Going to be a lot of anger about the results this court season, but I honestly think it's going to be healthier for democracy overall if congress stop leaning on the courts and bureaucracy to make critical regulations.
I live in a rural area. There are plenty of laws that make sense for my area that would be ridiculous in high density cities and vise verse. Here there is no minimum speed limit and I can drive my tractor down the road by attaching an orange triangle. I can drill my own well. I can chop and burn trees on my property. None if thus would make sense in the city.
NYC can make rules for NYC.
States that are economically and politically dominated by a single economic zone are a great examples of why minority contingents need strong veto power.
They could even get ~2 Republican votes for broad abortion rights, and likely more if they passed a targeted bill about the health of the mother, incest, etc.
As recently as a decade ago the democrats had a supermajority and passed sweeping healthcare reform bills. It's really not an insurmountable barrier.
Delaware was the smallest of the 13 states with a population of 59K. That's 2.36% of the 2.5M total in 1776. There were 26 Senators so each one had about 7.7% voting power.
Today, South Dakota has a population of 905K out of 330M or 0.274% of the population. There are 100 Senators so each has about 2% voting power.
A Senator from South Dakota today represents 1/10 the population that a Senator from Delaware did in 1776. If influence scaled with the same distribution it did in 1776, a South Dakota Senator should only have about 0.77% voting power, but today they have 2%. Population distribution is more widely varied today which creates much more power for lower population states than when in the country was formed.
How can anyone say that with a straight face in the presence of the electoral college (heck even the elected representatives don't have a legal obligation to vote for their party's candidate) and most importantly gerrymandering. Your assumption that the people can vote to enact change is simply not true.
I don't think that scales. When some group of people is large enough and has enough different things going on it has to delegate regulation making. There is just too much for the top level of management to be directly regulating everything.
The larger the entity grows and the more it has going on the more regulation making needs to be delegated. At some point you reach the point where even critical regulation has to be delegated.
We passed that point, I think, a long time ago in all the large first world economies.
"It is within the power of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions"
and leave the rest to the bureaucrats, and that would have been enough. I don't think that's an unreasonable ask.
We can hope that Congress will step up and legislate, but that seems pretty unrealistic to me. I fear that this is just the latest wave of successes by the party that wants our government to be as toothless and inept as possible and already has a stranglehold on Congress for the foreseeable future.
In my understanding -- and I've read good chunks of the leaked Dobbs opinion -- the above claim is not true. The Dobbs decision's reasoning is largely based on a lack of clear federal legislation saying that abortion is legal.
Of course that ruling should cut both ways and eliminate the possibility of a federal ban as well, but as we've seen the majority is willing to overturn precedent both as old as 50 years and as young as 2 years (see Gorsuch dissent on Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta) so its possible they would find the rational to uphold a ban even if they strike down a law mandating access.
When Congress passes a law, the law (sometimes referred to as the Constitution) gets amended, hence it is also referred to as an amendment.
Edit: ignore this comment, my information was incorrect!
There is a big big difference legally in the US between an Amendment and something in the USC
Essentially the same justification for why Congress could create the EPA in the first place allows them to codify any regulations as law or to extend the EPA mandate. What cannot happen is the EPA unilaterally deciding to overreach its mandate, because its taking actions with the force of law but without any check/balance. The Constitution is quite clear that laws are the purview of the Legislative, not the Executive, and the EPA is a function of the Executive.
Even if it was, there's no reason not to test it.
But states that don’t set their drinking age to 21 lose 8% of their highway funding.
By now, every state is in compliance, but some held out for years, and they could decide to change it in the future and forfeit the money.
Fascism by the way would be rule by fiat - eg a King or a Dictator can just declare new law: "I declare all Hamburgers shall now be served with bacon and anyone who fails to do shall be executed".
Writing down laws and having a neutral body interpret them is a really important part of fair forms of Government (but not unique to Democracy). There is no defense to a fiat in a Dictatorship but that is a defense in eg Democracy. The publishing, disseminating and authority of rules is the basis of a fair form of government.
The liberal justices are not a beacon of neutrality - they lean towards liberal policies and expansionist interpretations the same way the conservative justices lean towards conservative policies and paring down the Fed.
Fascism mixed with bureaucracy is extremely powerful and extremely difficult to fight.
Hopefully this article can shed some light on it for you.
https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/columnists/290919/bu...
This is what I view is happening in the US.
Single dictators don’t mean fascism. That’s an extremely simplistic and playground view on fascism. Heck, single dictators are much easier to combat than democratic & bureaucratic fascism.
And I'm sorry but I'm going to reject the opinion column of a small newspaper as a source.
You're right in that Fascism is not just composed of single dictators but you are confusing the Rule of Law with beaucracy. Having a high court and requiring laws to be explicit is not "Fascism", it is literally the basis of the legal system.
A “rule of law” is a tool that can be used for evil. I’m not sure why we’re being blind to this?
Is it? Then why am I reading news today about the Democrats wanting to suspend the filibuster for a federal abortion law?
The fundamental problem is that large important social policy decisions have been made as court cases rather than legislation for the past 50 years. If Congress actually made laws that explicitly granted rights to the people then we wouldn't be in this situation, but by passing the buck to the court they can claim that problems have been solved without actually having to get their hands dirty or face their constituents.
The constitution does not confer the right to clean water and yet, it’s not unconstitutional for the federal government to make laws regarding clean water standards.
Whether it can be legislated at the Federal level is a completely different question.
Abortion regulation powers were not delegated within the US Constitution and therefore those powers go to the states.
It's unfortunate that there isn't a stronger right to bodily autonomy enshrined in the constitution but that's tangential here.
There's still precedent and federal law that protects bodily autonomy in respect to having private medial exchanges with doctors.
We still have the FACE act for example, which is federal law preventing people from blocking the entrance of abortion clinics.
I think we'll find quite soon how much abortion is intertwined with interstate commerce.
Regarding bodily autonomy, it becomes a little tricky to make that argument when a mothers' decisions affect a separate body from her own. A body with its own DNA that happens to rely temporarily on her mother. Is the argument that a mother can kill her healthy child as long as it couldn't survive without her?