweeten the deal a little).

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#189

Post by gorbachev »

flavor8 wrote: post #6
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #4

Apologies if this is covered in the article, which I can't get to, but what is he doing to make amends? Or is this just empty, placatory words?

He's 85, his brother died recently, and he's very likely concerned about "legacy". According to Greenpeace, these assholes have poured $145,555,197 into groups that worked counter to climate policy changes being enacted (from 1997 to 2018). _Partisanship_ should be the least of his worries - he'll be remembered as a key figure who spurred inaction at the exact time that we should have been taking drastic action.

The Koch Brothers are also directly responsible for poisoning a generation of poor people who've had the unfortunate luck to live downwind from chemical factories owned by Koch Industries.

What's even more audacious is that all the money they gained from killing people, a lot of them from cancer, they pretend to be patrons of curing cancer funding cancer research.

The family puts most robber barons to shame.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#190

Post by spodek »

medium_burrito wrote: post #91
flavor8 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's 85, his brother died recently, and he's very likely concerned about "legacy". According to Greenpeace, these assholes have poured $145,555,197 into groups that worked counter to climate policy changes being enacted (from 1997 to 2018). _Partisanship_ should be the least of his worries - he'll be remembered as a key figure who spurred inaction at the exact time that we should have been taking drastic action.

Greenpeace is directly working against nuclear energy, which is the best way to have clean energy in the future for a large portion of humanity.

Nothing beats reducing consumption.
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