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5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

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Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#171

Post by bwaldrep »

joshuamorton wrote: post #142
koolba wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it s a great system because foundational change requires a super majority of consensus across multiple political lines. Not just a mob showing up with pitch forks demanding the flavor of the week.

That only works if people don't unreasonably deify the system. You have to admit the constitution is deeply flawed in order to be willing to modify it, and, well, if popular opinion is that it is deeply flawed, you won't amend it, you'll just have judges rule without interpreting it strictly. Politically speaking, it's a terribly flawed document, because it can't change it without a civil war or functionally one part…

It's a bit hyperbolic to say a civil war or one party rule is required. We've successfully amended it 27 times, 6 of those after 1950.

Ideally we'd see less of "judges rule without interpreting it strictly," which would help garner popular support for future amendments.

Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#172

Post by jjitz »

UncleEntity wrote: post #156
jyounker wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rule by the minority. You think that's fair?

Do you really want $other_party to be able to change the constitution whenever they happen to get a supermajority?

If they get a 2/3 supermajority? yes...

Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#173

Post by koolba »

jyounker wrote: post #147
koolba wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it s a great system because foundational change requires a super majority of consensus across multiple political lines. Not just a mob showing up with pitch forks demanding the flavor of the week.

Rule by the minority. You think that's fair?

> Rule by the minority. You think that's fair?

It's not rule by the minority. It's that the majority needs to get wider agreement on their changes if they are to be implemented. The minority cannot force anything to happen. They can only prevent sweeping changes from passing with the slimmest of margins.

For every liberal complaining about the filibuster or Senate debate rules, would you have been fine with total Republican control of all levels of Federal government from 2016-2018? They had a wider majority in both the House and the Senate than the Democrats do right now.

Slowing the pace of massive change is a good thing. It gives time for ideas to be fleshed out. It gives time for ideas to be experimented with at a smaller scale. It gives time for people to see the results or consequences of actions.

Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#174

Post by colejohnson66 »

greyface- wrote: post #164
whoopdedo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there 435 people in this nation well versed enough to write detailed regulations That's part of the problem. 435 is far too low for a representative democracy. The U.S. has the highest representation ratio among OECD nations[1]. The size of Congress has been held at this arbitrary number despite the size of the country growing threefold. The value of being in Congress, or being able to influence a member of Con…

> 435 is far too low for a representative democracy. Imagine a world in which the Congressional Apportionment Amendment had been ratified in 1789. The House would have more than 6,000 members today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am...

If it had been ratified in 1789, the "mathematical discrepancy" would have appeared between 8 and 10 million citizens. We're well past that now, and could ratify it if the states wanted to screw over Congress.[a] It wouldn't even need to be reintroduced, as submitted amendments don't "expire".[b]

[a]: Twelve states already signed on, just need a few dozen more

[b]: Case in point, the 27th Amendment[0] was submitted to the states for ratification at the same time (1789), but never had enough states sign on until 1991.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...

Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#175

Post by xyzzyz »

sofixa wrote: post #155
xyzzyz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those bureaucrats are appointed by the President, whom you vote for, and by Congress, whom you vote for, and may be fired by the former. I wish this was the case, but it is not: only a minuscule fraction of government bureaucrats is politically appointed. The people actually drafting the million pages of administrative regulations are overwhelmingly career bureaucrats, who are effectively unfireable. > 2. In 2022,…

> If the elected representative cannot get enough votes to pass a law, it most likely means that the law is not that important, or that there is no agreement on what it should be. I'm not even in the US and i know that's quite simply untrue. Almost every single issue gets split among party lines, regardless of its merits. Abortions, vaccinations, climate change combatting are supported by the majority of the populati…

> Abortions, vaccinations, climate change combatting are supported by the majority of the population, yet no law on either can really be passed due to arcane rules and the refusal of one party to do anything that might benefit the other

This is an extremely simplistic, if not outright naive take. Majority might be for “combatting climate change”, sure, but when it comes to actual methods to do that, you’ll find that there is hardly a broad agreement as to what exactly should be done about it.

For example, I support carbon tax, but I’m against directly subsidizing solar/wind energy projects (as we do now). You’ll also find plenty of people who support both of these measures, and those who support only subsidies, but not direct carbon tax. What to do about it?

The current approach seems to be that the Congress, instead of talking it among themselves, making deals and reaching majority to pass a bill, just delegates the job away to bureaucrats in federal agency. As a result, in so many aspects of life, we are being ruled by unelected, unaccountable, nameless bureaucrats, who proclaim “rules” that no majority would ever support. What’s the point of democracy again?

There is, of course, another solution to this, that works much better in practice: getting federal government out of all of this, and leave these things to states, exactly as the authors of the system intended. You’ll observe that the states have much less troubles passing bills about protecting or prohibiting abortion, for example. Why must everything be ruled by federal government, which was never intended to be doing that?

Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#176

Post by PeterisP »

throw0101a wrote: post #161
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code of Hammurabi (eye for an eye) seemed to be popular back in the day. One must wonder if its host nation-state had survived for longer, what iteration would be out in the wild.

> The code of Hammurabi (eye for an eye) seemed to be popular back in the day. "Eye for an eye" comes from the Book of Exodus, and it was meant not as a prescription, but as a limitation: > The intent behind the principle was to restrict compensation to the value of the loss.[1] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_for_an_eye

While Book of Exodus may be a major bringer of "eye for an eye" to western culture, it is certainly not the origin of the principle. The Hammurabi code predates the events described in the book of Exodus (and thus the book of Exodus) by many centuries, and does encode "Eye for an eye" as a literal prescription (If an citizen should blind the eye of another citizen, they shall blind his eye.)

So it was also a prescription - but yes, as you say, it is also a limitation for retaliation, assigning an equivalent punishment to limit escalation of vengeance.

Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#177

Post by edmcnulty101 »

vmception wrote: post #61
edmcnulty101 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome write up thank you. What about executive orders? That seems like extreme overreach of the executive branch. It's it being used in an emergency either. The presidents are issuing hundreds of them during their terms.

> The presidents are passing hundreds of them during their terms. There is a major lack of oversight on Executive Orders. BUT for the most part they are an accurate use from what I can tell. Usually they are merely aspirational goals for agencies to implement, much more similar to a CEO's quarterly goals for subdivisions. The President is a dual office role of being head of the executive branch, and being head of the…

Are they creating new laws with Executive actions?

That would seem like it falls under the legislative branch.

Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#178

Post by colejohnson66 »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #177
vmception wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The presidents are passing hundreds of them during their terms. There is a major lack of oversight on Executive Orders. BUT for the most part they are an accurate use from what I can tell. Usually they are merely aspirational goals for agencies to implement, much more similar to a CEO's quarterly goals for subdivisions. The President is a dual office role of being head of the executive branch, and being head of the…

Are they creating new laws with Executive actions? That would seem like it falls under the legislative branch.

Executive Orders, technically, are only orders from the Executive (the President) to the rest of the branch. As in, they can only tell the rest of the Executive Branch what to do, not create laws. However, with how much Congress has delegated to Executive Agencies, there's a lot more overlap and gray area than there was 233 years ago.

For example, the CDC has the authority to mandate certain things in the name of public health, because Congress created the HHS (who oversees the CDC) with the express purpose of doing so. So an Executive Order directed at the CDC can, in a sense, give the President that power.

Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#179

Post by beerandt »

vannevar wrote: post #170
refurb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appeal to modernity fallacy (I just invented it). But you’re wrong to argue the “court hasn’t done it”, because the court has been doing it all along. It’s called precedence.

I was referring specifically to striking down long-standing precedents that endorsed mechanisms like SEC enforcement, and interpreting a right of privacy. What we're seeing is a dramatically stripped-down view of the Constitution. If it were being done as part of a broad social consensus that included a plan to revamp the Constitution to meet modern needs, it would be difficult but beneficial in the long run. But wha…

You say tearing down, I say reverting tacky renovations that clash with the intended architectural style.

The structural bones of the constitution itself remain strong, and are made more resilient by removing ad-hoc modifications currently straining that framework beyond its intended yielding limits.

Re: 5th Circuit Court Finds SEC Enforcement Unconstitutional [pdf]

#180

Post by vannevar »

beerandt wrote: post #179
vannevar wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring specifically to striking down long-standing precedents that endorsed mechanisms like SEC enforcement, and interpreting a right of privacy. What we're seeing is a dramatically stripped-down view of the Constitution. If it were being done as part of a broad social consensus that included a plan to revamp the Constitution to meet modern needs, it would be difficult but beneficial in the long run. But wha…

You say tearing down, I say reverting tacky renovations that clash with the intended architectural style. The structural bones of the constitution itself remain strong, and are made more resilient by removing ad-hoc modifications currently straining that framework beyond its intended yielding limits.

The framing of a house is strong, too, but you can't live in it. Our society and economy are mind-boggling complex compared to the state they were in 1789. Whether you liked the renovations or not is immaterial, they serve a function. Unless you have a plan to replace that function (other than just hand-waving "send it all to the courts"), it will be a disaster.
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