This is a confusing headline. The judgement here is in NY state court, and pertains to employees of and in the City of New York, which enacted a vaccine requirement for employees of the city and later private employers in the city. Months later, Eric Adams was elected mayor of NYC, and he issued an executive order exempting athletes, performers, and artists from the mandate.
Petitioners sued, saying that the mandate with the exemptions was essentially arbitrary, and the courts agreed. So what happened here is that Eric Adams sabotaged NYC's vaccine mandate.
Rumor was Aaron Judge, the Yankee's biggest star, was unvaccinated. He personally sidestepped question about vaccine status and the team had publicly said a few (two?) players on a Yankees hadn't had their shots. Before opening day there were questions about if Judge would be able to play in New York.
The whole thing ended up being a mute point, because everyone on the starting roster[1] eventually got their shots so they could travel to Canada to play the Blue Jays.
Not merely arbitrary. From the decision:
"This Court aggress that the Commissioner cannot enact a term of employment on City employees and has exceeded his scope of authority..."
That part of the ruling, too, was based on the arbitrariness of the order (in particular the fact that the rule was indefinite rather than temporary, and applies only to city employees and not private employees once the private rule was rescinded).
Regardless of if they were the right thing to do, many of the various covid mandates being enacted through whatever form of decree really didn’t seem like they fit inside the authority of the government executives trying to enact them. Many were also made to be unenforceable so they’d never be tested in court while still influencing people.
The rule of law is important and limiting the power of “rulers” to make large sweeping regulations by themselves is important. Agreeing with what they’re trying to do doesn’t make it right. People have been cheering for authoritarianism more and more and it’s disturbing.
Us Americans are so obsessed with government overreach that you'd think our corporate overloads are actually treating us well and that the government is the bad guy.
When the government wants to fuck us over, think what the NSA has been doing, they won't look for precedents so there's no point in treating every decision they make as a potential sliperry slope.
Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.
> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.
They don't though.
None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.
And only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID. If you're not in either of those camps, or have natural immunity the risk is negligible.
Speaking for myself, I'm obsessed with corporate overreach in general. It just so happens that government is the largest and the most well-armed corporation around, so it gets considerable attention as such.
Doubt it. The court also said the following (court towards the end indicates that the mandate didn’t make sense even when the order was issued):
> “”Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19. As of the day of this Decision, CDC guidelines regarding quarantine and isolation are the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves. We have learned through the course of the pandemic that the vaccine against Covid-19 is not absolute. Breakthrough cases occur, even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted. President Joseph Biden has said that the pandemic is over.& The State of New York ended the Covid-19 state of emergency over a month ago.? As this Court stated in its decision in the Rivicci matter, this is not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders, the ones who worked day-to-day through the height of the pandemic. See Rivicci v. NYC Fire Dept., Index No.
85131/2022. They worked without protective gear. They were infected with Covid-19, creating natural immunity. They continued working full duty while their exemption requests were pending.
They were terminated and are willing to come back to work for the City that cast them aside.
The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health: it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for vaccination for all residents. In a City with a nearly 80% vaccination rate, we shouldn't be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down.
If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt. It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just.”
Yikes. This reads like a gish-gallop of anti-vax talking points. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the decision to reinstate the employees, but this legal reasoning is embarrassing.
Edit: I’m happy to learn that the New York Supreme Court is not the highest court in New York, this entire thread is misleading (I think people are assuming New York’s highest court slapped down vaccine mandates). I don’t know why New York has to name their courts in such weird ways…
“A talking point” is a very sleazy turn of phrase. You don’t say it is wrong, incorrect, harmful; you just apply guilt by association even though the statement in question may have merit by itself.
> Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19.
This was not true before Omicron. Vaccination was never a 100% protection against contracting or transmitting SARS-CoV-2, but it did significantly reduce the rate of both. People who refused to vaccinate themselves were, in fact, putting people around them at greater risk.
That protection has decreased with Omicron, though it is still not zero (and with boosters, it increases again for a few months).
That's not the case. Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative. The UK is one of the few countries that kept regularly publishing case stats even after this happened and it showed that once the initial vaccine 'high' wore off, vaccinated people were getting infected more frequently than the unvaccinated. Omicron didn't change this.
This sort of thing is unintuitive but has happened before. In fact Fauci cited the possibility of this effect as one of the reasons not to rush the trials. Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics (the way they classify people as unvaccinated for weeks after having actually been given the shot can warp the stats).
Because athletes and performers are irreplaceable and bring in tourist revenue which the city wants. Firefighters are more easily replaceable and have no effect on tourism. Having competing priorities is common enough, I don't see what doesn't make sense here. The city wants everyone to be vaccinated but it also wants broadway and basketball to be happening more, so they came up with this policy.
> Because athletes and performers are irreplaceable and bring in tourist revenue which the city wants. Firefighters are more easily replaceable and have no effect on tourism.
I believe this is the most cynical thing I've read yet today.
> I don't see what doesn't make sense here
If the Athletes and Performers are so irreplaceable, then wouldn't you demand they be the most protected by the vaccine, and thus require them to have it before you would require the firefighters? They are so replaceable, afterall...
> so they came up with this policy.
They wanted to force compliance, but then realized there are some people who see themselves as above compliance, so they carved out their own policy in a telling way to kowtow to them.
Dollars are replaceable. People aren't. You can't actually be happy to wrap this cynicism around this, can you?
This is the reason they did it. It's also the reason that most firefighters and others like them do not vote for politicians like Eric Adams. Despite the fact that he's a former police officer.
Well clearly there is an elite class to whom body autonomy is granted, and an underclass who must follow arbitrary and capricious rules. OP appreciates that celebrities and entertainers are our betters and should not be held to the same standard.
Yes exactly. You are allowed to infect people with a deadly pandemic if you're rich, but if you're poor you have to risk personal medical consequences or lose your remote job.
Reality is that not letting Kyrie play basketball cost New York millions, and firing a firefighter doesn’t. Tons of people lose their jobs when entertainment acts close because the performers aren’t vaccinated. Money talks, does that mean celebrities should not be held to the same standard? Not really, it just means that holding them to the same standard would cost more than adams was willing to pay, whether it was the right thing to do or not.
This is the issue. Politicians claim it about health and saving "grandma", but when the number of dollars get big enough, all that goes out the window.
So apparently getting vaccinated is critically important, but not more important than money.
Because they can be replaced by vaccinated people I guess and if one or two can’t that’s ok because they’ve still got all the other ones. Kyrie and the Yankees can’t be replaced.
I’d be willing to bet I could more easily find a team full of people to swing a bat or throw a ball than a couple thousand people willing and able to rush into a burning building.
> Same for many other jobs like garbage collection.
Spoken like someone who hasn't been to New York. I love the city, its a fun and vibrant place. But they have some unusual trash policies (primarily they don't have alleys so trash has to be dumped on the main sidewalk) and wherever you go its not uncommon for the sidewalks to be lined with trash waiting for pickup.
Aren't NYC's financials a basket case though? Surely its politicians don't care much about bringing revenue to the city, rather bringing profit to their friends and families and lobbyists. That is what makes more sense here.
My understanding is that a significant number of Yankees were unvaccinated and would not have been able to play home games. There are a significant number of New Yorkers that would’ve been very upset had that come to pass, so politicians acted according to public will and gave them an exception. Does that mean this wasn’t also corruption? No, but it is a reasonable thing to do even without corruption imo.
You just said it was for revenue to the city though.
I'm not really convinced about this new explanation either. I've seen little to no evidence that upsetting significant numbers of people factored into any other decisions around covid response, including the significant number who were upset by the creation of these double standards.
I'm going to have to stick with pure and simple corruption as the simplest and most likely explanation, unless there is some extraordinary evidence supporting some other less likely one.
You could probably make a pretty good argument. A firefighter deals closely with the population in non-voluntary situations. An athlete or performer is likely quite a bit separated from the crowd watching them, and they're choosing to be there anyway. I don't know if there was actually an attempt to justify the decision, though.
And I imagine someone could also make a pretty good argument in the other direction. A firefighter is probably going to be wearing a mask. Performers by their nature are yelling into a crowded indoor space.
The argument at the time was that it was "creating a double standard that disadvantaged local artists and athletes" compared to performers that were not residents of NYC (but commuted in for work).
Stuff like this and allowing certain events while vilifying others as "superspreader events" killed a lot of people's belief in mitigation strategies IMO. A virus is a virus and doesn't recognize human needs or wants. Either there are no exceptions for anyone or we shouldn't bother.
The same happened in CA with some stores being open and others closed. Why was Home Depot open? It made no sense in terms of spreading the disease . It was just arbitrary BS.
Closing the beaches was stupid too. If there ever was a safe place then it was the beach or state park wheee uou are in the open and the window blows.
Home Depot was open because people need to fix shit around their house if you want them to stay home. What's arbitrary about that?
I agree with you about the beaches. But in the early days, we didn't really know what worked and what didn't. People said 6 feet apart was safe enough indoors because "droplets containing the virus fall to the ground".
People were rabidly cheering it on too. Police going around shutting playgrounds and arresting parents for playing outdoors with their children, while at the same time the politicians they voted for were constantly and egregiously shown to be flouting the rules on frivolities, parties, travel, fun. And there were excuses for the politicians and bloodlust for the commoner trying to exercise or raise their child. Absolutely flabbergasting.
I used to wonder how on earth nazis and communists and the like were able to seize power and control of a population, and now I've seen it. Covid has been a really amazing learning experience for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cYPm__73XI I still remember this video that was widely circulated. The bans were never more than politicians wanting to look like they were doing something.
Dunno how it is in NY, but in my city, the fire department spends way more time on paramedic duties than on actually fighting fires (around 40 EMS calls for every fire call). IMO if you're getting a ride to the hospital from someone it matters if they have COVID. And even though the vaccines don't guarantee that you won't get infected, the government does have an interest in preventing severe infections. COVID was the #1 killer of first responders
I am perfectly happy to have a COVID spewing firefighter get me to the hospital after a car accident and let me take my chances there, than to be left without a first responder. 100% of the time.
I would rather have a live and vaccinated firefighter take me to the hospital than have to wait at home because an unvaccinated firefighter died of COVID or is hooked up to a vent
>I am perfectly happy to have a COVID spewing firefighter get me to the hospital after a car accident and let me take my chances there, than to be left without a first responder. 100% of the time.
Except that doesn't apply to this situation. IIRC, ~95-97% of cops, EMTs and firefighters in NYC were already vaccinated and those that weren't were given ample time (extended several times) to get vaccinated.
As such, that was never an issue.
That said, there certainly was an arbitrary and capricious standard applied in this case.
Also “In 2021, 1,353,500 fires resulted in 3,800 civilian deaths and 14,700 injuries”. By comparison, Wikipedia says there were 42,915 deaths due to motor vehicles in 2021, more than 10x. So it makes sense that even if fire department only dealt with road crashes they would spend more time on that than on fires.
> the fire department spends way more time on paramedic duties than on actually fighting fires
Why does the fire department do medical stuff in the US? Why isn’t it medical people providing paramedics? Seems like something that should be left to professionals?
Most common example is probably motor vehicle accidents where firefighters (in concert with police officers) will secure the scene, gain access to the vehicle(s) if necessary, etc.
A lot of firefighters are also EMTs and paramedics. Both because in places with volunteer firefighters they can just work as EMS, and also because there's quite a bit of overlap in that if you need a firefighter there's a decent chance having EMS around would be beneficial as well.
Firefighters who aren't trained in EMS are not providing medical care, so saying "leave it to the professionals" is pretty dismissive in this context.
What makes you think the fire department's medical staff aren't professionals? My city FD has 148 EMTs and 88 paramedics and are assigned to every station and unit in the city.
My county is kind of weird, but only firefighters are allowed to be paramedics here. They are considered professionals, they have to take the same classes and get the same certs as paramedics in other areas
> Mayor Eric Adams plans to announce on Thursday that professional athletes and performers working in New York City will no longer be required to show proof of vaccination against Covid-19, according to a person familiar with his plans.
> This means that Kyrie Irving, the Nets’ star point guard who has refused to get vaccinated, will be able to take the floor at Barclays Center in Brooklyn for the first time this season.
Adams is awful. NYC mayors exist to further the interests of property developers, corporations and the police unions. If that means that a public health measure needs to be sabotaged so some anti-vaxxer can play for the Nets, so be it.
I think that the confusion is with the word my. If you had said a sibling comment, it would likely have been immediately clear. Linking or quoting the sibling comment would avoid linguistic ambiguity altogether.
My state's republican governor sued mayors closing down construction sites during the peak of the pandemic, and also exempted a dizzying number of industries and sectors.
For example: if you sold an ATV to a town police department, you were deemed an essential business and thus got to ignore the closure orders and keep your entire business, both offices and showrooms/repair centers, open.
...but then his administration also went around shutting down bicycle shops in the city. Guess what a lot of medical staff and "essential" blue-collar workers depend upon for transportation, particularly since the public transit system was largely shut down, dangerous to be on public-health-wise, and doesn't operate at hours useful for some shift workers?
Eventually he got the message, but not after a lot of very cringe comments to the press about the pandemic being "real" and implying that bike shops were just frivolous luxury stores.
It's confusing because it makes it's technically correct [1], but doesn't really get at the heart of the matter. If 'tptacek hadn't pointed out the subtlety that it was the arbitrary nature of exceptions added later that was the reason for this judgement, I would not have understood or noticed it.
It's like saying "On-call developer fixes problem caused by program written in Java" – correct, but doesn't point out, for example, that it was caused due to a commit pushed to production on Friday evening after overriding the failing CI tests.
Because it's confusing: the NY Supreme Court is just a trial court, it's not at all like the US Supreme Court. The top appellate court is called the Court of Appeals. It's called "supreme" because it has general jurisdiction, as opposed to things like traffic court.
Apparently Maryland also names it's courts confusingly, which I only know because on the ballot in a couple weeks is a constitutional amendment to change it to be what you expect.
(and googling it just now to give you details, I arrived at Ballotpedia which said Maryland and New York are the only two states that don't call their top court "supreme". Maryland for not much longer probably, as ammendments on the ballot always seem to pass here. But even Maryland doesn't call a different court supreme!).
> Question 1 would rename the Maryland Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court of Maryland and the Maryland Court of Special Appeals to the Appellate Court of Maryland. It would change the name of a Judge of the Court of Appeals to be a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland and the name of the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland. It would also change the gendered language to gender-neutral in the articles of the Maryland Constitution that would be amended.[2]
> Maryland and New York are the only states that do not refer to their state's top court as the supreme court
(OK, so currently in Maryland you start your appeal at the "court of special appeals", and if you don't like the finding you can appeal further to the "court of appeals"? The Court of Appeals is a higher court than the Court of Special Appeals? I'd say that's almost as confusing as New York, although maybe not quite).
> The New York Supreme Court is the oldest Supreme Court with general original jurisdiction. It was established as the Supreme Court of Judicature by the Province of New York on May 6, 1691. That court was continued by the State of New York after independence was declared in 1776. It became the New York Supreme Court under the New York Constitutional Convention of 1846.
The name predates the US Supreme Court (in fact, predates the US itself), and many other state courts. Basically, someone changed the naming convention out from under them.
There's nothing stopping the state from renaming the courts now to conform with established convention in the rest of the nation, in order to reduce confusion.
>There's nothing stopping the state from renaming the courts now to conform with established convention in the rest of the nation, in order to reduce confusion.
I imagine that the entire New York Legislature are hanging their heads in shame for confusing a few dozen folks on HN who don't even live in the state.
I further imagine that it will immediately become important for the governor to call an emergency session of the Legislature (which normally meets from January to June) to change the name of the court after they read your comment.
Something I've been wondering in recent cases where courts are overturning recent government action, whether unconstitutional bills passed into law, or unconstitutional executive actions that overstep authority, is where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place?
The state of New York famously responded to the outcome of NYSRPA v. Bruen, which overturned the defacto ban on concealed carry, by declaring nearly all public spaces "sensitive areas" in which licensed individuals may not carry for their protection. Regardless of one's opinion of said rights, how do courts blatantly ignore rulings and orders from higher courts with no repercussions?
How do courts declare certain executive orders unconstitutional, and yet the perpetrators, who took an oath to uphold and defend said rights and values, face no consequences?
>where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place
You've hit the core problem of society/government that countless generations have tried to obfuscate via an academic body that implies that social interactions can be studied/understood like natural sciences.
At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence - Commit non-violent white collar crime? Show up to court, because if you don't you'll get arrested. Run from the police when they try to arrest you? You'll get taken by force.
Reject Capitalism? Starve to death on the streets.
Sure, there's political theory and economics can act like "utility" drives all things, but at the end of the day, it's the threat of some sort of violently bad outcome that keeps society in check.
The recent rub is that we have (probably correctly) decided that violence is bad and we should all just be chill and work together because it's good for all of us. We've also created hyper complex systems that couldn't even theoretically be kept in check with violence (Who am I going to punch when I was duped by a crypto scam?).
So instead of angry mobs tarring and feathering bad politicians/business people (probably bad) we just grouse on the Internet (bad but not as bad).
And stuff like this keeps happening, because an increasingly large number of people (especially the wealthy and politicians) are realizing the threat of violence isn't that great anymore. Like look at Elon Musk - his whole deal is proving that there are no bad consequences to doing whatever he wants and he's revered for it because people who still have a risk of violence in their lives are jealous but believe they one day could get to a similar place.
There's not really a solution other than figuring out how to may people be chill and cooperative on their own (good luck).
>Reject Capitalism? Starve to death on the streets.
What's "rejecting capitalism?" You can't blow up the NYSE, but most everything else is fair game. Your employer isn't going to care if you reject capitalism so long as you get your work done. If you don't want to work under a capitalist, you can join join or start your own cooperative. If you can't do that, you can be an independent contractor. If you don't have the motivation to do that, you can fall back on the charity of others.
>Like look at Elon Musk - his whole deal is proving that there are no bad consequences to doing whatever he wants
Musk got ousted as board chair at at Tesla, and was forced to buy Twitter at a very overpriced valuation.
I am sorry, if you 'reject capitaliam' but have to check if 'your employer' cares, and pay 'your landlord' and go to the same grocery store, what exactly have you rejected?
Based on what you're describing "reject capitalism" is just edgier phrasing for "not respecting property rights" (ie. expecting your employer to give you money for nothing, or for your landlord to house you for free).
Simple example - bhuddist monks, they don't take part in capitalism, they do their own thing.
Would you be allowed to build a monastery on top of a random mountain in America today? Clearly not. Force will be used to remove you.
So you portrailyal of 'anything short of terrorism is fair game' is totally inaccurate - the only way you are allowed to reject capitalism by selling tickets to a concert where you just talk shit.
Social interaction which is based on mutual trust (whether from family or sustained direct interpersonal interaction) is not really what we're talking about here. Folk dance festivals do not feed the world. The social structure of modern society is, by and large, about interactions between mutually distrusting strangers and their agents as they negotiate the exchange and distribution of economic resources. Basically everything you own and consume was produced by people you've never seen or interacted with.
You’re talking about capitalism not social structure. The post above that brought up social structure is also a red herring. This is about legal power and the threat of coercion. It would be trivial to implement a law to punish (say) Eric Adams or someone else in or formerly in nyc government for what they did. There are probably some basic mechanical reasons that is not generally done (although I don’t mean to dismiss the idea).
the idea is that sanctioning past behavior, which was legal at the time, is super extra bad (ie. no retroactive punishment), because then you can never be sure that the the ruling powers that be won't send law enforcement after you. (of course the brutal truth is that you can never be sure, hence people should realize that there's no opt-out from politics)
Positive reinforcement is not antithetical to the threat of violence and can go hand-in-hand. If you're good to me I'll treat you like family. But violate that peace and me and my clan will come down on you with furious anger. That's how people have lived for time immemorial.
Even so, violence isn't so much the basis for society itself, just the govt. And either way, it's only how outliers are dealt with. Most of what most people do all day every day is constrained by things like their family and peers' expectations and their commitments. I'd say social structures are primarily based on cultural norms.
Speaking as the son of someone who runs operations for the a federal district court, every ounce of the “violence” bit is covered by pounds and pounds of cultural norms and a fair bit of ritual as well.
Our aversion to violence is not new. In ancient Rome, it was sacrilegious to bring weapons inside the pomerium.
> At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence - Commit non-violent white collar crime? Show up to court, because if you don't you'll get arrested. Run from the police when they try to arrest you? You'll get taken by force.
Is this true for all social structures, or just our current one?
The social structures that emerge are time dependent. The people living in the middle ages had no way of predicting the social structures of today. Since we can't predict the social structures that the future will bring, how could we know for sure that there isn't X social structure that doesn't need violence to propagate itself?
We can talk about the likelihood of X social structure emerging, sure. But to make the universal claim about all social structures, viz "human nature", is flawed reasoning
> Sure, there's political theory and economics can act like "utility" drives all things, but at the end of the day, it's the threat of some sort of violently bad outcome that keeps society in check.
Being incarcerated or dead is very low utility for most people ;)
>At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence
This is completely wrong. Our current social structure in the United States is build on the threat of violence. Sense of duty, sense of shame, fear of ostracism, respect for tradition and family are all forms of social structure that have existed since we were crafting tools from stone. Of course all of these non-violent forms of social structure require a somewhat homogeneous population that shares the same values and culture. Many native American tribes had social structures like this where there was no police force, no threat of violence to enforce social norms. However, when a hodgepodge of people with different beliefs, different cultures, different educational levels, different educational values, different religions and different histories are jammed together in overcrowded cities the result is always going to be the same. Perhaps we should write "Our diversity is our strength!" On the side of all the prisons and police cars to make people feel better.
Elon is bound by all the modern societal rules, markets and law.
He wanted to weasel out of his M&A agreement with Twitter. No luck, contract law is well established.
He is also wanted to just do automatic assembly for Tesla, no luck there. You might remember when they had to set up tents connected to the factory building to extend the assembly line, etc. all because the markets demanded results. (Many people were shorting Tesla.)
...
Sure, he built a nice cult of personality for himself, it allows him a few degrees of freedom in the eyes of those people. But the vast majority of the people don't know much about him, and don't care. Not everyone is glued to Twitter, HN, Forbes billionaires toplists, etc.
Similarly Trump built a bigger one. And a lot of authoritarian assholes too. It was the norm for a long time after all, pharaohs, divine kings, etc.
>Who am I going to punch when I was duped by a crypto scam?)
This is what group violence is historically used for. When responsibility was so diffused among so many people that you couldn't fix things by picking one of the most responsible and making an example out of them the king or whoever would have everyone in the group subjected to violence or some other punishment under credible threat of violence.
The consequences in theory are political. Theoretically Congress should be impeaching Presidents and expelling members that do not uphold their oaths.
Executing consequences into popular Presidents or other members of Congress would also be politicized and have political consequences for Congress, so it doesn’t happen. That said, leaving impeachment or expulsion of legislative members to the Courts would also give them too much power.
So the real consequences are at election time. If you ran to retain your seat, and lost, that’s your comeuppance. It’s not granular, but it gets the job done eventually. This is also why control of the White House flips back and forth so much: nothing any President does is particularly popular most of the time, they just have the votes to do it. Incumbents do get massive advantages in staying power but in the present day, two terms looks like about the maximum we would be able to tolerate a President’s political party in the Oval Office and typically after midterms they no longer have the votes in Congress either.
Most of this is generally applicable to the States, but I don’t know New York politics specifically but would note that the previous Governor was put into a position where he was pretty much forced to resign both for scandals and for the actions he took while in office; and that was a slow slow build up.
Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels wrote a whole book showing that voters do not keep track of what elected officials do, and so politicians are not punished for bad behavior, see excerpt here:
That’s easy: it’s not our guy! It’s those other guys! We’re wonderful and they’re terrible!
That’s how incumbents can maintain their edge whilst Congress as a body is untrusted.
I’m convinced that capping the House of Representatives at 435 was a mistake, and Federalizing most laws even more of a mistake. The question isn’t whether democracy can scale, but whether ours can within its present constraints. The reforms I would want to see are mechanical; not social, economic or judicial. A Continental-sized nation with hundreds of millions and growing probably needs thousands—not a few hundred!—of legislators if representation is to be meaningful. Short of that, my Representative has 700K+ constituents, so any one individual holding her accountable without other connections is a pipe dream at best.
> That’s easy: it’s not our guy! It’s those other guys!
I mean, that has certainly been true for me, and many other people. I sent someone to Congress I liked. Congress then has a wide spectrum of people who end up doing whatever a small group decides (this term, whatever Manchin and Sinema want). It's pretty easy to like your guy but not the end results of the process or the body as a whole that produced it.
1. Wyoming Rule. No district should be larger than the least populist state.
2. Make DC a Museum. With modern technology there is no need to "send" legislatures to Washington DC, they can vote, meet, etc all remotely. This will make lobbying more expensive, and put the representatives back in their actual communities, because lets face it most of them represent Washington DC not Local Communities.
3. Expand the Term to 4 Years, with a 2 year offset to the president Election. So every 4 years the entire house is elected as a Mid Presidential term Election
Paraphrasing Winston Churchill: democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. For those decisions that need to be made collectively, democracy is just the worst bad method we've come up with.
But one huge benefit of freedom is that if we embrace freedom, the vast majority of decisions can be made individually, or by mutual agreement of consenting individuals, and not collectively. So the negative consequences of democracy aren't as impactful.
Perhaps democracy is fine, but we are just doing voting wrong. See this page for some interesting alternative voting systems that have different / better outcomes: https://ncase.me/ballot/
Assuming we need some kind of government, then does "against all" actually offer an improvement over the current system? The economist Kenneth Arrow suggested something in the opposite direction, approval voting, where the voters get as many votes as their are candidates, so the voters have the option of voting for everyone except maybe the absolute worst. Arrow did the math and liked the results from such a system of voting. And also, what is the goal of voting? Is it to give an individual an avenue for self-expression, or is it to achieve the social goal of forming a government? This is the argument against self-expression:
That arguably makes vote splitting worse. Do you cast your vote for the least bad corrupt candidate so the other candidate that wants to [legalize killing babies/control women's bodies] doesn't win, or do you vote for the "against all" option so that both corrupt candidates get disqualified?
You're contradicting thousands of years of political philosophy and theory with that statement. Democracy is a complete mess of whiplashing changes. It's only real redeeming factor is that it's better than tyranny by a monarch or aristocracy. That's an incredibly important factor though, so you need to find a way to make it work. Representative democracy is a way to temper the erratic will of the people and turn democracy into a workable form of government.
In the other comment seneca points out that you're ignoring history with your comment. You might want to consider a system that goes in the other direction, and adds more layers of representation:
Correct, which is why I spoke mostly of Presidents and Parties who are all big enough targets that most American voters do form opinions about what they’re up to, even with only vague notions about the details. Individual members of Congress can usually skate by, but that’s only as true as their district or State is uncompetitive.
And in States where “big issue” lawmaking is deferred to the public via referendum on a regular basis there’s almost no incentive at all to mind what the legislature or governor is doing; especially if tax increases also have to be voter approved. Who do you hold accountable when it’s the voters who make a bad decision about a law?
The emphasis on parties might be the most accurate part. This is a possible reason for the so-called "Panama Exception" -- a nation the should be a dictatorship and yet has been a thriving democracy:
This is pretty good insight. Now I'm wondering what public data sources show overturned bills as well as all sponsors of a bill. I think Congress' website tracks the latter, but the former might be difficult to obtain.
In cases of judicial review where the courts strike down a law, it's usually not as simple as you're trying to make it.
First of all it's not at all clear in advance that the laws are unconstitutional, and that the lawmakers are "perpetrators". Plenty of times the laws are challenged and the courts uphold them. The whole point is that laws often push boundaries or address areas not previously addressed by the courts, and of course courts are political too. Lawmakers are trying to do what they believe is right for the people, and courts are too, and sometimes they disagree, and all of this is legitimate.
And second, what would it even mean for a court to "penalize" lawmakers? For the government to penalize itself? The lawmakers are elected and often passing laws their constituents voted them into office precisely in order to pass. Do you want to fine the lawmakers and take away their salary? Do you want to fine the people who voted for them? No, of course not. That's ludicrous. Just as ludicrous as legislatures (or governors) fining judges when they think judges decide cases wrongly.
This isn't criminal, it's legitimate disagreement over what policy and law ought to be. Penalizing lawmakers doesn't make any sense. In the end the court overturns something, and if a change is dangerous/disruptive enough the courts place an immediate injunction until the final decision is made. This is how democracies work.
(On the other hand, if a legislator breaks a law personally, e.g. murders somebody, they are tried personally and go to jail just like anybody else.)
I’d like to see them held accountable. Every person who was affected by an unconstitutional law should have the ability to sue for damages arising from the intentional abridgment of their constitutional rights.
Our rights would remain more intact if lawmakers actually faced personal financial penalties when they try to deny us the already very few rights afforded to us by the constitution.
I mean that's just ridiculous. 'Unconstitutional' is incredibly vague & subjective (and incredibly political), to the degree that most developed countries don't allow judges to overturn laws based on this at all. (1) As an example of how subjective 'unconstitutional' is, consider that different levels of the judiciary disagree with each other about whether a law is constitutional or not all the time. It's very, very common for one appeals court to declare that a law is in accordance with the constitution or not, and then a higher level to disagree completely. If judges who've devoted their entire lives to the field can't agree and constantly overrule each other....
How are you going to handle it when the Supreme Court reverses itself on decisions decades later? Or even just a few years later when a new Justice is added? Does all the money from damages get returned, with interest and accounting for inflation?
Law is never settled and courts disagree and reverse frequently... So I don't think you've really thought this through... :)
Including who is going to pay for all those damages, which is going to be the taxpayers, so hello much higher taxes! ;)
I guess the politicians at a loss could try to sue each individual plaintiff that was previously paid out, but that seems improbable. That would be a good thing in practice, if you toe up to the line so close that multiple courts overrule each other you lose regardless. That would help keep our rights intact.
Three strikes. Politician voted three times for laws that later were deemed unconstitutional by the SC, so the politician can only be a politian again after 30 years and some mandatory training and test.
The current Supreme Court is a right wing nightmare, so that sounds like an efficient way to get all the liberals out of government. Hard pass, what is fair about letting unelected judges determine who I get to vote for?
You’re seeing this play out with student loan forgiveness.
Most legal scholars don’t believe it’s legal and will be overturned. But everyone also agrees any money given out will not be returned, so they’re rushing to get as much debt forgiven before it’s overturned.
Ancient Athens -- birthplace of democracy -- had an answer [1]. The sponsor of a law that was later found to be, in modern parlance, unconstitutional, could be fined.
In general, such consequences would be applied by the public. If the people feel that the executive overreached and is no longer honoring their oath, the people don't re-elect that executive. There are some exceptions (such as the impeachment power of the federal Congress), but in a system where the public elects the executive, the last recourse of a bad executive is the public's right to elect someone else. And even in cases like the power of congressional impeachment, the punishment they can extend is removal from office and nothing more.
No, if someone broke the law in the process of exercising the executive authority, that's a different issue. But we don't generally have laws of the form "the executive is not allowed to infringe on non-fundamental liberties during an emergency," because history shows that emergencies happen and sometimes people just have to be told what to do (arguably, that's one of the reasons we bother to have an executive at various levels of government).
> How do courts declare certain executive orders unconstitutional, and yet the perpetrators, who took an oath to uphold and defend said rights and values, face no consequences?
Same way no one suffered any consequences for deciding to support the opposition in the Syrian civil war to piss off Assad long after it was obvious they weren’t going to get him out and the only consequence was going to be lots of dead Stands mom Syrians. Same way there were no consequences for bombing Libya into civil war and open air slave markets. Same way there were no consequences for no WMDs in Iraq.
There needs to be a coalition to make them pay. It needs to be not just powerful enough, but committed.
>Something I've been wondering in recent cases where courts are overturning recent government action, whether unconstitutional bills passed into law, or unconstitutional executive actions that overstep authority, is where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place?
Unfortunately the penalty falls only on the taxpayer, and not at all on the lawmakers who pass unconstitutional laws or declare executive actions that they do not have the legal authority to declare as law. Indeed, lawmakers routinely flaunt their ability to enact laws that they know are unconstitutional across the political spectrum, to abortion laws (pre Dobbs) in "red states" to gun laws in "blue states". The recent NY legislation in the wake of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decision is the perfect example. It contained all sorts of blatantly unconstitutional measures, like requiring those applying for gun permits to turn over all their social media accounts for scrutiny. But since there is no potential penalty suffered by lawmakers who willfully and knowingly violate the Constitution, this sort of unlawful, blatant political pandering is going to continue.
This is what 18 USC 242 was written for. Allowing for punishments up to the death penalty for depravation of rights under the color of law. You’d need a federal government who would be willing to prosecute such a case however, but it’s possible.
Imagine, for a minute, that it was a crime for a politician to try to pass unlawful laws. That would, sooner or later, be abused by the group with political control to effectively criminalize opposition. Declare their opponents' efforts unlawful, convict them, and they're out of the way.
You have to consider not only the effects of nominal usage, but also the effects of abuse. In this case, they're extreme.
it's important to note that this is not the top court in new york, rather the beginning of the process of retrial and appeals. So, in effect, nothing will happen as a result of this ruling other than more appeals
> How do courts declare certain executive orders unconstitutional, and yet the perpetrators, who took an oath to uphold and defend said rights and values, face no consequences?
Isn't this like saying developers should suffer consequences if they allow bugs to get into their code? Because we are perpetrators of flawed code, like law makers are perpetrators of flawed laws?
> Regardless of one's opinion of said rights, how do courts blatantly ignore rulings and orders from higher courts with no repercussions?
Because to do otherwise is to abandon civil process (where people get to argue about laws, and they have the right to be wrong without further consequence than being wrong) and enters into what would effectively devolve into mob rule.
More like saying engineers - who, like elected officials, take an oath - ought to suffer consequences if say a bridge, whose plans they signed, collapses.
Not agreeing or disagreeing. Merely adjusting the analogy
> Don’t developers face consequences over bugs in their code?
If face significant consequences, there would be no developers left.
> Too many and you might get shown the door.
You are much more likely to get shown the door for being hard to work with, being crass, not showing up to work, not following process (that doesn't eliminate bugs but mitigates consequences), etc...
because its not always accidental. look at abortion laws before there was reason to challenge them, or many blue state gun laws. they're giant "fuck you"s to getting told to stop doing smth stupid. like NY gets its gun law overturned so its like "fuck you we're gonna make super invasive requirements for testing (which you cant even do in state) and turning over social media handles (hella chilling effect)." or almost all the lockdown orders that got overturned, but after 1-2 years of being in effect.
really grinds my gears cuz they KNOW these laws will get killed in court but it will take 3-4 years so in the mean time stfu and deal with it.
That's actually an old and effective political strategy. Perhaps distasteful, but part of the game in the same sense that icing the kicker in football is part of the game (as consequence of the rules of time-outs).
I've even seen it used to good effect to strong-arm otherwise unreachable organizations when they choose to be anti-social. During the housing crash, one of the major non-profit universities a city panicked about its investments going shaky and abruptly decided to stop paying into some multi-decades-long standing donations that back-stopped some city services. The non-profit was paying into that donation pool because state law that had made sense in the 1900s and a lot less sense in 2000 made those non-profits non-taxable (but they had eaten up a significant percent of available real estate in the city center, none of which could generate tax revenue to pay for city services).
The city responded by preparing an ordnance that would tax out-of-town students directly.
The uni responded that this would be obviously illegal on its face as per state law.
The city responded that they believed the uni was presenting a reasonable legal theory that they were happy to debate back-and-forth in county, circuit, state, and appeals court for the next five years.
The university returned to the negotiating table and hammered out a new plan to pay a percentage of their former amount into the donation pool, preventing what would have otherwise been a heavy disruption in city services at a time when everyone was hurting from the housing crash.
Messy, but this kind of creation of leverage is what makes political systems operate at all at multiple scales of governance.
They can, if the laws are written with criminal consequences. Most are not, with good reason. So many things which end up in courts just aren’t clear enough for the outcome to be obvious.
It's a little weird to be concerned about this now around COVID policies, and not during the last fifty years of laws passed by republican state legislatures that barely last past the ink drying on the law before getting slapped with an injunction and ultimately struck down by the courts, but not after the state AG wastes millions of dollars in taxpayer funds fighting it as high up the federal court system as possible.
Just to name a few: Book bans, anti-LGBTQ bills (bathroom bills and more), edicts on what doctor can or cannot say to patients (or must say to patients), ag-gag, voting restrictions, and anti-abortion-choice laws.
All passed with the full knowledge they'll be struck down almost immediately, with the express purpose of tying up funds of progressive non-profits and getting to brag to their base about how they're trying to further 'The Cause' (you know how conservatives are always going on about "liberal virtue-signaling? As always, they're great at projection.)
I'm not concerned about COVID policies. I'm concerned about policies and laws in general that are passed with the knowledge of their supporters that they're unconstitutional, and are later determined in the courts to indeed be unconstitutional.
Nothing about this is partisan to me. People who knowingly and intentionally violate their oaths should see consequences for their actions.
Unless the government actually about faces and holds the elected officials responsible, it devolves into unsanctioned violence, be it domestic terrorism, civil war, unrest, whatever the game of the week. That's what happens.
Penalties are generally meted out using the press (smear reputations through excessive focus on one person, show kompromat) and economic actors (withdraw sponsors, withdraw funding, etc). In the rare case that someone fails to be adequately railroaded using press and economics, yes, judges do mete out hefty fines and jail sentences, as a punishment of last resort against regime opponents, or give slaps on the wrist to regime allies (in this case, slap on the wrist). All justified with a 20-page verbal "explanation", of course, but those are just meaningless words for ultimately political decisions.
The Bonta team in California has been eggregiously playing the circuit-to-district football, violating fundamental rights of citizens. The 13th circuit is in bed with California state district attorney and the state legislator (both the husband and wife, "Bontas"). Wife is a legislator and the husband is the CA District attorney.
Not really, they were watching out for the health of other employees who had to work with employees that refused to do the most basic acts to prevent the spread of a deadly virus.
You're 100% bought into the propaganda. Isn't it time to pause and reflect?
Btw. "the science" hasn't changed. The vaccine never stopped the spread. There were no studies indicating that it did (medical trials were about hospitalisations / death, not infections / spreading). You fell for the fake science propagated by fake news media.
Interesting, I never bothered to investigate the basis of that claim. According to https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02328-0, a recent study does show that the vaccine was effective at preventing the spread, which is unsurprising to me. What is surprising is that the article claims this was the first study of the effectiveness against spreading an infection.
It would only be a measure of postponing some of the rising transmission rates if people don't get boosted every few months. Also it would have to be compared against the effects of natural immunity.
That is a pretty disgusting statement. What ""the science"" are you talking about?
The vast majority of doctors and scientists strongly recommend taking the vaccine. It is not about stopping 100% of illnesses and infections, but it is 100% about significantly reducing the chance of hospitalisation and death.
What are you talking about? Sounds like the time to reflect is all yours.
When you willingly refuse to get vaccinated, and are thus more likely to catch and spread COVID, shouldn't we make you pay for any lives you've contributed to taking away?
The effectiveness of the vaccines in terms of preventing spread weren't studied, per pharmaceutical company testimony to congress. The whole notion that you getting the vaccine would prevent grandma from dying was a whole-cloth fabrication.
While I agree with you that people should get vaccinated (if they want. Their body their choice), I feel like the argument of "to what extent other people's selfish choices should be allowed to endanger my life and livelihood" doesn't hold up.
You probably live in some developed country. If it's the US or Canada, I can say for sure that you live in a country that was founded on the exploitation of others. We continue to knowingly benefit off of such exploitation by importing and purchasing products produced by cheap and often abusive labour. We use electronic devices whose manufacture is mostly in China and other such countries where there is recorded abuses and in some cases downright modern day slavery. We continue to use these devices despite knowing that many of their essential metals are mined by exploited children in Africa.
I'm trying to understand exactly to what extent our selfish choices should be allowed to endanger others' lives and livelihoods
Then things might be different, but in our present reality it was always transparently clear to anyone who had eyes to see that the justification for coercination was founded on nothing more than hysteria, lies and wishful thinking.
It matters because vaccination has slowed both the severity and rate of spread of the disease, due to a reduced viral load shedded by the vaccinated individual.
It isn't a binary yes or no, but it has been a gradient. And every policy decision is made on a gradient of harm/benefit. So yes, it is entirely relevant about what the ethics of the hypothetical would be.
Not getting vaccinated is an action that directly harms other people, for what turns out to be no net gain. Requiring vaccination... Is an action that directly harms a few holdouts for some net gain for the rest. None of this is an absolute ethical question, and the degrees of harm and gain are this completely relevant to it.
I agree. We should take away all human rights from the unvaccinated, too!
And anyone talking about vaccine problems, they also need to go.
We could make a special disinfo re-education summer camp, where we will send all the plague rats and political dissidents. We'll let them out when they're good people again, and tow the party line!
Please stop dancing around the issue, and tell us exactly what these 'vaccine problems' are, and how they compare to the 'problems of actually catching COVID [1] without having gotten vaccinated'.
The comparison will not be favourable to you. [2]
[1] Your camp spent the past two years both telling everyone, and doing your best to ensure that everyone is going to catch it anyways, so this seems like a reasonable comparison to require.
[2] The risk of treatable myocarditis from catching COVID is vastly higher than from the vaccines. The risk of injury and death from less-treatable complications is incomparably higher. If we're all going to get it anyways, you're choosing to both hurt yourself, and others by not getting vaccinated. You can't even freeload off herd immunity...
My camp? Fuck off with that. No one's in my camp - especially not radicals like you.
I'm not going to argue with you on vaccine effectiveness, because that's actually not my point. I'm not afraid of people discussing the effectiveness of vaccines - I'm certain the correct opinion will win out.
What I am afraid of is the cruelty of political radicals - which this issue has created in excess.
During the pandemic, people in my corporate slack channels were GLEEFULLY fantasizing about all the vaccine deniers that were going to be fired due to Bidens executive order. This behaviour is terrifying, and anyone who carries this out is reprehensible. Even a moron is a person and has rights.
And the fact that you don't see this as the actual issue is evidence you're still possessed by this nonsense. I posted a snarky sarcastic comment about government suppression and you're talking about vaccines.
They were fired for cause, namely, insubordination. The resistance to vaccination is entirely political. The mandate was not, but instead in the interests of public safety and health. Easing the mandate for special cases was a terrible decision. The decision to ease the mandate should be reversed, not the mandate itself. So quickly they've forgotten the piles of bodies of COVID victims in NYC.
A growing number of doctors have threatened to withhold treatment from the unvaccinated, sparking backlash from doctors and bioethicists who say such sentiments violate the Hippocratic Oath. Those critics are even more troubled by the silence from professional organizations tasked with upholding medical ethics.
It ends with your survival. Vaccination isn't surgery, it's an extremely minor medical procedure that reduces or eliminates the risk of contracting a disease. During a deadly global pandemic, refusing vaccination is nothing short of suicidal. 97M Americans were infected and more than a million died. There were over 630M cases globally, and over 6.5M died due to COVID. The People have the stronger right to not be infected with COVID by you than your right to be infected. No one ever has any right to spread infection, not even libertarians.
>It ends with your survival. Vaccination isn't surgery, it's an extremely minor medical procedure that reduces or eliminates the risk of contracting a disease. During a deadly global pandemic, refusing vaccination is nothing short of suicidal. 97M Americans were infected and more than a million died. There were over 630M cases globally, and over 6.5M died due to COVID.
Way to dodge the question. Also, I think you're missing the point. I don't think OP or most other anti vax mandate people think that the covid vaccine is a risky procedure, or that the public is better off on net for it. They're against it because it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures.
>No one ever has any right to spread infection, not even libertarians.
You literally do, though. It's not against the law to get on a packed subway while you're sick as a dog, for instance.
> They're against it because it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures.
This is just a part of what is so ridiculous about their objections and reveals ignorance and a misunderstanding of law. The government isn't required to establish precedent here because it is already the law of the land.[1][2][3] That said, precedent has been very well established for a very long time.[4]
> it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures
Does it, though? Just because the government can mandate employees be vaccinated as a condition of continued employment, doesn't mean they can mandate employees be sterilized (for instance). No reasonable person would say the second follows from the first. Law isn't code.
> The People have the stronger right to not be infected with COVID by you than your right to be infected.
The proper branch of government to decide this is Congress passing a law, not each major making it up as they go along.
It is definately distopian for employers to decide anything on this matter -they are not sibject to dempcratic scruitiny.
And there are many methods of reducing covid infection avaliable - installing air purifiers, improving ventillation in schools, Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI).
If situation is so serious, whu are none of those being mandated? Now we know current vaccines give you immunity for like 6 months and new variants appear very rapidly.
> The proper branch of government to decide this is Congress passing a law, not each major making it up as they go along.
Congress did decide this already by passing legislation a century ago granting temporary increased powers to the executive in event of national emergency and its declaration.
> It is definately distopian for employers to decide anything on this matter -they are not sibject to dempcratic scruitiny.
Government employment is already dystopian and private employers can have any requirements they like short of discriminating against religion, race, disability, etc. There are no federal protections for political disposition.
> And there are many methods of reducing covid infection avaliable - installing air purifiers, improving ventillation in schools, Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI).
The virus was already circulating due to unpreparedness and slow reaction by the administration in office. Had we seen a two week stay home order in February, the crisis would likely have been averted, but the executive was overly concerned about the economy, which tanked anyway regardless of putting 300M+ Americans at risk of infection, illness and/or death.
> If situation is so serious, whu are none of those being mandated? Now we know current vaccines give you immunity for like 6 months and new variants appear very rapidly.
Again, COVID was already circulating by late February 2020, and if two vaccinations a year are required from now until the end of time, it is still a very small price to pay, a minor inconvenience at worst with the benefit of increased resistance to infection, severe illness, hospitalization, and/or death.
Not at all. We require school children to undergo medical procedures before they may participate in city-funded education. The tone of alarm is unwarranted. This is not a slippery slope situation.
The paranoia is a bit too late. Emergency powers were established by Congress a century ago, and at least 60 national emergencies have been declared since. In New York State, a state of emergency declaration permits the governor to direct local officials and state agencies, and to suspend state and local law or regulation to facilitate disaster response efforts. If there ever was a slippery slope, it has long since been descended many times.
What happens when a virus comes along that kills at a higher rate, say 35%? You're saying people should be willing to work alongside others when there is a 35% chance of a pandemic level virus killing you because a peer thinks science is dumb?
I think you've gotten your hypothetical scenario a bit scrambled.
Given a safe and effective vaccine, you and your vaccinated coworkers would either not become infected at all or would experience very mild symptoms and be left with supercharged immunity (immunity from your vaccine + immunity from infection). Your dumb, science-hating coworker would suffer much worse symptoms and maybe die (a little over 1 in 3 chance given the 35% fatality you postulate).
Your vaccine, first and foremost, is supposed to protect you.
But with covid that is not at all what we are seeing.
This was especially painfully clear in places with strongly-enforced "vaccine passport" regimes during the period they were in force before being abandoned. The vaccinated spent time with other vaccinated and were infecting and being infected by one another and birthing new, more transmissible vaccine-evading variants of the virus. Vaccine efficacy actual goes negative (i.e. vaccine recipients more susceptible than unvaccinated persons after a few months: "Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron or Delta variants following a two-dose or booster BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccination series: A Danish cohort study" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...) and vaccine recipients are infected and infectious for at least as long as unvaccinated persons (e.g. "Duration of Shedding of Culturable Virus in SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (BA.1) Infection" in NEJM https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35767428/).
FYI, the case was decided in Richmond County a/k/a Staten Island, arguably NYC's most conservative borough. The judge, a Republican, was elected in 2018. [0].
What was wild is the amount of hate and vitriol directed towards those who chose not get to vaccinated and lost or risked losing their jobs.
This forum was not exempt from that hate.
I hope this court opinion is enough to sway the opinion of those who held such extreme beliefs in this vaccine mandate that there are different opinions, and it doesnt have to be so extreme when deciding how to move forward with things that affect peoples livelihoods. Sometimes you do what is best for you and I do what is best for me is a perfectly logical and sane reasoning.
There wasn't hate, at least not broadly. There was anger, sure, but not hate. At the time the focus was on making sure the vaccinations were taken seriously so as to protect those who couldn't do it, and plenty of people instead made ideological and self-centered decisions (their right to do so) rather than compassionate and ethical ones.
People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels.
People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all.
Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it.
> People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels.
> People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all.
> Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it.
Right, that sounds like what I said earlier, mandmandam:
"There was anger, sure, but not hate" - and you affirmed it; white-hot anger. And it was deserved. But broad hate, no. We just wanted people to be responsible.
When you violate the social contract (protecting others by doing what's due), you attract anger.
I'm not really here to debate it; anyone saying otherwise is spinning our anger for others' irresponsibility and others' putting the immunocompromised in danger.
That may be, but it is really difficult to see how anyone will honestly make a case this was not government overreach, and an arbitrary overreach at that. We'll have to let it play out...
I think people of a particular viewpoint have allowed their bias to drown out reason.
To top it all off, it will be very difficult to argue in good faith the mandate was not arbitrary. It quite literally came down to a single dude deciding who he liked better.
Just in this very thread we have people admonishing Adams for "ruining" the mandate, and if he had just been more careful then all these anti-vaxxers would be out of luck... as-if the mandate was a weapon to use against those we don't agree with. That's wrong.
So, while you may assert there isn't much substance to the case, I assert you are very wrong. There is no reality where what happened is legal and there should not be a reality where what happened is legal.
This was the first step in undoing some very great injustices.
I actually have no view on the substance of the case. If the decision went the opposite way I would still give you the same view- legal decisions that are closer to political diatribes than they are well reasoned legal argument do not fair well on appeals.
This is definitely in that category. It reads like an internet argument on Reddit, not a judicial decision
Back pay? Seriously? I thought people weren’t happy about executive power through judicial means, but I’m seeing that same group of people celebrate this.
Also note: the NY Supreme Court is actually the lowest court level in NY. Articles like this are being misleading on purpose.
The judicial branch is not in the executive or legislative branch. Courts can invalidate laws and regulations from the executive or legislative branches. It is called Checks & Balances. It has kept power distributed for almost 250 years, preventing it from becoming concentrated in any one branch of government. Should that occur, you'd have bad actors enacting a one-party tyrannical state and tens of millions would die, mostly through starvation, but a good many through a state apparatus. It is familiar music. Our civilization has had to deal with such bad actors for a very long time, but despite the lessons of the past, there are still some who desire the one-party state. There is no sign that we, as a species, has completely eliminated the lust for power that's innate in humanity. It is for this reason that the founding fathers hard-coded such things into our nation which act as a stop-gap for tyrants.
> Articles like this are being misleading on purpose.
Maybe your complaint should be with the State of New York for having such a misleading name for their lowest-level trial court, and not the OP for literally referring to it by its name ;-)
I can understand why the vaccine mandate would be unconstitutional as a whole, but why shouldn't the city be allowed to fire whoever they feel like firing? New York is an at will state.
"At will" doesn't mean you can fire for any reason.
Even if you don't state the reason (which they did), it would be illegal to fire all black people from a company, because it's trivial to prove for a large enough company.
"at will" doesn't supercede civil rights act and other laws.
Did you read the ruling? It’s not actually very long (terrible pdf though):
“Finally, states of emergency are meant to be _temporary_. The question presented is whether the Health Commissioner has the authority to enact a permanent condition of employment during a state of emergency. This Court finds that the Commissioner does not have that authority and has acted beyond the scope of his authority under the Public Health Law and in violation of separation of powers. The Petitioners herein should not have been terminated for their failure to comply with the Commissioner’s Order during a _temporary_ state of emergency.”
and then later in the conclusion:
“It is clear that the Health Commissioner has the authority to issue public health mandates. No one is refuting that authority. However, the Health Commissioner cannot create a new condition of employment for City employees. The Health Commissioner cannot prohibit an employee from reporting to work. The Health Commissioner cannot terminate employees. The Mayor cannot except certain employees from these orders.”
In all seriousness, I did see that part while skimming through it, but I don't find it very convincing in regards to public employees. The order came from the Mayor, not the health commissioner. Requiring city employees be vaccinated is an administrative decision. It's within the best interests of the city that city employees not get sick, that the city's health insurance premiums don't go up, etc.
> It's within the best interests of the city that…
Yes, but that’s not the sole requirement. In addition to serving a legitimate government purpose, a government order must also avoid being arbitrary or capricious. Every order has to meet both requirements, and this one only meets one of them. From the ruling:
“This Court finds that based on the analysis above, the Commissioner’s Order of October 20, 2021, violated the Petitioners’ equal protection rights as the mandate is arbitrary and capricious. The City employees were treated entirely differently from private sector employees, and both City employees and private sector employees were treated entirely differently from athletes, artists, and performers. All unvaccinated people, living or working in the City of New York are similarly situated. Granting exemptions for certain classes and selectively lifting of vaccination orders, while maintaining others, is simply the definition of disparate treatment. Furthermore, selected enforcement of these orders is also disparate treatment.”
The health commissioner's order didn't say fire the employees [1]. It said that you can't have unvaccinated people on the premise which is clearly within their powers to "control of communicable and chronic diseases ... " [2]. The commissioner never said you needed to fire anybody. It we start taking this to the extreme, I think we can agree if somebody has Ebola its ok for the commissioner to say that person should not show up to work. Such a claim is in direct contradiction with the Judge's statements though: "The Health Commissioner cannot prohibit an employee from reporting to work.".
The Health Commissioner can _quarantine_ someone, for a specified period of time, yes. But that’s not what happened. Instead the Commissioner apparently decided that these people, who were not sick, couldn’t be allowed to work and earn their living. But they could still go to grocery stores and baseball games, because those places aren’t important.
Besides, you cannot go by the overall mission of some government agency to decide what they are allowed or not allowed to do. The legislature has delegated specific authority to each agency to take specific actions. An agency, no matter how well–meaning they are, is not allowed to take any action not on their list.
I've been thinking a lot about judicial review in common law democracies recently, and I tentatively think a better system would be to vastly expand the number of judges that are involved in making a decision. Example, you'd still have a tiered court system, and your case would still be heard in front of say a 3-9 panel appeals court- but after they write their decisions, a couple hundred other appeals judges at the same level get to a simple cast up or down vote on the decision, remotely. That way the case is decided by a larger, more stable pool of qualified judges- it's not like 1 judge dies, is replaced by the other party, and now that appeals court starts issuing totally partisan decisions the other way on a 5-4 vote.
It would hopefully make the judiciary overall less partisan, less of a high-stakes affair to nominate an appeals judge, and less swinging back and forth between 5-4 Democratic or Republican votes
I think that would make things more partisan, not less. Those hundreds of judges are not going to have the time to study the case in as much detail as the assigned judges, so their decisions will be based on a quick cursory reading, and their justification won't be on the record to be reviewed by higher courts. While motivated reasoning is always a concern, I would expect it to be more common in decisions made in this situation.
What? No. I'm not talking about adding tons of judges to the existing US system now. I'm describing a future potential system, likely for a new country
I have a feeling this would make things considerably more political.
If you don’t like what judges decide, get people elected who will write things clearly into law. If they can’t do that, it sucks, go fix the political situation and stop trying to fix that dysfunction by making major systematic changes.
>get people elected who will write things clearly into law
You can pass whatever law you'd like now- the existing judiciary can simply decide that it doesn't apply or isn't 'constitutional', and their decisions aren't reviewable. It's awarding ultimate power in society to a very small group The vast majority of developed countries don't work this way, at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty
At a minimum, calling a law 'unconstitutional' should require a supermajority out of a fairly large body
Petitioners sued, saying that the mandate with the exemptions was essentially arbitrary, and the courts agreed. So what happened here is that Eric Adams sabotaged NYC's vaccine mandate.