Hacker News Reader

Comment by avs733 | Hacker News Reader

> News related to this a few days ago got me thinking that people who want the US Supreme Court to ratify "sensible" mandates and orders coming out of the Executive Branch even if they're legally sketchy should perhaps be careful what they wish for.

Please explain how science-supported public health measures to control the spread of a deadly infectious disease are similar to imprisonment of a group based on their nationality because they were assumed to be helping the enemy during a way.

You just compared antibiotics and the fear of eclipses.

If institutions can't tell these apart they have already failed...all of them.

View on HN

At the time, there was a widespread fear, even among (as someone else mentioned) liberal icon FDR, that there was a significant security risk associated with Japanese-descended Americans. Even so, SCOTUS should have (ideally) said there was no legal case for interning them or (less ideally but better) simply declined to hear the case. It sounds very similar if the legal justification in equally weak. It's not the job of SCOTUS to make up legal reasoning for whatever the other branches of government want to do even if you (or the majority) agree with them.

SCOTUS is a legal institution that interprets laws given the facts and case in front of them. It is not their job to ratify Executive powers in the absence of Congressional action. They are not, nor should they be, a backup Congress.

> SCOTUS is a legal institution that interprets laws given the facts and case in front of them.

>that people who want the US Supreme Court to ratify "sensible" mandates and orders coming out of the Executive Branch even if they're legally sketchy should perhaps be careful what they wish for.

Yes...based on facts and laws...what are the facts and the laws in each case. Start with the facts, they are pretty simple.

The facts before them, which are provided by the plaintiff’s and defendant’s lawyers who are both charged with providing their best arguments; and according to the laws written by Congress.

This is not a small distinction.

You can read the decisions and there's no shortage of expert commentary on important SCOTUS decisions. If you actually care you're far better off going there than relying on comments from mostly non-lawyers.

The use of facts in the Supreme Court is to determine whether a law is legal, not good policy. The court is a check on legality of the actions of other two branches, not a check on their judgement.

I assume that any mandates re: vaccinations passed by states that roughly conformed to the facts of Jacobson v. Massachusetts would probably not even be taken up by SCOTUS as they would be matters of settled law (and have been effectively held up in more recent cases related to school vax requirements). However, expanding this to OSHA requirements was a bridge too far for (some) justices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com