[notabee]

Unless the way elections are handled changes, such as doing anything that selects for expertise instead of partisan hackery, all this is going to do is accelerate the gridlock, corruption, and dysfunction. It just does not logically follow that putting more pressure on the legislative branch to be functional is going to work when its functionality or lack thereof is based largely on a very gerrymandered population being blasted non-stop by a completely co-opted, corrupt media. When the corruption and control is so thoroughly embedded already, the difference between "unelected official" and "party-and-special-interest-approved elected official" becomes a silly fig leaf of a difference.

[mike_hearn]

Institutionally-declared experts are not exactly famous for their lack of partisan hackery, especially not in recent years.

> It just does not logically follow that putting more pressure on the legislative branch to be functional is going to work

You're talking like this is a political tactic or strategy used by the Supreme Court to achieve a specific outcome (which might "work" or "not work"), but it's not. Justices aren't meant to make such plans. They are supposed to do their job. If Congress does or doesn't do theirs, that isn't by itself the Court's problem nor something to which they should be the solution.

But it's also worth remembering that what "works" means varies a lot depending on perspective. There is plenty of stuff that is bipartisan in Congress and which they get done fairly quietly. Additionally, to the school of thought known as libertarianism, Congress not doing things is the desirable outcome and thus a gridlocked Congress is in fact the system working as designed, in the sense that it is being limited by the degree of agreement amongst voters on what it should do.

[adamc]

I think few who have watched the court think it is anything but a strategy used to work toward specific outcomes.

[mike_hearn]

Hmm well I'm a foreigner so am not really affected by Supreme Court judgements, and I would say that this particular court seems to be doing an unusually good job of just following the law as written regardless of outcome. Certainly it seems true when compared to the supreme court equivalents in most other countries, which are largely a joke.

As an example, the Supreme Court made another judgement this week that has pissed off lots of conservatives: it dismissed a case about social media companies banning political speech about COVID at the behest of the government, on the basis of lack of standing. This was widely seen as a blow against free speech. If you read the judgement though the problem was simply that the people being censored hadn't shown clearly that it was the government doing the censoring vs the social network executives, and were relying on a sort of ambient argument that the government was leaning on the companies in ways that weren't always clear, and so there was a First Amendment violation at one-hop-removed.

The court rejected this reasoning, saying they could only rule on cases where the people doing the appeal could show they had been directly harmed by the government, so they weren't even going to consider the rest of the case. If the Supreme Court were a bunch of conservative activists they wouldn't have done that. They'd have accepted the indirect censorship argument, accepted that the case had standing and then ruled against the federal agencies. And in fact the conservatives I saw talking about it were raging against "technical" judgements that could only be the result of pro-regime bias etc etc. But the judgement seemed logically sound to me. So the idea that the current court is packed with judges abusing process to get specific ideological outcomes looks very wrong.

I never paid attention to Supreme Court rulings before a year or so ago but suddenly it seems like they're all over HN. So this is the first time I've read them. The thing that's really striking is how stupidly obvious all these cases seem to be and how weak the original legal reasoning being overturned was. You can understand the argument within a few pages of reading, usually. Like when Roe v Wade was struck down, all I knew about it was that it was related to legalizing abortion. So naturally I figured it was something to do with abortion law. When it was struck down, I learned for the first time that it actually relied on some convoluted backflips to do with privacy law that had nothing to do with abortion, moreover it seemed almost everyone in the legal profession had always known it was logically dubious and the product of an activist court, etc. It was pretty surprising that such a judgement had survived so long, honestly.

Likewise for this judgement, what they're saying is there's not only the Constitution but also a specific act of Congress which both state that when statutes are ambiguous the courts decide on the correct interpretation. In the original Chevron judgement those laws appear to have been ignored and the courts started letting the executive branch decide what ambiguous law meant. That then became just the way things are done, but the law had never actually been changed to allow that. Once again this judgement seems .... kinda obvious? It's not exactly a complex feat of legal reasoning. The laws says the courts resolve ambiguity, they weren't doing it, now they've been told to do it. End of judgement.

It's quite fascinating how many commenters just assume that if there's a decision they don't like from a court it must be due to bias and corruption. Makes me wonder what they think when there's a decision they do like.

[travisb]

It's part of the polarization of politics over the past few decades where the ends justify the means and the sooner the better. People have given up on understanding underlying principles, let alone believing they are necessary for good long-term outcomes. One can even argue many have given up on the long-term entirely in favour of instant gratification of their demands for societal change .

You can see that even in this very discussion where a substantial fraction of the comments are making claims that this ruling will prevent regulation entirely -- a claim entirely unsupported by the principles in question.

[snapplebobapple]

i am sympathetic to desire to change how elections are handled (universal suffrage is a stupid idea without universal risk/ skin in the game, we need a way to make voters universally and roughly equal uncomfortable eith poor fiscal managment so they feel the pian when they vote thwmselves more stuff without also voting in a payment method) but its not happening.

i also think you are mistaking long term corruption and chaos with a normal process in big party system where every several decades the big voting blocks move around and thatparalyzes the politicians until they are sure who their voting blocks are. onve the voting blocks finishmigrating and sort out dominance per party things will go back more towards historical functioninglevels

[FactKnower69]

>we need a way to make voters universally and roughly equal uncomfortable eith poor fiscal managment so they feel the pian when they vote thwmselves more stuff without also voting in a payment method

another small govt ideologue that thinks the US's federal budget works like a household's

[goostavos]

>make voters universally and roughly equal uncomfortable eith poor fiscal managment so they feel the pian when they vote thwmselves more stuff without also voting in a payment method)

What does that look like in your mind?

[rustcleaner]

My idea is to apportion costs to the voter's choices (you want lobster, you pay for lobster), and/or hamstring the ability to move and immediately get access to voting in the new place's elections.

[snapplebobapple]

you can read in my other response but the short answer is: post a bond equal to X weeks salary to vote, bond is held for duration of those elected people's time and if they run a deficit the first hit comes off the posted bond before the country starts taking on debt. If you want to vote again next time post more money to top yourself up.

[DowsingSpoon]

>universal suffrage is a stupid idea without universal risk/ skin in the game

Can you clarify this statement? I don’t understand what you mean.

[snapplebobapple]

Right now almost everyone gets to vote ( basically if you are a citizen who is over 18 you get to vote in most democracies) but when you look at how the government actually functions a majority of these voters are strongly net beneficiaries of government (through direct and indirect transfers) and have almost no risk from any of their votes because the strongest argument you can make is their taxes may go up but their transfers will likely still cover it and those transfers may be in forms that are less optimal than whatever they were spending that cash on directly before it was taxed away and then transferred back. Its' a very weak claim to having any skin in the game. Even among the minority of people actually paying for all this and not getting it back as transfers, you can make an argument that a subset of those guys are also largely insulated because they are good at getting excess government subsidy for their businesses via lobbying. Overall, there's a very tiny group of people who are experiencing actual costs from the decisions made by voters, which is stupid. Most of the people making the decisions need to have some real exposure to their decisions. I would personally do it by requiring people put up 2 weeks salary as a bond that pays some nominal interest but is stuck for at least the period that that election is valid for and if the people elected run deficits then the deficit is paid for out of the posted salary first prorated so that everyone experiences the same percentage of the pain and has to post the same percentage again at the next election if they want to vote there. You could also solve this by limiting voting to the people actually paying but that's a really bad idea for abuse reasons. Better to keep the voter rolls as broad as possible and just ensure people get a taste of the results of their choices as above (or through some other method, I'm open to ideas).

[vharuck]

>Its' a very weak claim to having any skin in the game.

The government is the only entity that can legally take away my liberties, possessions, and life. By falling under its rule, all residents literally have their skins in the game.

Your starting point of money transfers could be read as an argument for better economic equality. If, for a person with a socially necessary and full-time job, taking more in taxes than they receive in benefits will financially ruin them, I won't blame the worker.

[snapplebobapple]

>The government is the only entity that can legally take away my liberties, possessions, and life. By falling under its rule, all residents literally have their skins in the game.

No, what that is is a recipe for tyranny of the majority (of weak performers) over the high performers by way of voting for policies that transfer wealth from the guys that got the job done to the guys that didn't. You are conflating the need for a strong constitution limiting government power with the idea that because maybe it's possible for the government to do some bad things to you you should get the right to tell the government to take from others and give to you.

Your second paragraph is just wrong. Money transfers are abusing one group for the benefit of a different group. It's weaponization of the very thing you incorrectly claimed as a reason you should get a vote in your first paragraph. The argument for transfers would be about network effects from the transfer being so great to the payer that they are better off (think providing healthcare has a network effect of healthier workers and customers making the paying business owner better off through increased sales/lower sick costs and other things of this variety) and the argument would be that if they weren't trying to freeload they would do the transfer anyway because it is in their interest. Your second sentence of your wrong second paragraph is wrong in the sense of being nonsensical. if you want to clarify what you mean I can then tell you why it's wrong from a logic perspective (or maybe I will agree with you, I can't tell).

[rustcleaner]

Maybe eliminate secret ballots to do an "if you vote for it/him, you pay for its/his costs" sort of system?

Or keep ballots secret and apportion taxes to districts or counties which vote for increased costs, and have it be sticky on move for 5-10 years. Also prevent new-comers from voting in local elections for a period of up to 5-10 years (while retaining the vote in the previous jurisdiction). All these things add costs to locust electorate and will slow down the californication of the south and midwest as californians continue to flee in droves. It's already causing political havoc in various locales.

Do not vote for garbage politics thus destroying your home, then move to a nice place with opposite politics just to vote your garbage again. You act like chauvinist locust when you do that, moving into new political ecosystems to destroy them into your 'ideal' vision.

If you move from blue to red state because your blue state went to hell, wait 5 or more years to register to vote. I only wish this was law so places like AZ can stay nice with lower crime, castle doctrine, and presumptive consealed carry.

Now to batton down my hatches, I sense a downvote typhoon in the air...

[snapplebobapple]

Secret ballot is important to avoid direct reprisal for voting the way you think is correct in the face of social pressure (the classic example is your union or your employer tells you to vote for someone you think is terrible. Without secret ballot you risk losing your livelihood for doing what you think is right) Thus you can only make sure the entire voting group has clear skin in the game and repurcussions from their group action.

forcing tax distribution is a bad idea too because there's lots of stuff it is in my interest to subsidize as a high tax payer in jurisdictions in which I don't vote (the most obvious examples being services around my factories in other states or for my customer base in other states, but there are many many other examples). I also need services in other places that are communal (i.e. I don't need a navy in nebraska but nebraskans sure benefit from the navy protecting the coasts). If you are going to do something like that it's better to clearly define government tasks and then keep levels of government out of tasks that they aren't assigned via a strong constitution.

You don't want to stop people from voting (same deal as why you want people in smaller, efficient companies making up the majority of the economy vs government and other forms of oligopoly) You just want them to experience pain from their bad choices so they are unlikely to do it again or have to really suffer to keep making bad choices so that eventually enough of them stop out that the good choice people shine through. I'm also not willing to claim their politics are garbage enough to want to stop them from voting (even though it looks like garbage to me) because I know I am not smart enough to account for all variables and accounting for all variables, at least enough to have something started to grow rapidly rather than having to start from scratch, is what all this individual freedom is great at. If I was smart enough to account for all variables we would be better government by a dictatorship of me and historically that has never turned out better than democracy on any timeline stretching past a couple rulers (this is also why we should be more agressively breaking up these large oligopolies we have let form since Rhenquist changed the supreme court position in the 70's. They aren't smart enough to have all that power either.

[thethimble]

On the other hand, enabling the judicial and executive branch to overcompensate for this disfunction also seems problematic - particularly as the former groups aren’t elected (except for the President, of course).

[HDThoreaun]

I think everyone agrees congress being dysfunctional is problematic. The question is if it’s better for the other other branches to pick up the slack or if we should just let the government do nothing