391–400 of 1001 posts
This seems like the judicial branch just voted to give itself substantially more power. Are there any checks against this? Or can justices just keep granting themselves more powers and invalidating any restraints?
Yes, packing the court.
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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 and pass well-reasoned and descriptive laws. So the large body isn't functioning well and the small body doesn't trust it anymore. So if we make the small body (the supreme court) large like the large body (congress) will that actually fix the issue? Isn't the i…
> 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 i…
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.
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It's worth reading the judgement itself. The court has indeed voted to give the courts more power, but not on the basis of nothing. It did so because it views it as taking back powers that were incorrectly/lazily given up without basis in what Congress wanted. From the judgement: Congress in 1946 enacted the APA [Administrative Procedures Act] “as a check upon administrators whose zeal might otherwise have carried th…
As a legal dilettante I have some questions: What does this decision mean for court caseload going forward? If it will increase, how much? Is there budget for that?
It Congress wants to change the law, they can. It's up to congress, not the administration, to make law. For decades it seems Congress has largely abdicated its legislative responsibility in exchange for the political ease of letting the administrative state, and the courts, make the law. Just because something has "precedence" doesn't mean it's right. Banning gay marriage had precedence, but that didn't make it righ…
For context. Roberts, Alito, and Thomas; who are still on the court were dissenting opinions on the gay marriage decision. Seeming to favor "precedence" when it's convenient.
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Obvious check #1: Congress gets its sh*t together, and stops writing endless vague blather into law. Obvious check #2: Congress enlarges the Supreme Count to 21 Justices. And lets the President know that his nominees for the 12 new positions will need to understand who's the real boss.
Why stop at 21, why not get 1 supreme court from each state? You could get 2 if you wanted to be spicy and setup a sort of room for them all to debate in. Then after they heard the debates they could vote on the matter and if it passes it gets written into law. A sort of congress...
The interesting differences between the legislative and judicial branch is not the number of people (moreover, the Supreme Court is not exactly the entirety of the federal judicial branch).
Before proclaiming that this outcome is horrible - Please consider that the Good Guys (your opinion) might not win the election in November. And that you might not want the courts auto-deferring to all the plausible-ish interpretations of ambiguous laws which gov't agency officials appointed by the Bad Guys (your opinion) might suddenly add the Official Agency Interpretations next year.
So "Please consider that supreme courts may also limit the power of the Bad Guys" is clearly false, because when the Team X has power, they will make sure Team X is in every branch of the government, and their justices will decide whatever the executive branch is doing is very kosher and constitutional, as long as it's their team.
In the end, the system can only hold as long as even "Bad Guys" are good enough that they're not willing to break the system from inside. You keep electing the Real Bad Guys, the system will fail. Checks and balances aren't magic.
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What does “expertise” have to do with whether Congress authorized fishermen to be charged for government-mandated inspectors?
Congress was pretty explicit about that; they wrote it in the legislation. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/50/679.55
There's a tendency among certain people on HN to act like the conservative justices have no rhyme or reason and are just a bull running mindlessly through the china shop breaking precedent at random or specifically to hurt specific groups of people. I'm not a fan of every ruling that they've made, but this should have come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's been paying any attention to the arguments that this…
This process that you just described is what produced Chevron deference.
Good. Make Congress do its job. Erode the executive until we're not frothing at the mouth every 4 years worrying about who will be "in charge," and instead focusing on the actions of our congressional representatives.