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Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

bbc.com

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Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#711

Post by drewrv »

ceejayoz wrote: post #652
xyzzyz wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headlines aren’t entirely wrong. If you look at the conservative majority opinions, you’ll find that indeed, it’s about the relevant legal issues, ie. what the law actually says. On the other hand, if you read liberal dissents, they’re mostly about what they think appropriate policy should be. In this particular case, the majority opinion starts off by quoting the relevant statute and analyzing its meaning, where…

> If you look at the conservative majority opinions, you’ll find that indeed, it’s about the relevant legal issues, ie. what the law actually says. Qualified immunity and asset forfeiture would like a word.

This term alone the "conservative majority opinions" have been downright contradictory on "relevant legal issues". Women now have a right to defend their life with a gun but cannot defend their life with healthcare.

It's clear that they are simply using "originalism" to cherry pick what falls in line with their personal opinions.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#712

Post by Balgair »

meatsauce wrote: post #577
fooey wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congress doesn't remotely have the bandwidth to explicitly write out and decide all the little rules it takes to regulate the country, even if they had a clue what they were doing in each case It's pretty clearly designed to dismantle the federal regulatory apparatus

Congress has plenty of time and money. They are too busy jockeying for votes to do anything. The problem with congress is that they are too focused on winning elections instead of doing the GD job. I view this as yet another reason why we need strict term limits for members of congress. There are too many leeches.

I don't think that's true.

Typical staff sizes for congresscritters seem to be about 60 people. I managed to get some salary data on them, and $5M total per congresscritter seems to be reasonable [0]. So, I dunno, double that cost for ancillary expenses and the like, you get ~$10M per congresscritter. Multiply that all out and you have ~26,000 people and ~$4.4B total.

The total spending of the whole US federal government is ~$4T with ~4M people employed. So, ~1000x the budget and ~150x the staff of all of congress and their staffers.

Sure, yeah, you can double or 10x the staff of congress, even up the budgets by 100x. Maybe only 1/10th of the budget is actually needed. Maybe you can get by with giggling the staffer pay ratios. Whatever. You're still really short.

Oh, and you still have to have the staff that was doing the original jobs of the congresscritter.

Unless you completely rejigger how congress works to the tune of a ~100x increase in budget and staff[1], there's just no way congress can take over that job.

[0] There's not really a database on this that I found. I just took a random sample of 35 congresscritters and then googled for their staff sizes and salaries. It's not definitive and it varies a fair amount, but 60 seems to be a high yet good estimate.

[1] Imagine trying to grow any business or enterprise by 100x. It would take a very very long time for the dust to settle. Let alone working all the kinks out of the system that you're creating from whole cloth. And that's a new system. You'd also have the fight with the old system when trying to do this between congress and the exec. branch. The likelihood of it occurring in any kind of reasonable timeline and in any kind of reasonable effectiveness is precisely 0.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#713

Post by the_doctah »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #248
pupppet wrote: post #106

Everyone stating this is a good thing because it's not the Supreme Court's job to do xyz are conveniently ignoring the fact these decisions are being made due to tribalism, not out of some concern for rule of law.

Also, even if the surpreme court was completely correct to do this: why is this their focus? Why is this so much more important than the the thousands of other cases waiting for their attention?

You ask this like there isn't some long-established, drawn out process for getting a case before the Supreme Court.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#714

Post by tablespoon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #654
lolinder wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make OP's point less true: the headlines surrounding this decision are misleading. This is not judicial overreach, it's an application of a different theory of judicial review than we've become accustomed to, and it's not necessarily a bad one. If we don't like it when the police creatively interpret laws to target minorities, can we allow the EPA the authority to creatively interpret laws to target foss…

> This is not judicial overreach, it's an application of a different theory of judicial review than we've become accustomed to, and it's not necessarily a bad one. Originalism is as bad in jurisprudence as orthodoxy is in religions. It is extremely dangerous to act like there haven't been hundreds of years of civilizatory development in all areas since the scriptures were written. Originalism/orthodoxy/fundamentalism…

> Originalism is as bad in jurisprudence as orthodoxy is in religions. It is extremely dangerous to act like there haven't been hundreds of years of civilizatory development in all areas since the scriptures were written. Originalism/orthodoxy/fundamentalism, especially one that doesn't take contemporary issues of the text's origin into mind, always is bad.

No it isn't. Your analogy doesn't really work because religious scriptures can't usually be amended (within the context of a single religion), while there are well-defined mechanisms for amending and updating law (e.g. what legislatures do all day). Basically: update the text itself with the needed changes, not the interpretation.

There are serious problems with using interpretation to update law: it makes the text ambiguous, because who knows how some loosely-constrained judge(s) will decide to "update" it in the future, and it's anti-democratic because it bypasses the democratic political bodies who's actual job it is to actually make the updates.

The problem with US constitutional law right now is that a lot of people want certain things to be "constitutional" when there's no actual consensus for doing so (a consensus isn't 50% + 1, it's "pretty much everyone agrees").

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#715

Post by barsonme »

Goronmon wrote: post #344
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The decision looks simple and correct to me, even with only reading from the very left biased BBC article. Despite your very right biased comment, I don't buy the idea that congress needs to write legislation down to specific policy details that might come up with every minute aspect of what is intending to be legislated. I don't think elected politicians are capable of being knowledgeable enough to give specific gui…

> do you really want a US senator voting on what level of chemicals are allowed to be present in drinking water?

That’s not the level of granularity here. Using your hypothetical example about clean drinking water, Congress would need to delegate authority to EPA to regulate clean drinking water instead of EPA inferring or assuming it has that authority because of some other unrelated statute. Congress itself would not decide what a safe level of arsenic in drinking water is, EPA experts would.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#716

Post by extheat »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #699

Every surpreme court article makes me hate this community a bit more. There is far too much obsessing over "their logic is consistent" and far too much intentional ignorance of the fact that they chose which logic to bring to bear on which issues, and that there are many other possible ways to apply consistent logic. Their logic can be consistent and they can still be partisans, looking to implement a specific agenda…

If you take an overly simplistic view of things then yes every ruling is partisan everywhere. This by itself is not a meaningful insight because all forms of government will be corrupt. The purpose of SCOTUS isn’t to rule based on what the desired outcome is, it’s to rule based on what the law explicitly does say and is permitted to say per the Constitution. I believe if we set aside climate change, for most reasonable people it’s not hard to see that the executive branch took action that the legislative branch never gave them, (and likely did so because they knew such laws could not pass Congress).

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#717

Post by gsibble »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #503
gsibble wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also makes it easier for states to expand access to abortion, including expanding it up through the 3rd trimester. Just today, CA put a Constitutional amendment on the ballot in November to allow up to the final minute abortions. That ruling gave power back to the people and state legislatures. It benefit blue states as much as red.

That’s just as horrific as banning abortions altogether.

But it's up to the people to decide. That's what freedom is.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#718

Post by mrguyorama »

rayiner wrote: post #306

Headlines about Supreme Court cases are almost uniformly misleading, because they suggest the Court is making decisions on policy issues rather than legal issues. The very first words of the opinion, on p. 2, make clear that the legal issue before the Court is very different: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf The Clean Air Act does not purport to give the EPA blanket regulatory authority ov…

Ah yes, this is all perfectly above board. It just so happens that after a huge amount of horse shit by the republican party to appoint certain specific justices, there are immediately perfect test cases to put everything exactly the way they want it.

No. This was planned, planned very in advance, planned in the open. The republican party has openly wanted to do this for decades, put a plan in motion and executed very well. It is obvious that these justices are completely beholden to the republican party, and should be seen as such. We can play all the dumb semantics games we want, but none of that changes that the Supreme court is part of the US government, that their decisions have broad consequences, and that those consequences are obvious.

If you do "the right thing" and it leads to millions of people oppressed when "the wrong thing, or nothing at all" would have led to zero suffering, did you really do the right thing?

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#719

Post by EricDeb »

TylerE wrote: post #660
JamesBarney wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The roe v Wade decision seemed to follow a similar pattern with the conservative opinion being about how there isn't really a basis for a constitutional right to an abortion up to viability (seems true) and the liberal dissenting opinion was about how the decision was going to be bad for women (also true) and how this opens up the floodgates to reversing a lot of other important supreme court decisions ( not sure how…

I’m waiting for the first lawsuit against the DEA. What in the constitution gives the right for the Fedwral Government to regulate what we voluntarily put in our bodies or grow in our back yards?

And this is where their hypocrisy will show because they will absolutely find a way to allow the DEA to remain

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#720

Post by gsibble »

Victerius wrote: post #556
gsibble wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly disagree. All of the recent decisions make perfect legal sense, this coming from the son of a Constitutional attorney who has described to me the rulings, reasons behind them, precedents, etc.. And he's a pro-choice, anti-gun Democrat. He still agrees with the legal decisions. I read the rulings myself too and they make total sense given what I've learned over decades of listening to him.

> I read the rulings myself too [X] Doubt

You can doubt all you want, I read the rules, concurrences, and dissents on most SC decisions. The media doesn't really report the facts on them so I prefer to get them right from the source.
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