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Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

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Re: Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

#121

Post by nxobject »

oldsklgdfth wrote: post #82
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to find anything except wildly biased news sources. After reading the article I know I should be upset about what the supreme court has done, and I should be fearful about what could possibly happen tomorrow because of it. But I don't have a very clear picture about what actually happened. How could one possibly build their own opinion one way or another from this piece?

IANAL, but pretty curious of SCOTUS. I just read a lot of the opinions. (I hate that the pdf does not have a table of contents). I've used the mental model of math and theorems to reason about it. In this model, all laws have to be consistent with base axioms from the constitution (and common law maybe?) I have come to realize that it is not a great analogy. The model breaks down when you realize that the law is not…

i.e., welcome to Constitutional law, where divining the effect of a amendment written in 19th century prose lives and dies on jurisprudential philosophy, rather than decided case law. (Is that what you mean by the “(and common law?)” parenthetical?)

Re: Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

#122

Post by oldsklgdfth »

nxobject wrote: post #121
oldsklgdfth wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but pretty curious of SCOTUS. I just read a lot of the opinions. (I hate that the pdf does not have a table of contents). I've used the mental model of math and theorems to reason about it. In this model, all laws have to be consistent with base axioms from the constitution (and common law maybe?) I have come to realize that it is not a great analogy. The model breaks down when you realize that the law is not…

i.e., welcome to Constitutional law, where divining the effect of a amendment written in 19th century prose lives and dies on jurisprudential philosophy, rather than decided case law. (Is that what you mean by the “(and common law?)” parenthetical?)

By common law I refer to British common law which pops up in opinions.

References to "domicile" come from common law (in Trump v Barb).

I may be mistaken.

Re: Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

#123

Post by plaguuuuuu »

ceejayoz wrote: post #18
apparent wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No chance 3 ever passes, and a wealth tax would require an amendment unless it is "apportioned among the states" or some such thing (and it can't be because wealthy people are concentrated in a handful of states). Editing to add: It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally diffe…

> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally different. This already happens, though. Candidates largely ignore entire states they know they can't win, as well as ones they think they will win. (Ask Hillary if she regrets not campaigning more in Wisconsin, for example.)

In Australia you have "electorates" which are areas of roughly 100k pax. Each electorate gets one representative in parliament. Omitting some finer detail here.

Then by contrast the senate: each state gets 12 senators regardless of population.

Re: Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

#124

Post by atmavatar »

apparent wrote: post #114
atmavatar wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. As opposed to campaigning exclusively in the half-dozen swing states that matter?

At least those states have a mix of urban/rural/suburban areas. If there were no EC, Dems would campaign exclusively in cities.

Those cities encompass both urban and suburban areas, and they represent something like 80% of the country's population.

While I'm sympathetic to the notion rural areas should not go unrepresented, I find an electoral system where you only have to secure electoral votes for states representing ~25% of the population to win, only a handful of which you need to campaign at all due to the winner-take-all nature of virtually every state's electors to be strictly and starkly inferior to one in which a candidate needs to campaign for no less than 40-45% to secure a plurality.

Re: Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

#125

Post by the_sleaze_ »

apparent wrote: post #115
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't forget the gifts and donations the judges receive because "Until recently, the judiciary’s ethics guidance didn’t explicitly address the ownership issue." > If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000 https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...

Are you of the opinion that he would decide cases differently if not for those gifts? Because the general consensus is that Thomas is one of the most ideologically pure justices (whether one thinks his ideology is good or bad). I've not seen anyone identify even a single case where his vote seems to coincide with a benefactor, but not his typical ideology.

I genuinely struggle to comprehend the stance behind your comment. There are essentially no other official seats that are _not beholden to anti-bribery laws and standards.

This is like saying Pete Rose was innocent because he never threw any game he gambled on, or Trump can take gifts from Qatar because they never influenced him in any way.

I genuinely think this argument is made with dishonest motives. Truly astounding if it is not.

Re: Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

#126

Post by brightball »

darksaints wrote: post #71
brightball wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t abolish the electoral college without standardized voting across all states. A single state or even county allowing frivolous or unverified voting can swing the entire election. The EC provides a failsafe by capping the max impact of a single state in the event of an anomaly. In other words, you can’t talk about abolishing the EC without a national voter ID law.

Voter ID laws would not be a problem if said IDs were free. They’re not, and nobody that ever proposes such laws ever proposes a way to make IDs free, because they aren’t actually caring about election integrity, they only care about the practical disenfranchisement that would result from it.

Voter ID is supported by 82% of the US population. It’s virtually impossible to live in the US without ID.

Nonissue.

Re: Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

#127

Post by AnthonyMouse »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #110
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Five Constitutional amendments we need Let's consider these then. > Strike pardon power What are you going to replace it with? What happens to someone who is convicted in a case where the law is both clear and clearly wrong? The courts can't help them when they actually did it but there are scores of laws that "innocent people" violate without knowing it on a regular basis. You need something else to address that i…

> What happens to someone who is convicted in a case where the law is both clear and clearly wrong? Same thing that happens most of the time now. They serve their sentence unjustly. If it’s a serious issue, the Congress can act. > You need something else You don’t. Most societies don’t. Pardon power is an anachronism nobody would argue for if it weren’t already here. > sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discr…

> Same thing that happens most of the time now. They serve their sentence unjustly.

Shouldn't we be making problems better instead of worse?

> If it’s a serious issue, the Congress can act.

Does Congress have the authority to pardon someone?

Also, do you really expect that to happen even if they could? Congress can't agree on anything by design.

> This is a unitary-executive thing. Prosecutorial discretion is unrelated.

They're pretty related. Prosecutorial discretion is Congress passing a law and the executive deciding not to enforce it. How different is it to Congress passing a law and the executive deciding not to implement it?

It's the check provided by the other elected branch. The ability to say no.

> Lots of thought has gone into this. One can write it competently. At the very least, the First Amendment would still stand.

It's not a drafting issue. If someone can buy a TV network or a website with a lot of readers and then use it to say what they want, money buys speech. If someone with access to an audience can't say what they want, you don't have a First Amendment anymore, because having an audience is a prerequisite to exercising speech which is imposed by reality rather than the law, and there is no way to get one without spending money or money-equivalents like labor/time. The concepts are directly in opposition. The government can't simultaneously regulate speech and not at the same time.

> They’re not! SCOTUS just confirmed this for the Fed.

And that decision was a little nuts. So if the public wants the Fed chair out, there is no practical democratic process that can do it?

> We have a mishmash of authorities, with the Congress clearly wanting some agencies to retain some independence.

Which is a violation of checks and balances. It's Congress setting something up and trying to tell the other branches they can't stop it. That shouldn't happen, and the existing instances of it happening are also bad.

There are times when you want Congress to act as a check on the President, but there are also times when you want the President to act as a check on Congress.

Re: Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

#128

Post by apparent »

the_sleaze_ wrote: post #125
apparent wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you of the opinion that he would decide cases differently if not for those gifts? Because the general consensus is that Thomas is one of the most ideologically pure justices (whether one thinks his ideology is good or bad). I've not seen anyone identify even a single case where his vote seems to coincide with a benefactor, but not his typical ideology.

I genuinely struggle to comprehend the stance behind your comment. There are essentially no other official seats that are _not beholden to anti-bribery laws and standards. This is like saying Pete Rose was innocent because he never threw any game he gambled on, or Trump can take gifts from Qatar because they never influenced him in any way. I genuinely think this argument is made with dishonest motives. Truly astound…

There are two possible reasons that someone might be generous with a justice: either because they like and want to support him, or because they want to influence him. The first presents no ethical issues, but the latter does.

If there is any evidence of the latter, perhaps you could point it out? AFAIK, none of the generosity ever received by Thomas came from a friend with business before the court. Furthermore, Thomas is perhaps the most easily predicted justice, since he sticks to his ideological guns, which are quite well-known. Attempting to bribe him would be a fool's errand, and by all appearances it has not happened, at least not successfully.

You're free to point to evidence to the contrary, if you're aware of it.

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