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Please don't take HN threads on generic political/ideological tangents. It's not what this site is for, it's repetitive, and it invariably turns nasty.

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Our court system routinely handles far more technical issues than online publishing. Like every modern country, we regulate everything from water reclamation to aviation.

I'm talking about SCOTUS. Can you give examples there? Trial (district) and circuit appealate courts are different - though they also have been politicized to degrees.

Regulation is handled in the executive branch. Just because we regulate it, or it's tried in court, doesn't mean it's done well. That's the issue.

Isn’t regulation (mostly) handled by the legislative branch and enforcement handled by the respective department (sometimes executive)?

Those departments are largely executive agencies. The executive branch is supposed to enforce but over time it began to do both. The court is pulling this back now.

I’m not sure why I’m getting downvoted here. This is a pretty factual statement.

The environmental protection agency, for example, is an executive agency:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_...

You're ignoring half your own statement?

Which part? That the executive branch is only supposed to enforce but over time has begun to legislate as well?

Or the part about the Supreme Court ruling that executive agencies are acting beyond their scope?

Unfortunately (and that is another Area where the Supreme Court should start striking regulations down) the legislative branch often passes open ended ambiguous laws directing an agency to accomplish a open ended ambiguous "goal" or "directive" instead of passing actual specific laws. These are then "interpreted" by the agency into regulations. Which is why for example the ATF (excuse me BATFE today) can just redefine what is a "machine gun" under every administration making entire classes of products illegal or not on the whim of who ever runs that agency (or is president).

This should be plainly unconstitutional as the legislative branch is not empowered by the constitution to delegate its power to the executive. legislative branch makes the laws and executive enforces the law. However in the US Today, the executive is both making and enforcing the law. That is not how it should be nor is it tenable for a free society to function

The DEA is another organization that is infamous for doing this. Or rather infamous for being handed such broad decision making authority. Like ATF though, it’s by design - it allows politicians to continue to make unpopular decisions without having to be held accountable for it.

It isn't delegating its power, it's leaving the implementation to the executive branch because it doesn't know how to implement its goals.

If the legislative branch was able to do this on its own, it would, but that would be a massive amount of work that they don't want and would do poorly if they tried.

no, it allows politicians to continue to make unpopular decisions without having to be held accountable for it by the voters.

"It is not us, it is that crazy FBI/DEA/EPA/ATF/CIA/NSA/<Insert Agency here>, if you elect us we will put a stop to them"

and they never do

> This should be plainly unconstitutional as the legislative branch is not empowered by the constitution to delegate its power to the executive

this is a fringe theory not agreed to by serious people, and used in a bad faith way by people who want to just dismantle the administrative state. The only logical conclusion from that thought process is no regulatory body can exist.

Though the "big tent" about regulations being mishandled by SCOTUS is that SCOTUS will often just throw out plain text interpretation of statutes and regulations when it doesn't satisfy the majority's overall goals.

West Virginia v EPA begs to differ.

Yes I think SCOTUS is acting in bad faith. I do not believe this to be a radical point of view in this day and age. There is some navel gazing about how SCOTUS is the final say here so what they say "is right", in some sense, of course.

>>and used in a bad faith way by people who want to just dismantle the administrative stat

It not in bad faith. I absolutely / 100% have the desire to dismantle the administrative state, it should not exists at all.

Anyone that claims to support "democracy" should also want to dismantle the administrative state as there is nothing less democratic than a bunch of unelected bureaucrats with the power to rewrite laws, and ruin peoples lives / businesses

Basically every action taken by the executive, if only through the realities of selective enforcement, leads to decisions being made by "unelected bureaucrats". Unless we start voting for every cop, prosecutor, auditor, city planning official, the domain experts they bring on, etc.

If you agree that delegation at some level makes sense, then we're talking about degrees of delegation being considered reasonable. But outright ruling out any form of executive delegation seems kind of hard? Your argument would apply to every level of the state after all, including your city council.

>>Your argument would apply to every level of the state after all, including your city council.

That would depend on the State Constitution, and the powers it gives state governments, and the power those state governments then give the cities they authorized under their state laws

That is the beauty federalism, what applies to the Federal Government does not have to Apply to State Governments.

No. In most areas the legislative branch has delegated their authority to the executive branch, and appointed bureaucrats write the regulations. This is a problem due to lack of accountability. I hope that the Supreme Court will eventually eviscerate the authority of the executive branch to write regulations. If something needs to be regulated then Congress ought to pass a specific law about it, not pass the buck.

How could Congress possibly keep up with all the issues affecting the country? Congress is a serial machine - it can pass < 1 bill at a time. Executive branch agencies are parallel machines.

There is no need for Congress to keep up with all the issues affecting the country. They should only legislate on issues where they have legitimate Constitutional authority without stretching the intended meaning of the commerce clause. Everything else can be left to the several states, or simply not regulated at all.

In particular I hope the Supreme Court will eventually reverse the precedents established in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), United States v. Darby (1941), and United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters (1944). That would essentially destroy much of the federal government as we know it today, and good riddance.

There are orders of magnitude too many decisions and too much analysis for Congress, whose bandwidth is < 1 bill simultaneously. If you think regulators move slowly now ...

Congress delegates it to technical experts, who are appointed by an elected official (the President). Congress can always change the law if they are unhappy; they have the ulimate power.

> Can you give examples there?

Most of the SCOTUS docket, the stuff which never makes headlines, is eye-wateringly boring dives into random technical matters.

The Google/Oracle lawsuit was far more technical than this https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf and was just settled a little over a year ago

> I'm concerned about the US Supreme Court's ability to handle a subtle, technical issue tied to new media. They need to take into account all the stakeholders, rights, law, and the dynamics of social media, and come up with an innovative solution that meets all needs fairly and clearly.

Nope. That's what legislators do.

The Supreme Court's job is to decide whether safe harbor in Section 230 applies to companies when they are exercising editorial control.

What do you mean that it is now oriented towards partisanship? This has been true for at least a century. The recent Dobbs decision is as much the result of partisan efforts to institute policy opposed by the majority of the country as the original Roe decision was.

The court has handled complex technical issues many times before. This, along with partisanship, is nothing new.

Didn’t Dobbs return the decision to the states? Isn’t having the decision decided by majority vote the least partisan thing you can do by definition?

If they had truly taken a partisan stance, they would have unilaterally decided to ban abortion based on specious reasoning not unlike Roe.

I think we all know very well the partisanship involved, despite the theoretical questions (which might be interesting in another context).

Majority rule is the most partisan thing.

The decision was (more or less) up to individuals before. A state decision is inherently more partisan.

I don't think that most people would agree that anarcholibertarianism (the system which allocates least decisions to state) is the least "partisan" option. That's not what people understand by partisanship.

I think the person was referring to decision on the legality of abortion, not the decision of having an abortion. Instead of forcing the legality at the federal level it is now at the state level.

That would be true if States wouldn't overreach themselves and make it illegal for people to seek abortion in another State or prosecute its citizens.

It doesn't take a genius to forsee a standoff between Red and Blue.

States do this with all sorts of other laws. Look at the tax code in states for example. This isn't really unique.

After Dobbs the US is more like the EU.

I feel like a large part of the US population wants to go back to the Articles of Confederation, which were so ineffective as a system of government that they had to be replaced after 12 years.

Americans hatred for their own government is legendary and somewhat bizarre.

It reminds me of the famous clip in Monthy Python: "what have the Romans ever done for us".

Understand that the United States of America arose out of resentment for British governance and thus governance in general. Our literal essence is to distrust and hate all governments.

The US federal and state governments exist strictly at the pleasure of the people and it's written in our Declaration of Independence that we can and will get rid of them all at a moment's notice if they stop enjoying the people's pleasure.

That the Articles of Confederation got canned was a demonstration of the people's power to get rid of government that failed to garner pleasure.

Stuff like our Bill of Rights exist because, yes, we fucking distrust and hate our government so much we felt a need to codify our resentment.

> Isn’t having the decision decided by majority vote the least partisan thing you can do by definition?

If one party believes something to be an individual right and another party believes it to be a matter for collective/state decision, then no.

(Not that the Democratic party fully sees abortion as an individual right of the mother - after all, the Roe v. Wade decision did not really consider it as such, nor did it legitimize abortion throughout the pregnancy term; and the Democratic party generally supports Roe v. Wade. It has also not tried to put the matter into federal legislation for the 40-odd years between Roe and Dobbs.)

Which states actually feature majority vote = majority representation?

> Isn’t having the decision decided by majority vote the least partisan thing you can do by definition?

Partisanship is not defined by "rightness" or "closeness to some notion of democracy", it's about closeness to a party line. Overturning Roe was a target of the Republican Party. They did it.

> The recent Dobbs decision is as much the result of partisan efforts to institute policy opposed by the majority of the country as the original Roe decision was.

It's not just one decision, but would you provide support for that claim? Dobbs was decided by conservatives put on the court specifically to make that decision, which they executed promptly, along with other conservative priorities. Roe was decided by conservatives also, and they weren't put on the court to rule on abortion.

I know it's much less convenient, but can we stop referring to the Republican party as "conservatives" ? In this case they reversed a precedent that had been in place for two generations, with a justification firmly rooted in collectivism.

How would you prefer the Republican Party be referred to as?

"Republicans" or "Republican Party" works - we don't need a synonym. If we really want to talk about views independent of the party, then let's characterize each view individually rather than as a group.

What doesn't make sense is taking a group of positions that were conservative in the 70's, carrying them into the current day after society has changed significantly, and then talking about them as if they still represent a slowing of change rather than a radical departure.

> Roe was decided by conservatives

Roe was decided by the Burger court, which, according to Wikipedia, "is generally considered to be the last liberal court to date". It was heavily based on a Griswold v. Connecticut precedent by the Warren court, generally agreed to be the most liberal Supreme Court in US history. Both of these verdicts were and continue to be widely criticized by conservatives as being based on extremely dubious reasoning. I don't know what made you think that Roe was "decided by conservatives".

There is a lot historical revisionism involved around these issues, with many people making blatantly false claims, either lying, or being themselves mistaken. The result is that people who have not lived through it, or who have not studied the history diligently, are very much misled as to the facts, because the media, which is very good and active at correcting lies and falsehoods spread by conservatives, takes approximately zero efforts to correct falsehoods spread by liberals (often it in fact acts with clear intent of spreading misapprehensions, by selective reporting and careful omission of facts).

"last liberal court" -- it remains the case that 6 of the 9 justices on the court that decided Roe were put there by Republican Presidents.

That's not a lock that they were in fact "conservative," but four of them were put on the court by Nixon, and regarding Blackmun, "The Justice Department including future Chief Justice William Rehnquist investigated Fortas at the behest of President Richard Nixon who saw the idea of removing Fortas as a chance to move the Court in a more conservative direction, and Attorney General John N. Mitchell pressured Fortas into resigning." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abe_Fortas

So four were appointed by Nixon, who specifically had in mind moving the court to a more conservative stance. The fact that he failed miserably with Blackmun notwithstanding, the only thing that can honestly be said of the court at the time is that it was less conservative than courts that followed, not that it was liberal.

> So four were appointed by Nixon, who specifically had in mind moving the court to a more conservative stance.

Did he? Whether or not that was his intent is unclear

It's literally quoted from wikipedia, which I linked, which cites https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rehnquist_Choice/zk...

So yeah, seems pretty clear that he did.

> Both of these verdicts were and continue to be widely criticized by conservatives as being based on extremely dubious reasoning.

Roe is criticized by liberals as well. I didn't realize how much of a stretch that decision was until it became front and center. I remain in favor of a codified Roe and, given how flimsy that ruling was and that they had plenty of chances to do so, I blame Democrats entirely for not doing so before this ruling. Especially given that it would generally be nationally popular to do so.

The cynic in me sees how popular Roe style abortion rules would be nationally and how much it was used as a fundraiser and wonders if Democrats simply didn't want to kill the golden goose.

At no point have Democrats had the ability to legalise abortion with members like Manchin in the party.

And the idea they wouldn't do it anyway for fund-raising reasons is a disgraceful claim to make.

"And the idea they wouldn't do it anyway for fund-raising reasons is a disgraceful claim to make."

We are talking about modern politicians, aren't we?

Congres is incapable of doing it's job so the Supreme Court has to do it.

I have read about America in the 1850s and there are some unsettling parallels.

> At no point have Democrats had the ability to legalise abortion with members like Manchin in the party.

2008.

Today everyone has instant access to virtually all human knowledge at all times in the palms of their hands yet somehow we are less informed and more susceptible to obvious propaganda than prior generations.

Pretending that the court only became politicized in 2016 is the most naive retconning I’ve seen on HN.

The progressive movement intentionally politicized the court in the 1960s against the strong warnings of the most ardent conservative the court has ever had. They went on to have a heyday of progressive wins. Now it’s the time for the conservatives’ revenge.

Speaking of other institutions that were politicized pre-2016… Obama deputized the IRS against conservative orgs and then had his lackeys destroy the evidence (failed hdds anyone). He used the FBI like his personal police force to go after his strongest political enemies. Pretending for a second that it’s the conservatives who are politicizing anything is just pure alternative history, aka fiction.

> They went on to have a heyday of progressive wins. Now it’s the time for the conservatives’ revenge.

I guess that's back to bans on interracial marriage then? (Loving v Virginia 1971)

It's certainly .. unfortunate that a lot of America's freedoms for all its citizens have been achieved against the wishes of a lot of its citizens and had to be done through the courts rather than the seriously dysfunctional legislature.

>The reactionary conservative movement, with its campaign to politicize everything

I'm sorry but which movement came up with the slogan 'the personal is political'?

Which one has entire academic departments dedicated to 'problematizing' everything from the skin color of LOTR orcs to dog walking?