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Comment by landryraccoon | Hacker News Reader

Would you restore to a decades old previous commit on a system that had been running just fine in production that entire time?

SCOTUS isn't even really the engineering team imho, they're devops. If they're there just to enforce the rules, the rules are set just as much by precedent as by the letter of the law, since precedent is what is already working. They should just keep the system running and have a strong bias for favoring the status quo.

This court isn't "conservative" in the traditional sense; I would call them hyper-reactionary.

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"running just fine in production" is your assessment.

The court's job isn't to decide if the system runs well or not. It's to uphold the legal structure which was established long ago, because of the initial belief thaf in the long run a system without checks and balances will fall apart.

Federal branch agencies need clear limits to their power. There are many historical examples of why this matters. Congress failed to create clear limits for the EPA, and the court is telling them they need to do their job. That's the court's job.

I like seeing one branch of government do its job and keep another branch accountable. Nothing prevents Congress from granting them those powers explicitly - except for political will, which is exactly the point (agencies shouldn't be doing things for which there is no political will).

Nothing prevents Congress from granting them those powers explicitly

I think you're correct, but just to play devil's advocate...is it possible that as society get more complex, it prevents them from doing so? It's jarring to hear Congress talk about passing bills before they read them, but in the context of everything the would have to know in an increasingly complex society, it may be a sad fact that don't have the ability to both pragmatically and judiciously create laws.

Thinking in terms of software; it's easy to come up with hard rules for writing "Hello World" programs. But expand it to a space shuttle with hundreds of thousands of lines of codes, the number of interfaces grows so fast that creating centralized hard rules becomes nearly impossible.

This is an argument against large central governments.

If the system gets too large to effectively govern with understandable rules, then will be captured by special interests, which are the groups with the strongest incentives to create / understand these complex rules and use them to their advantage. This is called regulatory capture and the larger and more complex a system is, the more likely it will be captured.

This can be avoided by governing as close to the local level as possible (the subsidiary principle) so that you never have the complexity of governance grow to the point it gets captured.

Unfortunately strong central governments don't like their power being taken from them, and they are more powerful than any political organization within their territory, so in practice you have power move from local to national and rarely the other way around.

I understand your perspective, but disagree.

Central governance is, in some ways, a response to complexity. If you extend the "governing as close to the local level as possible" too far, you risk an unnuanced understanding because the local level can't be an expert on every system they interface with. For example, do you have the knowledge to accurately assess the risk when you take a flight? If you're like most people, you probably don't know enough about aircraft maintenance, or avionics, or pilot training etc. I know libertarians may disagree but don't think a mish-mash of localities helps in this case either, at least not in the short-to-medium term when you risk a lot of bad days before everyone agrees on a set of standards. This is exacerbated because of a lot of cognitive biases regarding how we perceive risk. Particularly with big systems with lots of complicated interfaces, the lowest level of effective governance may start looking an awful lot like a centralized government.

I would argue it could be better improved with fundamentally refocusing politicians attention. When half their time is spent campaigning, it obviously constrains their ability to craft policy.

> Federal branch agencies need clear limits to their power.

Yes, and if Congress wanted to set these limits, they would do so.

Which, in the case of the EPA, they did.

The court looked at the limits, and decided they didn't like them.

> Would you restore to a decades old previous commit on a system that had been running just fine in production that entire time?

So you believe the Supreme Court should not have ruled anti-racemixing laws unconstitutional, because they had been considered valid for 99 years since the passing of the 14th Amendment (which the Court used to justify its decision), whose authors were alive during much of that time, and hadn't mentioned that they've been made unconstitutional by its passing?

Or is it that if the court moves in one direction, that's okay and progress and living constitution. But if it moves back, that's hyper-reactionary and they should just maintain the status quo? In other words, you want a ratchet that only moves in the direction you like, even if it means ignoring the law in favor of the status quo (but only in cases where you like the status quo)?

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