Hacker News Reader

> One thing that makes SCOTUS interesting is that they have no enforcement mechanism. It's mainly only tradition and respect for the institution that causes people to follow Supreme Court rulings

You're underselling this, I think.

It is "respect for the institution" why the military accepts the civilian authority of the POTUS as commander in chief. If we are only considering the ability to use violence to enforce one's position as legitimate, it's the military and police forces who rule. Once you factor in laws, the SCOTUS is authoritative as to how the laws can be legally interpreted.

This very much reminds me of the riddle in Game of Thrones:

"In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the name of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me – who lives and who dies?”

The more interesting question to me than "who lives and who dies?" is "who holds the most power?" The three great men have enormous resources to influence the sellsword, but in this situation isn't it the sellsword ultimately making the decision and being the agent of change? Does the military let POTUS pretend he has ultimate power, or does "respect for the institution" really overpower the military?

I really hope "respect for institution" is more powerful than our military. I think so far we've seen that it is, but the current administration seems to be attacking our institutions pretty aggressivly.

>Does the military let POTUS pretend he has ultimate power, or does "respect for the institution" really overpower the military?

A huge portion of the military really comes down to who has money to keep paying the soldiers, fueling the bombers etc. If the military revolts but no one ends up paid, a problem ensues.

I think in the scenarios where the military decides to no longer respect civilian rule (a coup), it's not particularly hard to occupy the Treasury and the mint.

A potential improvement might to split the scope of duties across more independent government entities. It's actually similar to how corporate management tends to plan management roles: things like end-to-end ownership of clear (and relatively limited) responsibilities. These days, the federal government's scope is massively larger than when the constitution was created.

One approach to splitting things might look something like this:

government A: education, taxes, social services, abortion, immigration, ...

government B: electoral issues, telecom/internet, mail, privacy, utilities, workplace regulations, ... basically, mundane areas that are more about boring competence and finding smart solutions. Or at the very least, serving the public will more directly.

This way, the boring yet important stuff can be done by B without being drowned out by the divisive stuff in A, where people become polarized into thinking they just need to vote against particular issues and there's no real accountability for the rest of it.

You might think that state-level government provides more accountability by being smaller, and this is true in some way, but for the most part I see the exact same thing happening where state government elections are mostly not providing much accountability in a lot of government domains because they aren't contentious enough to be the deciding factors in elections. But they are still important nevertheless.

Doesn’t the system already work like this? The federal government is responsible for the things enumerated in the Constitution (accepting, as you say, that the scope of these powers has become wider in practice over time). The states are responsible for everything else. The “boring yet important” decisions are made by unelected bureaucrats rather than politicians.

This (to my understanding) was the purpose of the Senate originally. Appointed by the states (however they choose), for terms of 6 years. This means they represent the interest of the state as a whole, not of the individual voters.

Yeah. And I was about to say something to the effect that this plan was a bad idea, because then you end up with out-of-touch political elites in the Senate. But then I thought about the current makeup of the Senate...

Very interesting points regarding enforcement mechanism.

> I'm not sure what that would look like.

Just iterating a few possibilities:

1) Lifetime terms (like Roman senate or SCOTUS)

2) Term limits (like US Pres)

Honestly really naive about political theory and I wonder what the case is for each and what the process for changing would look like (guessing it is something congress would have to do, so hard to do).

The typical argument I've heard against term limits is that you limit the experience your lawmakers have.

And they have an incentive to angle for their next job. Like congress people walking into a lobbying job on the other side of the desk. Conflict of interest

Which is why the FCC is a complete mess of regulatory capture: it's a revolving door between FCC positions and big money telecom positions.

This already happens, though, without term limits, so is it really that big a worry?

3) Randomly selecting citizens to serve (like jury duty).

Rotate randomly selected federal judges through the job.

deleted

>For SCOTUS rulings and the law more generally, there is an "enforcement mechanism": Bring a legal case.

Who would hear a legal case against the SCOTUS?

deleted

Sorry, I conflated my mention of SCOTUS existing "without any meaningful oversight" with your mention of "enforcement mechanism" - I missed that you were replying to someone who replied to me, not directly to me!

Even if you could somehow “fix” the press, you’d still be left with the problem of individuals favoring those elements of the press that reinforce their existing beliefs. It’s not a lack of information that’s the problem; the problem is that people self-select news sources that reinforce their existing beliefs. In fact one could argue that the present abundance of “information” is a primary enabler of such bubbles.

deleted

>long ago I concluded that quite broadly, astoundingly, that the media doesn't know how to draw a graph!

I'm almost certain most people doing these graphics know exactly how to draw a graph, it's just that their audience has made it clear that they like incorrect graphs, so long as they reinforce existing beliefs.

Someone, somewhere, has almost certainly done an A/B test of "correct graph" versus "misleading graph" and learned that the latter produces more clicks, shares and revenue.

deleted