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Crows Turn Off posted:Why do we think the SCOTUS justices care about their public image? There is no recourse for any decision they make and they have not shown to care about public perception at all before. They are not beholden to the public. I don't think they'll consider popular legitimacy at all in their decision. Basically the only thing the Supreme Court has is (the image of) legitmacy. They command no troops and they hold no pursestrings, all they have is that people regard their court decisions as legitimate and worthy of upholding. If state governors and federal police feel like they can just ignore what they say if it's inconvienient, they become a bunch of irrelevant old people in nightgowns.
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Jan 2, 2024 18:31
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haveblue posted:Well, once public pressure began to build after the string of Clarence Thomas scandals, they responded. It was a weak response that changes nothing, but it shows that they do care. They are aware that the parts of the government that are beholden to the public do have power over them; congresspeople were talking about imposing a code of ethics on them legislatively and they did this as preemption The problem is that "code of ethics" means functionally nothing if there's no way to enforce it. The only discipline tool the legislature have is impeachment and removal, and those are doomed to fail for the exact same reason it's doomed to fail for any other impeachable position. Ratoslov posted:Basically the only thing the Supreme Court has is (the image of) legitmacy. They command no troops and they hold no pursestrings, all they have is that people regard their court decisions as legitimate and worthy of upholding. If state governors and federal police feel like they can just ignore what they say if it's inconvienient, they become a bunch of irrelevant old people in nightgowns. There is no way this happens without completely rendering the idea of a federal government meaningless. "John DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 18:32
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I wonder what happens if the chief justice refuses to administer the oath of office at the inauguration.
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Jan 2, 2024 18:34
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We don't know the SC's internal communications, but I don't think there can be too much of a chance of a complete rat-loving on this just because there haven't been any dissents. Multiple justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson especially, have made it abundantly clear that even if they can't win decisions, they want to document how hosed up the majority's opinion is. Not saying everything's going to be fine and dandy, I don't really believe in trying to make firm predictions with only partial data, but I think we can say that if the SC was for certain going to rule in Trump's favor despite that being hilariously wrong and dumb, we would've heard something by now.
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Jan 2, 2024 18:36
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Kavros posted:The supreme court dictating the election isn't even really novel territory, but the present majority justices have eaten away at their popular legitimacy so hard that I'm almost going to guarantee that they punt and do whatever it is keeps them out of the spotlight on this one, even if the leonard leo / conservative block justices have gone through hell and high water to assure us that they are textual originalists who cleave purely to the literal meaning of laws as written. That's the thing though: there's no real way to duck the spotlight here. Roberts has to personally administer the oath of office to this guy if he wins. I'm inclined to agree that some attempt to duck out is the most likely option, I'm just not clear that the Court can successfully manage to keep ducking for the entire next year. There's too much in the pipe. It is truly fascinating how quickly the establishment party collapsed. I'm not certain his conviction will end his campaign. You can legally run for president while incarcerated, and he will not withdraw voluntarily.
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Jan 2, 2024 18:39
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i wonder if they'll make him a special orange suit to wear to state dinners in the prison mess hall? king of england getting shivved for not sharing his pudding cup. trump and the prime minister of bangladesh talking through glass at their little phones. touching palms through the glass
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Jan 2, 2024 18:43
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InsertPotPun posted:i wonder if they'll make him a special orange suit to wear to state dinners in the prison mess hall? king of england getting shivved for not sharing his pudding cup. trump and the prime minister of bangladesh talking through glass at their little phones. touching palms through the glass Justice Roberts cooling his heels in intake while they wait for Trump to be brought up to Visitation to take the Oath of Office Secret Service constantly searching for shivs and finding new ones literally every search
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Jan 2, 2024 18:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I wonder what happens if the chief justice refuses to administer the oath of office at the inauguration. The Constitution doesn't require that the Chief Justice be the person to administer it. LBJ was sworn in by a district judge who happened to be on the plane. One of the other justices will probably step up or they can find the next most appropriate person if needed
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Jan 2, 2024 18:50
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DeathSandwich posted:There is no way this happens without completely rendering the idea of a federal government meaningless. "John Yeah, I didn't say it would be a good thing.
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Jan 2, 2024 18:52
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Secret Service constantly searching for shivs and finding new ones literally every search Ah yes, Prison Architect
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Jan 2, 2024 19:37
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haveblue posted:The Constitution doesn't require that the Chief Justice be the person to administer it. LBJ was sworn in by a district judge who happened to be on the plane. One of the other justices will probably step up or they can find the next most appropriate person if needed Coolidge was sworn in by a Justice of the Peace, to name another.
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Jan 2, 2024 19:39
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Ratoslov posted:Basically the only thing the Supreme Court has is (the image of) legitmacy. They command no troops and they hold no pursestrings, all they have is that people regard their court decisions as legitimate and worthy of upholding. If state governors and federal police feel like they can just ignore what they say if it's inconvienient, they become a bunch of irrelevant old people in nightgowns. Can you imagine, the police running around, shaking people down for protection money, beating up anyone they want, summarily executing people. MADNESS!
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Jan 2, 2024 21:29
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Platonicsolid posted:Can you imagine, the police running around, shaking people down for protection money, beating up anyone they want, summarily executing people. MADNESS! It's the strangest thing, but I actually can. For some reason they all have darker skin tones though, do you think that means anything?
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Jan 2, 2024 21:56
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PC LOAD LETTER posted:Aren't most of the suites to get Trump off the ballot being brought to court by Republicans? This could be an effort carried out entirely by other Republicans and the Democrats will still be credited. The public will conflate this with the trials Trump is currently embroiled in, and they already largely frame those as partisan efforts to unfairly punish him for loving America too much.
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Jan 2, 2024 22:52
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I hate that I think this is true, but Donald Trump is an accurate representation of about a third of this country. Loud, dumb, and vainglorious.
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Jan 2, 2024 22:56
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Crows Turn Off posted:Why do we think the SCOTUS justices care about their public image? There is no recourse for any decision they make and they have not shown to care about public perception at all before. They are not beholden to the public. I don't think they'll consider popular legitimacy at all in their decision. The Supreme Court is absolutely beholden to the public. They're fairly insulated from direct involvement with politics, but making a ruling which sufficiently infuriates a substantial enough portion of the population can cause a considerable political backlash against the Court, potentially enough to erode away their insulation from politics or even cause a political upheaval in the country as a whole. This is the ultimate limit on their power to play Calvinball with the law, but it's also a limit on how strongly they can stick to the letter of the law in the face of public opposition. The most famous example of this would be the Dred Scott case, commonly cited as one of the major contributing factors to the Civil War. The ruling was intended to forever settle a highly contentious political issue by issuing a legal opinion that took it out of the hands of the politicians and settled the question once and for all. Instead, it infuriated and radicalized abolitionists who opposed the decision, while at the same time emboldening the slaveholders to use any means necessary to resist abolitionist pressure. Another example would be the repeated overturning of New Deal legislation back in FDR's era. While it didn't cause a civil war, voters' overwhelming support of FDR's economic agenda (to the point where FDR felt comfortable introducing a court-packing bill) was able to pressure a judge into reversing course and approving New Deal policies. All that is why I don't expect the Supreme Court to disqualify Trump without at least a conviction. As long as Trump is the top GOP candidate by a huge margin, and as long as Trump is polling evenly with Biden, and as long as the Congressional GOP is overwhelmingly supporting Trump, I can't imagine the Court being eager to put itself in the position of having to tell the electorate that the country's preferred candidate isn't allowed to be president. My prediction right now is that they start off with requiring a conviction, and then when the case makes its way back to them after a conviction they'll look at how the conviction affected his polling and decide based on that.
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Jan 3, 2024 00:31
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Watching people get extremely nervous and skittish about anything happening to trump that resembles accountability, like being banned from the ballot box in whole states, and remembering i have that impulse too reminds me just how much his getting elected broke our brains in so many ways
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Jan 3, 2024 00:37
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Main Paineframe posted:The Supreme Court is absolutely beholden to the public. They're fairly insulated from direct involvement with politics, but making a ruling which sufficiently infuriates a substantial enough portion of the population can cause a considerable political backlash against the Court, potentially enough to erode away their insulation from politics or even cause a political upheaval in the country as a whole. This is the ultimate limit on their power to play Calvinball with the law, but it's also a limit on how strongly they can stick to the letter of the law in the face of public opposition. But isn’t the Court’s role, partially, to mitigate the ugliest byproducts of Democracy via a Constitutional filter? They can’t do that by chasing, or even really considering, public opinion. I seriously doubt a stronger Dred ruling would have prevented the civil war, but I’d argue the ruling was infamously bad because that Court put too much of an emphasis on public opinion. The Court’s job was to stand in the breach and call out a clear Constitutional violation, and public opinion can express itself via legislation, Amendments, or even violence. The Court somehow requiring the approval of the people was never a talking point until Dobbs. I get that it was an unpopular decision, but making a decision that flies in the face of public opinion does not itself delegitimize SCOTUS, in my opinion.
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Jan 3, 2024 01:23
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Main Paineframe posted:The Supreme Court is absolutely beholden to the public. They're fairly insulated from direct involvement with politics, but making a ruling which sufficiently infuriates a substantial enough portion of the population can cause a considerable political backlash against the Court, potentially enough to erode away their insulation from politics or even cause a political upheaval in the country as a whole. This is the ultimate limit on their power to play Calvinball with the law, but it's also a limit on how strongly they can stick to the letter of the law in the face of public opposition. The difference between them and now is that FDR had the moxie and the votes to pack the court if it came to a fight. In the current legislative body, there is absolutely no clear way to get the sorts of majorities you would need to pack a court. Every single opposition party member in the senate would sooner die in fillibuster before any legislation on the courts would pass cloture. Compared to the pre - Civil War times? People today just absolutely do not have the appetite for the sorts of widespread violence that would have to be on the table to make the judiciary consider alternate course of action. Any modern John Brown would be identified as a terrorist and FBIed / ATFed into nonexistence before he ever got started. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 01:59
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TheDisreputableDog posted:But isn’t the Court’s role, partially, to mitigate the ugliest byproducts of Democracy via a Constitutional filter? They can’t do that by chasing, or even really considering, public opinion. I seriously doubt a stronger Dred ruling would have prevented the civil war, but I’d argue the ruling was infamously bad because that Court put too much of an emphasis on public opinion. The Court’s job was to stand in the breach and call out a clear Constitutional violation, and public opinion can express itself via legislation, Amendments, or even violence. In purely legalistic terms, yes, but if the Court is seen as making rulings totally out of step with how a lot of the public understands things either are or should be, eventually the social compact could suffer. As it stands the SCOTUS is seen by many as a bunch of old assholes who have made some lovely decisions, and that's a totally tolerable state of affairs for the court, but at some point those lovely decisions start to make people feel like the American state has diverged too greatly from where it should be, and at some point that number of people could grow large enough to cause real problems. I don't think a Trump ruling is enough to do that (and the court is only one of myriad American institutions that can contribute to this issue) but I can absolutely believe it'd be regarded in the future as a major landmark on the road there.
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Jan 3, 2024 02:31
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DeathSandwich posted:The difference between them and now is that FDR had the moxie and the votes to pack the court if it came to a fight. In the current legislative body, there is absolutely no clear way to get the sorts of majorities you would need to pack a court. Every single opposition party member in the senate would sooner die in fillibuster before any legislation on the courts would pass cloture. He literally did not have the votes to pack the court. The backlash at the time was incredible, even with a massive Democratic majority in Congress. The Senate blocked him and the fallout cost his party heavily. FDR utterly failed to strongarm the court: he eventually won out the old fashioned way, by staying president through multiple conservative retirements. Democrats today have more will to pack the court than Democrats of the 1930s. It's just still insufficient since there are more Republicans opposing it more vigorously than there were then.
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Jan 3, 2024 02:58
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MrNemo posted:
Al Gore? Ratoslov posted:Basically the only thing the Supreme Court has is (the image of) legitmacy. They command no troops and they hold no pursestrings, all they have is that people regard their court decisions as legitimate and worthy of upholding. If state governors and federal police feel like they can just ignore what they say if it's inconvienient, they become a bunch of irrelevant old people in nightgowns. This is pretty much how I see things heading. I was so glad to be done with 2023 yesterday and then I realized that 2024 is an election year and god drat this is gonna be horrible no matter how it shakes out.
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Jan 3, 2024 03:09
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DeathSandwich posted:The difference between them and now is that FDR had the moxie and the votes to pack the court if it came to a fight. In the current legislative body, there is absolutely no clear way to get the sorts of majorities you would need to pack a court. Every single opposition party member in the senate would sooner die in fillibuster before any legislation on the courts would pass cloture. ... FDR literally didn't? Like, he introduced the bill right after he was elected in the largest landslide since Washington, held a Fireside Chat stating the bill was his largest priority, and it immediately got held in committee and never saw the light of day because he didn't have the votes to pass it. His attempt to pack the Court and his failure to do so is said by some historians to be a major reason his second term accomplished so little, as Democrats he had been able to cajole into supporting him previously suddenly realized they could get votes by claiming to be curbing his excesses, and it set the stage for the Southern pro-business wing of the party to decide to venture into exploring third parties, leading to the Dixiecrats of 1948.
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Jan 3, 2024 04:56
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DarkHorse posted:The only way Trump backs his secondary is if they swear fealty to him. Trump cannot abide being secondary, he couldn't even countenance being the power behind the throne unless everyone knows it. Hieronymous Alloy posted:If he's disqualified after he clinches the Republican party nomination, he could pick a VP candidate as his replacement on the ballot. My guess is he'd pick Ivanka. Well Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis both pledged to pardon Trump if elected. He's obviously not going to endorse them until he has no shot, but they've taken the first public step to currying his favor
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Jan 3, 2024 07:08
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DarkHorse posted:Well Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis both pledged to pardon Trump if elected. He's obviously not going to endorse them until he has no shot, but they've taken the first public step to currying his favor Except the president can’t pardon state crimes. And don’t pardons come with the stigma of basically admitting you did it if you accept?
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Jan 3, 2024 09:42
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Oracle posted:Except the president can’t pardon state crimes. And don’t pardons come with the stigma of basically admitting you did it if you accept? I can't image how a guy who virtually brags about how smart he was to bankrupt his own casinos caring about, or even acknowledging on any level, a stigma attached to his big beautiful pardon.
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Jan 3, 2024 10:58
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Trump will just argue its impossible to prepare a defense of such a monumental constitutional question case and have it done by the general election in November. How it continues from there depends on if he wins or the guy currently doing everything he can to be the most unelectable incumbent in human history wins. Either way, I wouldn't expect any profiles in courage to happen.
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Jan 3, 2024 12:02
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Oracle posted:Except the president can’t pardon state crimes. And don’t pardons come with the stigma of basically admitting you did it if you accept? The stigma is utterly meaningless.
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Jan 3, 2024 14:05
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I've had some time to think about this (hold your applause), and I think the acceleration of this thread is pretty much in tune with the fact that we have an unprecedented number of chaos agents in the SC that could group into a ruling in literally any direction. Us plebes are left endlessly pontificating about potential rulings because any loving theory can hold water now. Am I wrong in thinking this? This feels unprecedented. I could wake up tomorrow to hear Trump's invalid candidacy is sustained, but also Obergefell is overturned because... dice throw is justified via reverse engineering. I sure do hate this timeline.
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Jan 3, 2024 15:21
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Scags McDouglas posted:I've had some time to think about this (hold your applause), and I think the acceleration of this thread is pretty much in tune with the fact that we have an unprecedented number of chaos agents in the SC that could group into a ruling in literally any direction. You aren't wrong.
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Jan 3, 2024 15:32
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:You aren't wrong. Appreciate ya. I try to be somewhat self-aware that every generation thinks their problems are new and unique... the older generations just didn't experience this, man. But in this case, literally, we are thrust into uncharted waters and nobody can possibly provide advice.
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Jan 3, 2024 15:43
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Scags McDouglas posted:Appreciate ya. Oh it isn't completely uncharted. Ask anyone you know in Weimar Germany or 1850s America!
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Jan 3, 2024 15:44
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Scags McDouglas posted:I've had some time to think about this (hold your applause), and I think the acceleration of this thread is pretty much in tune with the fact that we have an unprecedented number of chaos agents in the SC that could group into a ruling in literally any direction. With the modern reality of the Republican party and the turbocharged results of the Trump admin that ordered reality is just plain gone, and you have to start thinking much more along the lines of "gently caress you, make me or else." It's a wrenching process to internalize that at an absolutely fundamental, gut-level approach to every aspect of reality institutions like the supreme court give absolutely zero fucks about that previous societal order. It's now naked displays of raw power, checked only by consequences or external, higher powers. Abortions? They're gone because  whatever we don't care, gently caress you make me. Oops now a lot of people hate us and we're losing elections. Uh-oh that's having consequences I don't like consequences what can we do to fix this?
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Jan 3, 2024 15:55
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TheDisreputableDog posted:But isn’t the Court’s role, partially, to mitigate the ugliest byproducts of Democracy via a Constitutional filter? They can’t do that by chasing, or even really considering, public opinion. I seriously doubt a stronger Dred ruling would have prevented the civil war, but I’d argue the ruling was infamously bad because that Court put too much of an emphasis on public opinion. The Court’s job was to stand in the breach and call out a clear Constitutional violation, and public opinion can express itself via legislation, Amendments, or even violence. Originally, basically half our constitutional system was intended to mitigate the ugliest byproducts of democracy. But pretty much all of that has been rolled back or shuffled into a corner long ago. For example, the Senate was originally an anti-democratic institution handpicked by political elites and not directly accountable to voters. And of course, the presidential election itself was originally to be done by the electoral college, which would choose a president on voters' behalf. With those extra layers of elite gatekeeping largely removed from both the executive and legislative branches, the judicial branch is far more vulnerable to the whims of the electorate than it was back in the early days of the US. The Court is insulated from public opinion, yes. However, "insulated from public opinion" is not the same as "does not have to consider public opinion at all whatsoever". Of course, this was also true even for the Senate and Electoral College as originally conceived by the founders. Even in an anti-democratic system that limits the populace's direct input, public opinion is still a powerful force. Elite gatekeeping can only go so far. I'd recommend reading up on the history of the British House of Lords if you're interested in this topic. As an inherently anti-democratic institution which originally had important political advantages over the House of Commons, it was a powerful gatekeeping force protecting the interests of the elite from the whims of democracy, but there were a number of times where overwhelming public sentiment was able to overcome its gatekeeping role, forcing the House of Lords not only to back down on an issue it felt strongly about but also to willingly surrender some of its own power in the aftermath to placate the angry populace. DeathSandwich posted:The difference between them and now is that FDR had the moxie and the votes to pack the court if it came to a fight. In the current legislative body, there is absolutely no clear way to get the sorts of majorities you would need to pack a court. Every single opposition party member in the senate would sooner die in fillibuster before any legislation on the courts would pass cloture. FDR didn't have the votes to pack the court. His court-packing bill seemed doomed to fail - but after his overwhelming reelection victory in 1936, the justices saw where the political winds were blowing and decided it was best to take the L there. After all, regardless of whether FDR could accomplish packing the court, having "should the court be packed?" even on the table as a potential option being actively talked about is enormously damaging to the only power the Supreme Court has, its legitimacy.
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Jan 3, 2024 16:07
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The complete abandonment of stare decisis was the last straw for a lot of people, it tore the mask off in a way that woke a lot of them up
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Jan 3, 2024 16:08
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I got my bar license before the Dobbs decision, and it's pretty remarkable how much that one case has changed the general perception of the Court by other attorneys. In law school (and my early career) people still respected the Court (mostly) even if they thought it was making wrong calls. They thought that the judges were, in general, earnestly following their convictions, even if those convictions were kinda batshit for some of the justices. Now it's really mask off. The Thomas corruption stuff has really cinched it for a lot of folks too.
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Jan 3, 2024 16:13
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bird food bathtub posted:I wouldn't say wrong, just using...outdated assumptions, I guess? We, speaking as a collective societal whole, are used to a series of assumptions based on the idea of little-L liberal order. Once you get over the gut-level fairness of how society should be ordered and start thinking like an authoritarian verging-on-fascist society things start matching up a whole lot more with the reality on display. The previous assumption is that the "output", so to speak, of the supreme court was based at least notionally on an ordered social system within an agreed-upon set of rules in the constitution. Like it or hate it, there was at least a fig leaf on the rulings and a set of boundaries that the game had to be played within. How much that ever comported with reality is an argument as old as time and one I'm specifically setting aside right now so don't @ me, as is the modern parlance. So first off, just to get this out of the way: I completely agree. But there's a thesis you're not fully addressing. "gently caress you, make me or else" doesn't function as a solution for lifetime appointments to the SC. It's a completely unchecked branch of government unless the Democratic party achieves super-majorities. Which isn't going to happen. The Trump appointees aren't capable of shame or they would have applied under a legitimate president. So the game is over, we just have to hunker down and wait for our conservative overlords to die from old age. I know this sounds like doom-posting but it's hard to shy away from reality when it's slapping you in the face.
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Jan 3, 2024 16:25
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Nitrousoxide posted:I got my bar license before the Dobbs decision, and it's pretty remarkable how much that one case has changed the general perception of the Court by other attorneys. Did you pass the bar after the Shelby County decision in 2013, by chance? Making a ruling that congress can't make good decisions if they don't sing & dance enough before passing them was where I saw the SCOTUS reputation of logical argumentation die, myself.
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Jan 3, 2024 16:30
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Scags McDouglas posted:It's a completely unchecked branch of government unless the Democratic party achieves super-majorities You don't need a supermajority to fix the court. You need a simple majority of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster. You need a simple majority of both houses to expand the court. You need a simple majority of the Senate to appoint more justices. We had those things for the first half of the Biden administration. The will wasn't there yet, but we were down to two holdouts for that first step, both of whom are likely to be gone next time quote:The Trump appointees aren't capable of shame or they would have applied under a legitimate president. So the game is over, we just have to hunker down and wait for our conservative overlords to die from old age. As we saw with Scalia, this can take much less time than you think
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Jan 3, 2024 16:31
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Gerund posted:Did you pass the bar after the Shelby County decision in 2013, by chance? Making a ruling that congress can't make good decisions if they don't sing & dance enough before passing them was where I saw the SCOTUS reputation of logical argumentation die, myself. I was going to make an analogy about striking down the Clean Water Act because our water is so clean but I realized it was too on the nose and made myself depressed about our future
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Jan 3, 2024 16:37
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