@Lookout

Cuz only Russia has oligarchs silly.

Again the rich have representation without taxation and we the little people have taxation without representation.

What the Supreme Court is doing now has the full blessings of democrats or they would have used legal procedures available to them to keep the extremes off the court. Every judge that was appointed during Bush and Trump had the blessing of the democrat in the state they were from because both sides have to agree to let them get nominated. And let’s not forget how many times Schumer let McConnell fast track his judges. I’ve been predicting that the courts would start rolling back lots of the good legislation passed that helped we the people and that’s what we are seeing.

Congress has allowed Amazon and other corporations to deny labor rights and worker’s compensation was put in place so people couldn’t sue their employers, but that has been whittled down for decades. Now if you get hurt at work you have to see a company doctor who more often than not will say that nothing is wrong and you go back to work. The system is so corrupt that most times now you have to get an attorney just to get acknowledgment that you have been injured and need treatment. I fought my case for 5 years after I got injured and every time the judge ruled in my favor the insurance company would still deny treatment and back to court I went. But I wasn’t involved in the decision. Workers have to wait in cramped rooms for hours while attorneys hammer things out and take it before the judge. Good luck if you are in pain sitting in uncomfortable chairs that make it worse. Oops…went on a rant, but that ruling has pissed me off!

Good OT, Q

persecutes the poor and enriches the wealthy as it was designed to do.

Congress has the power to pass laws, but refuses to do so along with their refusal exercise its power to end the endless wars. We just have to face up to the fact the US gov't (all 3 branches) is totally purchased, owned, and controlled by the global corporate oligarchy.

Better prepare accordingly IMO.

Ironically I felt like it was a bargain yesterday to buy gas for $3.85.

Thanks for the OT!

@fire with fire  
to me ever since I heard about FDR, Executive Order 9066, and Korematsu v. United States as a schoolkid.

Sending people to concentration camps based on their ancestry alone seemed so clearly unconstitutional to me — especially so during a war sold to the masses as trying to rid the world of the evil of going after people based on their ancestry alone.

If I could see it, why couldn’t the grown-ups? Should we in Hawai‘i even want to become a state? Join a country that, when you get right down to it, didn’t really like us “Orientals” (folks of East Asian ancestry) very much and didn’t trust us?

Stare Decisis?

Reich glides right past the money shot on this hallowed rule of law -- "The Supreme Court can change its mind and rule differently than before, but it needs good reasons to do so, and it helps if the justice’s opinion is unanimous or nearly so."

I have no quarrel with his substantive opinions on how the Supreme Court should decide Constitutional Law cases that come before it. But yet another hair-on-fire screed on the awfulness of Republicanism without even a hint of what to do about it, other than voting for Democrats, is disingenuous and bereft of substance. Yup, Right Wing Bullshit sucks.

My last vote in a Presidential Election was in 2012 when I voted for Barack Obama for exactly one reason -- to keep Mittens Romney from appointing judges. My side won the election but lost the Courts any way. Go figure.

About stare decisis, Reich asserts that the Radical Republican appointed justices have blown up this venerable doctrine. Uh, that was the exact complaint against the Warren Court when it overturned all of the jurisprudence of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The Lochner Era
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The Lochner era is a period in American legal history from 1897 to 1937 in which the Supreme Court of the United States is said to have made it a common practice "to strike down economic regulations adopted by a State based on the Court's own notions of the most appropriate means for the State to implement its considered policies".[1] The court did this by using its interpretation of substantive due process to strike down laws held to be infringing on economic liberty or private contract rights.[2][3] The era takes its name from a 1905 case, Lochner v. New York. The beginning of the era is usually marked earlier, with the Court's decision in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), and its end marked forty years later in the case of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), which overturned an earlier Lochner-era decision.[4]

The Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as "play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role".[5] The Court sometimes invalidated state and federal legislation that inhibited business or otherwise limited the free market, including minimum wage laws, federal (but not state) child labor laws, regulations of banking, insurance and transportation industries.[5] The Lochner era ended when the Court's tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress's regulatory efforts in the New Deal.

Since the 1930s, Lochner has been widely discredited as a product of a "bygone era" in legal history.[1] Robert Bork called Lochner "the symbol, indeed the quintessence, of judicial usurpation of power".[6] In his confirmation hearings to become Chief Justice, John Roberts said: "You go to a case like the Lochner case, you can read that opinion today and it's quite clear that they're not interpreting the law, they're making the law." He added that the Lochner court substituted its own judgment for the legislature's findings.

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My own favorite Supreme Court Decision was rendered in 1810 to resolve a dispute about a Georgia State Legislative enactment that granted the land called Yazoo to a group pf speculators -- Fletcher v. Peck. When I studied this case in law school almost half a century ago, the law professors chortled at the intellectual gymnastics that the early Supreme Court performed in order to rule against the argument that wall to wall bribery of the Georgia Legislature should nullify the State Issued land grant for the Yazoo -- a parcel of land known today as Alabama and Mississippi.

The citizens of Georgia voted every single member of the Legislature out of office in the next election and the newly empowered tribunes of the people passed a law to renege on that crooked deal.

The Supreme Court said, "Nerts!" The business interest of enforceable contracts prevails and the bribery is irrelevant to the case. The buyers are entitled to get what they paid for. (Slight snark added on that last point.)

As a predictable side bar, a collateral issue in the case was whether the native inhabitants of Alabama and Mississippi had anything to say about who owned the dirt under their feet. I'll leave it to C99 members to guess how that turned out.

Everybody of course has heard of the Dred Scot decision.
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From the earliest days of the Republic, the Supreme Court has been a political institution and there is no way to avoid that. Double talk is the usual means of pretending to abstract political considerations from the Court's impartial enforcement of the law and the Constitution. You can't hardly argue that your party needs to win elections to "protect Roe v. Wade" and then claim that you do not think the Court is political. No the argument is to prevent the Other Side from usurping the integrity of The Law with political bullshit.

And, ahem, all the arguments about judicial legislation actually apply right on the Nose of Roe v Wade. You might be able to deduce a Right of Privacy from the text of the constitution, but you will not find the word, "trimester," anywhere in the Constitution. Just like another great Warren Court policy making case, Miranda, the "remedy" ordered is a little statute spelling out the wording of the famous warning that you see in every cop movie or TV show since the sixties.

Personally, I do not have a problem with the politicization of the Court, just as I have no problem with the idea of death and taxes. No avoiding it, period. Nor does it bother me that the Warren Court departed from the judicial tradition of just deciding the case before them and instead imposing binding new regulations of public officials. That is legislation.

My only point with all of this is that getting indignant about the Supreme Court making political decisions is both hypocritical and bad politics. The best argument on the politics of this is that the Dems never tried to pass legislation to protect the rights that were literally created by the Warren Court.

I'm giad that Warren and Douglas and the rest of them used their power for small d democratic goals. But there is no reason to assume that the Supreme Court decisions are some sort of Holy Writ, unsullied by politics.

It is a political institution and it has to be.

FDR's biggest political setback came with his Pack the Court idea. He was right and the people were wrong to oppose him. But the Idea of Impartial Law is pretty much a necessity for civilization And people get irrationally torqued about the idea of "political" decisions -- unless, of course, the decision was in your favor.

@wokkamile @wokkamile prefers the Court Packing (or "Judicial Enhancement" as I would call it) approach, adding as many as 4 new justices to the Court, or 13 total, after Dem gains in the senate this fall. He's got tremendous clout with D.C. Dems, so his proposal is worth taking seriously. I'm in favor of whichever court reform proposal seems to be getting the most support.

Tiny Denmark has 18 judges (plus one Court president) on its highest court. All appointed by the Justice Minister upon recommendation of an independent board of judges. All high court judges face mandatory retirement when they reach age 70. Close to my ideal system in existence.

how pathetically weak current D leadership has been on the abortion issue in recent times. From Obama going from making codifying Roe his "top priority" in the campaign to making it "not really" his top priority shortly after taking office, to Nancy Pelosi's embarrassing reading of an Israeli poem as her response to the Dobbs decision. Vague poetry is no substitute for bold prose action. Note too that Biden still is refusing to back a filibuster reform or carve out for bills on reproductive rights, this being the key to producing a bill on abortion rights. This piece speaks for me on Ds fecklessness, and don't forget to click on the YT link therein. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/why-olivia-rodrigo-celebs-ab...

Going forward, here's one interesting proposed solution that I've come across: the Article III solution. Art III sect 2 cl 2 of the constitution: In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Idea: congress finally cobbles together enough senate Ds (via election and filibuster reform) to support codifying Roe or similar into law making it the nationwide law of the land. The bill contains a clause specifying that per Art III, this law and any law dealing with personal reproductive rights shall not be reviewable by any federal court.

It's called Jurisdiction Stripping. Seems rather straightforward that it's clearly in Congress's power to delineate the types of cases fed courts, including Scotus, can hear. It has the virtues of being constitutional, with no need of a constitutional amendment, and would be far less controversial than court packing.

Other possible ideas: Court term limits. 12-18 yrs on the Court. After which they go to Senior status on one of the lower federal courts until their number is finally called.

Federal land: use available fed land in an anti-abortion state where health clinics could be built to provide abortion services.