[pc86]

SCOTUS doesn't "attack" anything. They issue a ruling based on law. It's funny that any time there's a judicial ruling we like, it's fair and impartial, and any time there's a judicial ruling we don't like, it's judicial activism.

The other reply already makes it pretty clear why this Arizona's law violated 1A. If you want to make a legal argument that donating money to a political campaign isn't political speech, go for it. But right now it's considered protected political speech so this ruling makes perfect sense.

"Court reform" is a funny way of phrasing "ignoring the Constitution."

This isn't even a partisan issue. Harris has been on the ballot 4 months and her campaign has raised approximately 3x the amount of money Trump's has. Moneyed interests are absolutely on the side of Harris this time around.

[zaptheimpaler]

The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade 2 years ago and the Chevron doctrine recently.

Do you think these judgements were both supported by the constitution when they were made and also not supported by the same constitution when overturned? Which one was the "ruling based on law"?

If there was a straight deterministic line from the laws to the rulings the court make, we would need far less courts or lawyers or highly trained judges. The fact is there are a million laws and precedents with 100 applying to any given situation in slightly different ways with many interpretations. Laws are written vaguely to keep them somewhat future-proof and leave room for interpretation/evolution. The courts do have a lot of power here.

[pc86]

It was Chevron deference that was overturned and it's a very important distinction. The only thing that changed was that courts were required to give deference to the agency interpretation of a statute. Now the agency needs to prove they're not misinterpreting the statute. That seems like a good change, no? Having to prove you're right in court instead of the judge being required to just assume you're right unless they're overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

[zaptheimpaler]

No, it seems to severely undercut the efficiency and power of regulatory agencies to me. Court cases are extremely slow & expensive and having to wait 5-10 years to act is almost as good as not being able to act. I think this might be good in a world where senate could quickly make/amend laws and courts could quickly decide on them, but that's far from where we are..

But that's besides the point, now we're arguing about which is better, but the point is neither is unambiguously correct or following/ignoring the constitution as you earlier claimed. It's simply the court using their authority to take a political stance.

The courts are not directly answerable to the public and hence should not make political decisions in a democracy, yet they made a decision that goes against what the majority [1] of the country wanted.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/07/06/majority-of-...

[consteval]

It seems like a good change if you're a Helen Keller impersonator. To anyone not blind and deaf, we understand the intention of that ruling is to cripple the agencies as much as possible.

That is, and has been, conservative political policy. If you're conservative and ideologically opposed to the notion of the bureaucracy in general then it's a good change, because now they are much weaker.

The fatal flaw you're making here is that courts are impartial. No, the intention of this overturning is such that rules which are obviously correct can still be challenged, delayed, and even killed by conservative courts. It takes even a cursory glance at the courts in Texas to understand this is the case.

There're two aspects to law: what it says, and how it's practiced. What it says is that overstepping agencies must now prove they are following the laws as set by Congress. In practice, this means agencies will be blocked by extremely ungenerous conservative interpretations of law such that they cannot enforce common-sense regulations, with the intention of further empowering the private sector.

[ETH_start]

Later rulings supersede previous ones because later rulings review their precedents and will correct mistakes that they identify in their precedents, so if a later ruling found those earlier rulings incorrect in their application of the law, we assume there was in fact a misjudgment in those older rulings. The justices provided legal reasoning in overturning Roe vs Wade and the Chevron doctrine, and unless you find some glaring mistake in that reasoning, the default assumption should be that the rulings to overturn these doctrines were legally sound.

[consteval]

This completely ignores the political motivations for rulings. In my opinion, a person who does not at least try to address the obvious partisanism of our current court is not worth listening to.

Please keep in mind some justices have gone as far as recommending revisiting rulings on same-sex marriage and interracial marriage. We cannot continue to play stupid.

[ETH_start]

There is no obvious political motivation. You're simply assuming that a ruling that is favored by the political camp you identify with could only be overruled due to political motivations, which is not sound reasoning, and only reveals your own political motivations.

[consteval]

No, I'm reasoning based on the history of these judges and the extreme conservative stances that they are, in fact, politically motivated. Not to mention they're not anywhere close to consistent in their views. On one hand, they're extremely textualist and will routinely shut down power for other branches of government. On the other, when it comes time to save Trump, of course they then declare former presidents have absolute immunity.

Once again, if you're not able to at least begin to acknowledge the obvious political biases of our current court, you're not worth talking to. There's no point in arguing with dishonest people, because they can just lie when they feel like they're losing. As a side note, playing stupid is also a form of dishonesty. I don't really care if you "know nothing", if that's the case then don't bother speaking.

[ETH_start]

Being "extremely conservative" in their rulings has no relevance to the likelihood of them being politically motivated. It's entirely possible that the Constitution itself is "extremely conservative", given the well known commitment of the framers of the Constitution to limiting the power of the federal government through Constitutional restraints, and the 130 years of judicial history during which the SCOTUS consistently ruled the way the current SCOTUS is ruling on cases.

[zaptheimpaler]

This is again assuming that there is a binary right or wrong in how the law is applied. This is an ideal of the law, where there is precisely one law that applies to any given situation, describing exactly what is legal or not, with no ambiguity or contradiction. Speak to any lawyer or read about it, and you will find this is not true.

Here's a random article i came across today speaking about the ambiguity in the law applied to a particular case - https://archive.is/Z6V2Q . Just something I came across randomly, this is not uncommon. A quote:

> “I know it seems kind of strange that there isn’t a definitive answer to this, but that’s because the rule is based on a principle that can be applied in lots of different contexts, and it just happens that it hasn’t often been applied in this context before,” she said.

Here is a quote directly from the ruling overturning Chevron:

> Finally, the view that interpretation of ambiguous statutory provi- sions amounts to policymaking suited for political actors rather than courts is especially mistaken because it rests on a profound misconcep- tion of the judicial role. Resolution of statutory ambiguities involves legal interpretation, and that task does not suddenly become policy- making just because a court has an “agency to fall back on.” Kisor, 588 U. S., at 575. Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences.

In other words, the court directly saying that it is their job to resolve legal ambiguities.

The logic you provide to uphold the overturning of Roe vs. Wade should apply just as well to the original Roe vs. Wade too. There was not any "glaring mistake" in the reasoning, there's just a lot of room for subjectivity.

[ETH_start]

The assumption of judicial law is that there is an objective correct answer and that later rulings are more likely to arrive at it than their precedents.

The passage you quote does not contradict this. Note it states that court interpretation is

"based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences"

The ambiguity means that the correctness is a matter of probability, which implies that the probability of making a correct ruling increases with the amount of precedent a ruling has to fall back on.

[adamc]

Great! And after we pack the court full of liberals, I'm sure you'll be on-board with every ruling.

[ETH_start]

The whole point of winning presidencies is to appoint justices when one retires or passes away.

Packing the court, i.e. expanding the court to obviate the need to wait for a justice to retire or die in order to appoint a new one, on the other hand, effectively eliminates the independence of the judiciary, by nullifying the independence that Supreme Court justices obtain as a result of their lifetime tenure.

[adamc]

The rulings overturned will be sound, by your own rubric.

And that has not, historically, been "the whole point of winning presidencies".

[ETH_start]

Later rulings are more likely to be sound, by judicial logic. The entire system of judicial law rests on that assumption.

And one of the rewards of winning presidential elections is being able to replace the justices that retire or die..

[gottorf]

> It's funny that any time there's a judicial ruling we like, it's fair and impartial, and any time there's a judicial ruling we don't like, it's judicial activism.

It is funny, but at the same time I absolutely believe that in many cases it's possible to distinguish between judgments of the activist kind and those that aren't.

Critics of SCOTUS should keep in mind that they agree unanimously more often than one might think. In fact, it's the modal outcome over all terms, with roughly third of all cases decided unanimously. IIRC 7-2 or more one-sided rulings (meaning more concurrence between all justices) occur roughly four-fifths of the time.

[jgalt212]

Truth.

The courts have become more / too important as Congress has become more ineffectual.

[potato3732842]

Congress wouldn't matter as much if the feds hadn't spend 200yr usurping so much power from the states.

[dingnuts]

well the states really kind of blew it when they chose slavery as the hill to literally die on, didn't they?

it's not like this is all on Congress..

[potato3732842]

I was thinking more recent stuff, like fed income tax and then "giving" that money back with strings resulting in the current "we'll fund your state level EPA and DOT agencies but only if they goose step in line with us" status quo. Said status quo means that every stupid nitpick of federal law winds up getting fought tooth and nail over.

[adamc]

It wasn't even slavery that caused the war, but secession. (I am not arguing that slavery didn't cause secession -- it did -- but that wasn't what created support in the north for fighting a war over it.)

[gottorf]

That states' rights were used to fight for the right to maintain slavery does not mean that the concept of states' rights is wrong. It is slavery that is wrong.

[krapp]

I'm inherently mistrustful of arguments for "state's rights" that don't explicitly state what rights are being advocated for, that the existence of a Federal government is standing in the way of.

It's usually something gross and regressive, like wanting to mandate Christian doctrine as law, or to reintroduce racial segregation or to send all the gays to conversion therapy. Otherwise it would be something normal they could just, you know, pass a law about. Because states do have rights, they just don't have absolute sovereignty.

[gottorf]

> Because states do have rights, they just don't have absolute sovereignty.

This would be more meaningful if the federal government wasn't involved in everyone's lives to the degree that most people's idea of state sovereignty ends at issuing driver's licenses and license plates.

In general, a call for "states' rights" is a call for the federal government to act in line with the supreme law of the land that is the Constitution and restore the concept of "laboratories of democracy" that states ought to be. Instead, what we have is a federal government that supposedly has the legal authority to regulate activity that crossed no state boundaries and harmed no one[0].

> wanting to mandate Christian doctrine as law, or to reintroduce racial segregation or to send all the gays to conversion therapy

I'm not aware of any recent efforts at the state level, at least more seriously than someone trying to make the papers in a primary election, to achieve such goals. Do you have any examples?

[0]: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/317us111

[rat87]

It was also used as an argument to fight for Jim Crow laws. So called "States rights" have a very ugly history in America

[potato3732842]

And on the flip side states rights is what let half the country not have slavery from the get go, certain states grant women suffrage, basically every singular "good thing" you could come up with started in one state. My state had great public healthcare before the federal mandate.

The current state of weed legalization, and research into medical psychedelic use would probably be a ton better off without the feds sticking their dick places it doesn't belong, to name but one example.

[consteval]

But the unintended consequence is that we were forced to weaken states' rights, so that we could abolish slavery. We could not have federally abolished slavery if we did not first give the federal government the power to do that. Unfortunately, the union had to take that power by force.

[adamc]

Right, but once you fight a war over it, the SCOTUS is forced to make choices to legitimize the actions of the remaining USA, and state's rights were... de-valued.

[Dylan16807]

It's more that states don't really do things better than federal.

[adamc]

That is such a distorted fantasy I don't really know what to say.