Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 1001 posts

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

#721

Post by joshstrange »

exabrial wrote: post #205

I agree with "congress cannot delegate it's powers" to a certain extent. Negative example: The BATF has a splendid history of literally doing nothing except putting it's critics behind bars, while solving 0 actual crime and preventing any sort of mass tradgedies. Positive example: The FAA has done an incredible job making air-travel safer than car travel. I have a feeling that a lot of the higher-ups are former engin…

> The FDA has done a great job in regulating the industry for their namesake: food and drugs.

The Sackler Family/Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin has entered the chat

It's hard to see what the FDA (didn't) do in that case as anything but complete corruption. Allowing a new label for this new untested drug and then the head left to go work for Purdue shortly after? Revolving door.

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

#722

Post by JamesBarney »

specialist wrote: post #663
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…

More specifically, the dissenting opinion argues that the right to abortion logically follows from all the prior rights granted to women, eg own property, voting, divorce.

It's my understanding it's argued the right to an abortion is given from the 14th amendment.

I didn't really see anything from the dissenting opinion about how the right to an abortion is given by women's right to voting, property or divorce (?).

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

#723

Post by jimbob45 »

namdnay wrote: post #539
kbuchanan wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great example of how on an individual level commentators want to bend democratic processes to achieve their own goals, but, without fail, they get caught in a tangle of contradictions. What is the Supreme Court's mandate? To stop climate change? To feel out the majority's opinion and make a legal path for it? This is why democracy is so hard: it consistently yields outcomes that are disappointing to a large…

> What is the Supreme Court's mandate? To stop climate change? Stopping climate change should be everyone’s mandate. When your house is on fire and a neighbor has a hose pipe, so you get into an argument with them because they’re not a fireman?

Do you feel that Korematsu v US and Trump v Hawaii were correctly decided then?

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

#724

Post by bmitc »

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…

Societal concerns cannot be deterministically determined via deductive logic. So, people who hide behind "this sounds logical to me", whether intentionally or not, just happen to agree with the specific logic used in that instance. When presented with other so-called logic, suddenly it's illogical.

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

#725

Post by josephcsible »

dsr_ wrote: post #458
zionic wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the fix here is for Congress to pass a specific law empowering the EPA with explicit authority. If something like that can't make it through congress then it isn't democratic, and the task then becomes one of convincing the other side. I've the had the anti-coal conversation with plenty of conservatives and they were all open to my point of view. Ultimately this court's decision is a win for democracy, even if i…

You've almost got it, but you need to go one step further. Congress isn't democratic. Congress is overly concentrated. To begin with, the Senate is absurdly anti-democratic. The 710K residents of Washington, DC don't get a vote there at all. The 600K residents of Wyoming get the same 2 votes as Vermont (620K) and California (39 million). Anything that says that Texas and West Virginia are equal to each other in some…

> Any Constitutional "originalist" who thinks that the House of Representatives is just fine at 435 reps is a hypocrite. At one per 34,000, we need about ten thousand reps to meet the standards of representation that the founders thought was reasonable.

How is that hypocritical? The Constitution says "The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one Representative". The fact that we're not near the upper bound doesn't make it unreasonable. If they thought a reasonable representation would have required some lower bound other than 1 per state, they would have written that.

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

#726

Post by throwaway5752 »

nostromo wrote: post #357
cmurf wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dissent indicates the power is already explicitly granted in the EPA statute plain as day. It really isn't clear to me what language would satisfy the majority.

“The EPA may regulate carbon emissions” would do the trick.

Now repeat for every chemical, and you have an unregulated mess, as this decision intends to create.

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

#727

Post by panda-giddiness »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #522
Spivak wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody in the comments is saying that the Supreme Court is wrong in the sense that the logic doesn’t follow. Of course it’s nuanced and up to interpretation, that’s why most decisions are split — and usually split on “conservative (do what I say) and liberal (do what I mean). The reason people are mad is because the court is relitigating long settled cases which breaks the main principle of the court which is don’t b…

Most decisions are actually not split. It's just that the controversial ones get all the press. No one is gonna get fired up about 9-0 or 8-1 decisions.

This is incorrect – most cases are split. The most common outcome is 9-0 (about a third of cases), but the second most common split is 5-4.

This shouldn't be surprising – controversial cases are more likely to end up before the Supreme Court than mundane ones.

[1] http://supremecourtdatabase.org/analysisFrequencies.php?sid=...

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

#728

Post by nescioquid »

vintermann wrote: post #476
nitsky wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That may even be "constitutionally" correct... but it makes the US completely incapable of operating in the modern world. The Constitution was designed to be amended to adapt to a changing world. Let's amend it! However, it is the role of the Supreme Court to apply what the Constitution DOES say, not decide what it SHOULD say.

The role of the court is whatever the hell it pleases. It is the court which gets the final word on what they should be. They do write opinions, but they might as well not since they answer to no one. No one can hold them accountable for blatantly contradicting themselves. They can very theoretically be impeached, but that's a 100% political process - it's equally (im)possible whether they're "fulfilling their role"…

> The role of the court is whatever the hell it pleases.

Sort of seems like it. It was only in the early 19th century that the Supreme Court gave itself a) the power of legislative review, and b) declared itself the supreme interpreter of the constitution.

Since we've been busy upending precedent, why not upend these two precedents as well?

> They can very theoretically be impeached

In the past, one SC justice resigned under the threat of impeachment over his financial conflict of interest. At least one of our justices has been in violation of ethics rules around financial (and political) conflicts of interest. Several other have lied under oath at their confirmation hearings. I'd at least like to see Congress open some investigations as the first step towards impeachment.

But you're right, it is a political process, and I think the democrats are more than happy to simply fundraise off of this rather than exercising any check at all.

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

#729

Post by the_only_law »

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…

> Every surpreme court article makes me hate this community a bit more.

I mean, HN is kinda a go to place for pendantry, it's not terribly surprising. People started a huge fight over whether the word "they" can refer to a single individual the other week.

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

#730

Post by scarface74 »

philwelch wrote: post #679
JeremyNT wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Headlines about Supreme Court cases are almost uniformly misleading, because they suggest the Court is making decisions on policy issues rather than legal issues. This is the naive version of how SCOTUS works that they teach us in elementary school. History has shown that the Supreme Court is a political body with its own political agenda. The doctrine and precedent cited is used as a justification for whatever pol…

The majority of justices on the current Supreme Court have been doing a good job of sticking to the law rather than attempting to enact policy. What you’re describing is a good criticism of the mid-20th century Supreme Court, but the current Court has done a good job of rolling back those excesses.

If you ignore that whole “gerrymandering is okay”.

Thomas wants to revisit a lot of rulings like the one that gave gay people to right to get married. But I bet he won’t revisit “Loving vs Virginia”.

Post reply on HN