Wisconsin governor vetoes portion of budget bill that would allow Tesla stores and service centers:
Alter Viggo on Twitter
Strangling Innovation: Tesla vs. 'Rent Seekers'
Alter Viggo on Twitter
Strangling Innovation: Tesla vs. 'Rent Seekers'
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As much as I agree with you on the issues, it would be a big mistake to go down that road. The Senate needs to be reorganized first. Packing the courts is a never ending slippery slope. Be careful what you wish for.
bhtooefr
Active Member
I just don’t see that happening. I think best idea at this point is justice term limits timed so that every presidential term gets at least two appointments. Most people would see the wisdom in that, I believe. Having any one justice on board for forty or fifty years does not make sense on many levels.
EVNow
Well-Known Member
Sanders proposal is basically term limits. He just has an idea of what to do with the supreme court judge after the term is done.
EVNow
Well-Known Member
The court system is actually broken. In a way when Trump said "Obama judges" - he was right. Too much partisanship among judges. I'd also say, it is now an extension of the "establishment".
When the party system changes, the politicians who were at the peak of their careers in the last party system become out of touch. The "out" party also becomes much more cautious by nature, but this time the dominant party was actively abusing the out party. That abuse didn't happen in any other cycle.
When the New Deal was the meme, Republicans were a lot more cautious and just tried to pump the brakes on Democratic ideas rather than put forward too many ideas of their own. If you look at the records of the Republican presidents during that era, they were closer to Obama and Clinton in their ideologies than any Republican Reagan to the present. We almost got universal basic income under Nixon.
When it comes to the politics of electric cars, there is an extra twist in the Upper Midwest. I heard an interview with Tim Ryan a few weeks ago. He went through a litany of areas where the Chinese are kicking our tails and I agreed with most of them, but he also mentioned electric cars as one of those areas. I thought of writing his campaign and pointing out that Detroit is getting its tail kicked by an outsider car company, but the company is not Chinese, it's American.
I was talking about this with my SO a few days ago. She is sort of an expert on legal ethics (other attorneys consult her about ethical dilemmas). She believes a lot of the problems with partisanship on SCOTUS could be solved by requiring SCOTUS to conform to the Code of Conduct for US Judges which all lower court judges need to follow.
I believe Reinquist declared that SCOTUS did not have to follow it, but recommended that all SCOTUS judges do their best to voluntarily conform. Since Roberts took over, that restraint has gone out the window for the more conservative judges. Thomas and Scalia regularly took part in very partisan political activities and Thomas' wife is a Republican operative. I believe Alito has crossed that line a few times too.
The Code of Conduct requires judges to not only be impartial, but to prevent any behavior that might be interpreted as biased. And there is a process for removing judges that refuse to follow the code. If SCOTUS had to follow the code, the judges that schmooze in conservative circles today would either distance themselves from those activities or would be removed.
There are also some differences on the court that aren't exacty left-right, but overlap with it. There are two schools of thought about how to interpret the Constitution. There are the originalists who believe the whole thing was set in stone like some sort of legal Bible from on high and then there are those who take Thomas Jefferson at his word and believe that the Constitution is a living document that needs to be reinterpreted for each generation.
The originalists tend to be conservative, but they have to twist themselves into legal pretzels to justify their ideology sometimes because the world was a very different place in the 18th century and new technologies as well as cultural changes have made some of the 18th century thinking woefully out of date.
A small subset of the right also holds onto the idea of the unitary executive. They believe that the president should be king and should not be limited in any way. (Of course this only seems to be in fashion when a Republican is president.) Thomas is the only clear unitary executive on the court now. I don't know about Kavenuagh and I doubt Gosuch is one.
During the Bush era SCOTUS shot down a number of the extreme laws Bush signed into law. Frequently the rulings were 8-1 with Thomas dissenting. I read one of Thomas' opinions on one of those cases and it basically said, "we should trust the president".
The unitary executive idea is lunacy within the constitutional framework. The Constitution was clearly written with different ideals in mind. Even an honest originalist can't really adhere to unitary executive ideas. We will probably be seeing some court decisions on it soon. Bill Barr is trying to push that to the limit to protect Trump.
The originalist ideas have a little bit more justification, but they still fall apart when you really think about it. Whatever someone thinks of their religious texts, the documents that define and control a nation are not in the same class. We know that the constitution was drawn up by quite fallible human beings and Thomas Jefferson stated that he hoped future generations would reinterpret the Constitution to work best for their realities.
Trying to be an originalist gets you to some absurd results. Originalists tend to be big on the 2nd amendment, but the 2nd amendment does not say firearms should be unrestricted. First is also states "for a well regulated militia", but it only talks about the right to keep and bear arms. It doesn't specify what type of arms.
If you want to interpret that with a true originalist lens, then anybody should be able to own a nuclear weapon. And the amendment says "people" not "citizens" so anybody residing in the United States can't be limited, including Mohamed who just moved here from Iraq... That is an absurd answer that I think all originalists would recoil from, which proves the point that originalism is not really workable.
Unfortunately there probably is no way this could be fixed in any way that was foolproof. Expanding SCOTUS would be a good short term solution, but long term could make for an unwieldy court. Though an expanded SCOTUS could work like the court of appeals work. Most appellate courts have 20 or more judges. A given case might just get a panel of three judges drawn at random. A major case might get the entire court en banc.
An expanded SCOTUS could hear cases with 9 justices drawn at random with the entire court coming together for critically important cases (like Bush v Gore in 2000). That would make the political calculus for people trying to maneuver things like abortion laws in front of the court much more difficult. If you don't know the make up of the particular court you're going to face for your case until it gets to the court, that might curb this legal activism on the part of conservative groups.
To be fair, I would propose expanding the court to something like 19, but the person who is president at the time can't appoint all the judges at one. At minimum allow one presidential election in between the first half and second half of the expansion.
Apparently that happened because Fox News was doing live telecast from the bar. The reporter didn't realize what they were chanting at first.
That would be an interesting system that randomizes the court.
Make SCOTUS have to conform to the Judicial Code of Conduct and a lot of the partisanship will stop, though the ideology won't.
Packing the courts has been done repeatedly throughout US history -- the Supreme Court size has changed repeatedly (look up what was done in the Civil War and Reconstruction periods!) It's significantly easier and more common than reorganizing the Senate. The easiest way to reorganize the Senate is to add a bunch of new states, of course, which was also done repeatedly for political purposes in the 19th century.
The bottom line is, if the courts are so obviously corrupt that they are not respected (which is the case right now), they have to be reformed by making real judges dominate over fake judges.
The fake judges have been violating stare decisis and throwing out precedent for funsies, and for no good reason; they've done it three times in the last year and been condemned by the 4 real judges on the court. This behavior is guaranteed to bring the courts into disrepute, even among those who still respected the court after Bush v. Gore and Citizens United. Packing the courts is probably the only way to make the courts respectable again.
I refer to Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Goresuch, and Kavanaugh as fake judges because the Constitution says that judges serve on "good behavior". It is indisputable that each of these men has behaved badly, and as such has forfeited their position as judge. The bureaucracy simply doesn't have a way to process that.
Though the largest the court has ever been was 10 justices. It was set to 9 in 1869 and hasn't changed since, though Roosevelt tried to make it bigger.
The only constitutional remedy for bad judges is impeachment. It's pretty much impossible to get a conviction in the Senate in the current political climate. If the Democrats got to 67 Senators (winning the lottery is easier), they could remove the bad eggs on the court. Roberts is definitely conservative, but he actually is a reasonably good judge. I wouldn't pick him for SCOTUS, but while some votes like Citizen's United were bad judgements, overall he has done very little that would rise to the level of impeachable offenses. Goreshuch has also been a fairly reasonable judge.
I think the two justices who would be at biggest risk for impeachment would be Kavenaugh and Thomas. Kavenaugh almost certainly perjured himself during his confirmation hearings (for appealate as well as SCOTUS) and Thomas has been quite politically active as a justice.
He is a textbook malignant narcissist:
Malignant narcissism - Wikipedia
He may be losing his marbles too, but his behavior is also consistent with a narcissist who is in over his head and his cons are going bad. All personality disorders get worse with age, but he was showing plenty of signs of this when he was in his 30s. That's why some of the richest neighborhoods in New York City who hadn't voted Democrat in over 50 years voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. They knew what a nut job he was because he's been trying to break into their social circles all his life.
These people are very dangerous and like the movie Gremlins where you aren't supposed to feed them after midnight, the absolute last thing to give a malignant narcissist is power.
The US has 240 years of legal tradition to fall back on but this is the hardest test the system has ever faced. Trump is just as crazy as the looniest of 3rd world dictators, but only the well established institutions are preventing him from becoming the first Idi Amin with a large military and a nuclear arsenal.
It is a trope on the internet to compare people to Hitler, I have been very careful not to before Trump, but Trump is just as evil and just as crazy as Hitler, but about 150 points shy in the IQ department. The fact he's not very bright and has little impulse control has prevented his plans from actually working very well. He's still doing a lot of damage like letting a toddler loose in a china shop. And the elected Republicans putting their own interests ahead of the country are trying to get what they can while they still have power.
Mader Levap
Member
I am not commenting on his overall behaviour and I won't play armchair psychologist/psychiatrist. I simply claim this particular mistake is due to senility and not other issues he may or may not have.
Off Shore
Off Topic Member
Armchair neurologist, then?
IANAN but I have done brain research by asking questions of no less than John Lilly when he spoke on campus.
More important discussion comes out of a little watched tangle with a Federal Judge over the Census' citizenship question.
Judge Rejects Justice Dept. Request to Change Lawyers on Census Case
Trump and Barr's effort to do-over a run around the Supreme Court's decision is almost slapstick comedy with the judge doing the smacking. A classic study of how hole-digging is Trump's twitter finger. (In the psychology field is this known as a TTF syndrome?) One can imagine Roberts smiling at the Supremes' set-up. Will we see contempt charges by the Supreme Court soon? Look for an over the net return by the judge.
By the way, it is absolutely critical for Trump and the Reeps to keep blocking Latinos from voting. To borrow a phrase from Trump, "Everybody knows this."
More important discussion comes out of a little watched tangle with a Federal Judge over the Census' citizenship question.
Judge Rejects Justice Dept. Request to Change Lawyers on Census Case
Trump and Barr's effort to do-over a run around the Supreme Court's decision is almost slapstick comedy with the judge doing the smacking. A classic study of how hole-digging is Trump's twitter finger. (In the psychology field is this known as a TTF syndrome?) One can imagine Roberts smiling at the Supremes' set-up. Will we see contempt charges by the Supreme Court soon? Look for an over the net return by the judge.
By the way, it is absolutely critical for Trump and the Reeps to keep blocking Latinos from voting. To borrow a phrase from Trump, "Everybody knows this."
Which particular issue? You posted after @S'toon posted a Robert Reich video.
The ruling yesterday was about the census case in New York. Today the judge in the census case in Maryland did the same thing. I read yesterday's ruling. It was a classic case of the government being hoisted by their own petard. The judge said the government had said this was urgent and changing the entire legal team right now would slow down the case, so no, they can't do that.
Here is a database of all the state AG cases in the Trump administration:
Statistics and Visualizations - Multistate Litigation vs. the Federal Government - State Attorneys General Data
So far Trump has kvetched about court decisions, but he has more or less gone along with them. At least he never completely defied the courts. If the citizenship question appears on the census anyway (and I suspect they might have told the printer to print those forms), that would be open defiance of SCOTUS, which has never happened before and there is no clear cut way to deal with that.
Appellate courts and SCOTUS don't have a mechanism for holding someone or an organization in contempt. That would fall on the original lower court. Technically a lower court could hold anybody in contempt and lock them away until they agree to cooperate, but I don't know of any government official, especially a high government official who has ever been locked up for contempt.
We are on the brink of a real constitutional crisis. The federal government only continues to work as long as the vast majority agree to follow the law and submit when the courts rule against them. If a court order was ignored without consequences, that would be the beginning of the end for the US system of rule of law.
Trump did have one win today. An appellate court threw out the emoluments lawsuit against Trump. I'm not too surprised by that. That's an example of another hole in the US legal system that Trump has exploited. It's been tradition for presidents to not mix their personal business with government business, so Congress never passed a law to support the emoluments clause. So it's a mandate in the Constitution with no instructions on how to do it. Just about every other clause in the Constitution has laws passed by Congress defining how they work.
...and Thomas perjured himself in his confirmation hearing, for those who remember it.
I think Rucho et al v. Common Cause et al. is an impeachable offense. The "ruling" from the Corrupt Five violates the basic principle of the law that "there is no right without a remedy", and it ignores the Constitutional guarantee of a "Republican form of government" for the states.
Kagan comes within inches of calling for impeachment over the Corrupt Five's disregard of stare decisis in Nevada v. Hall and Knick v. Township of Scott. These are cases where, as Breyer said, the precedent has "caused no serious practical problems", but the Corrupt Five just *wanted* to overturn them.
Overruled: Is precedent in danger at the Supreme Court?
Obviously Bush v. Gore was an impeachable offense; Thomas had a conflict of interest and didn't recuse himself, and the ruling didn't make internal logical sense as well as being blatantly corrupt.
Since the Senate has made it impossible to use impeachment to remove ANYONE, it's time to recognize that the Constitution doesn't actually specify impeachment as the only way to remove Supreme Court judges who have failed to exhibit "good behavior". They're really supposed to be removed automatically, and impeachment is just confirmatory. Throughout the history of the English legal system, new methods have been developed when the old procedures for removing corrupt officials weren't working. And now it's time.
The Senate is the real disaster. It's undemocratic; the only way to fix it is to add a lot of new states (this is basically how it was kept functioning through the 19th century), or to hold a new Constitutional Convention. Well, the US Constitutoin has lasted longer than any other written constitution (kudos to the UK on its brilliant "unwritten constitution"); it's probably about due for a replacement. More likely is that the country disintegrates like the USSR did.
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