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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Courts in the US are generally quite independent of the political process. Abuse of the court system is prosecuted fairly heavily. This is "rule of law".

On the other hand, courts in China do whatever the CCP tells them. These are not equivalent.

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I think this depends on what you define as "abuse". Many suspects are railroaded into plea-bargains to avoid bankruptcy or the risk of more severe charges regardless of actual guilt[1]. There are also abuses like civil asset forfeiture or false DMCA takedowns that rarely see any punishment.

I think it's possible to get justice in the US court system if you have money. This isn't really "rule of law" as one might commonly think of it though.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...

How do you feel about Steven Donziger ?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/lawyer-who-sued-chevron-sen...

Also, on a technical level, let's not equate a government apparatus that both controls and records anything and everything you do online, with a government asking a private company to identify people who searched the name of a girl who was murdered.

The China surveillance apparatus is based on compulsion of private companies. Where are you drawing the distinction?

I believe it's in degree. The great firewall, a massive centrally controlled effort, vs random judges with asking for narrow data related to specific events.

Cops can search your car if they have a reason to believe you've committed a crime, but if they just start rifling through every car in a public lot someone is getting sued.

> Courts in the US are generally quite independent of the political process.

I'm not sure what to make of this statement.

To become a judge at the federal level is a deeply political process. Judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Nominated judges are usually the same political party as the president but must also be acceptable to at least a majority of senators, and there is often some bargaining to make this work. Every SCOTUS nomination in recent history has had senators question nominees on their political opinions. Federal courts frequently break along ideological lines such that the balance of liberals to conservatives on a court is important to parties and voters. Some state courts mirror this, with the governor nominating and a legislature confirming. How could this process be described as apolitical?

This is different from an apolitical process where a neutral body like a bureaucracy or bar association selects judges based on merit. The US is distinct from many European countries in this regard.

Where is this judicial fantasyland you live in with apolitical judges and independent laws? They're written, passed, judged, and enforced by heavily partisan actors, now more than ever. You're kidding yourself, and no one else, if you think the US judicial system is politically independent.

Given that judiciary being subservient to the Party is an intentional feature in China, no competent western system would do "worse" in judicial independence than China.

The GP is literally always correct in relativistic terms. If that makes people in the West feel more comfortable with the government, I guess I could say good for them? :)

The Supreme Court itself is a partisan institution, now more than ever, and every reading of the Constitution has been subject to partisan biases since forever. That's not to say we have no checks and balances, just that they are not independent. More like interdependent and part of a vicious cycle; biased legislators appoint biased judges who exonerate biased executives who reward biased legislators. I think the cycles of the last few years have made that abundantly clear, but any cursory reading of US history should reveal this is not a new pattern. It's just how the system has always worked, our folklore notwithstanding.

If you don't think life appointment makes someone politically independent, I have to wonder what possible office would qualify. Divine monarch? Fürher?

Does your ideology radically change over your life? Why would theirs? They judge with their own biases, and are often out of touch with public sentiment. They're just people, and in case of at least one, a rapist with powerful friends.

A bigger court elected by the people could help solve that problem. Not lifetime appointments with zero accountability. The Supremes are just another fascist and anti democratic institution, like the electoral college or the party apparatuses.

You have a very peculiar view of language if you think that elected officials are less political than ones that are appointed for life.

Lifetime appointments just mean they get to force THEIR politics on the rest of us, instead of being accountable to ours. It doesn't make them magically apolitical. They are partisan hacks appointed by shitty legislators elected by an antiquated electoral system participated in by a disenchanted and uneducated mass. The Supreme Court doesn't have a great track record of being some sort of enlightened wise guru above the fray, they're very much a part of the broken model of American representative democracy and its inability to cope with the issues of modernity.

(sorry, new account BTW, lost the last password)

And if we're arguing semantics, there is a tendency for conservatives to label "things done differently than before" as "political" and the status quo as the sane default, which it rarely is to anyone not in line with their ideology. Everything in civic life is political, especially in a democracy as ragged and divided as ours. The more precise question, I think, is not whether some person or institution is "political" (they are, unavoidably, especially if they don't even see their own politics) but whether they are responsive to democratic whims. The Supreme Court by design is way less so, vs the House say. And I'd argue that's a huge part of their problem. Society and needs didn't evolve as quickly when that institution was designed. It simply cannot keep up. 9 old farts who don't understand technology have no place governing the future of 300 million.

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