Amazon Joins SpaceX in Mission to Destroy NLRB
vice.com
vice.com
This is called preserving your argument for appeal. Amazon doesn’t think those arguments are going anywhere (certainly not in a proceeding before the board, is the board going to declare itself unconstitutional?), but they might get lucky and have one of these issues decided by the Supreme Court before their case is finalized on appeal.
If you don’t raise the issue now, you forfeit it later even if the law develops unexpectedly in your favor. Best practice is to preserve these arguments.
This is a coordinated effort to get cases in front of SCOTUS that can gut the ability of federal agencies to do anything, especially agencies that are inconvenient to large corporations by regulating labor, environment, standards, food quality, etc.
See Project 2025 [0], which is a plan to reshape the executive branch of the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The plan would perform a swift takeover of the entire executive branch under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory — a theory proposing the president of the United States has absolute power over the executive branch. Project 2025 envisions widespread changes across the entire government, particularly with regard to economic and social policy and the role of the federal government and federal agencies.
They are taking every possible approach towards their goals, and this is just one line of attack.
That's incorrect. The argument in the brief is the unitary executive argument.
Unitary executive theory is the straightforward idea that Article II means what it says. “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” So the President has authority to hire and fire executive branch officials and bureaucrats.
The arguments here are based on separation of powers. The Constitution provides for three branches of government. The NLRB is an executive branch agency. But it (and other agencies) exercise what are essentially judicial branch powers.
(EDIT: That was why President Andrew Johnson was impeached [but not convicted], for violating the Tenure of Office Act, enacted by a Reconstruction-era Congress to protect a Cabinet officer; a later Congress repealed that statute, and the Supreme Court subsequently held that a similar statute was invalid, but Congress could use its Article III power to deprive the courts of jurisdiction to overrule such a statute.)
The problem is that post-New Deal liberals are in love with the idea of a neutral bureaucracy. To them governance by expert technocrats is an indispensable aspect of what they view as modernity. If you weren’t expressly trying to reach that result, there would be no reason to read anything more into Article II than what it says.
That sounds like, everything not expressly allowed is forbidden; Ninth and Tenth Amendments notwithstanding, that doesn't seem like an ideal way to apply rules written more than 200 years ago for a population that was two orders of magnitude smaller than today, with a concomitant increase in the number of commercial- and noncommercial interactions.
That's true — but realistically it's well-nigh impossible to get the requisite 2/3 of the House and Senate and 3/4 of the states' legislatures to agree on just about anything.
Moreover, recent events have shown that soi-disant conservatives and MAGA adherents hold very different views than centrist- and center-left Democrats about how the country (and the world) should be governed; ditto their respective counterparts in other countries.
So pragmatically, if we want to keep a functioning United States going as a unified country in a technologically-globalized 21st century, it seems appropriate to not take a cramped view of federal governing authority.
Some in the U.S. have argued for splitting the country into Red- and Blue Nations. That seems like just kicking the can down the road: It's not implausible that in the future, a Putin- or Orbán-like strongman figure would climb to power in Red Nation, proclaiming that Red Nation should militarily conquer Blue Nation to restore the (re-)United States to its former glory so that it could resume pursuing the Manifest Destiny that God (supposedly) intended all along.
Capitalism is like a game. For rich, greedy bastards, it’s literally a Monopoly game, while for the less fortunate, it can be life or death. But the point is, it has rules. Trying to change the rules and get rid of what feeble protections and regulations we have, in order to make more money, is just evil (in my personal opinion).
Corporations are not people and don’t have constitutional rights. I mean, apparently it is the case that courts have applied rights like the First Amendment to companies in court cases. But this should obviously be a very limited thing. We don’t need businesses to have a right to “pursue happiness.” It’s just a business.
... aren't the rights of corporations in part derived from the rights of individuals? Suppose Alice and Bob each have small businesses, but Alice is a sole proprietorship, and Bob incorporates. Without warning, or any kind of warrant or legal proceeding, the police come in and confiscate all of the merchandise from both businesses. Should the 4th amendment only protect Alice?
Bob, being the owner of the business, clearly has fourth amendment rights even if the company doesn't. Ergo the property of the company is protected (hypothetically, you seem to forget that the fourth amendment is hardly even real anymore due to rampant abuse of civil forfeiture). But, on the other hand, when the company, say, poisons a hundred people with knowingly carcinogenic products, Bob is the human being responsible.
Companies being "people" is utterly ridiculous and always has been.
-Lucy Parsons
Anyone that has worked for a large corporation knows how much of a shit-show they are, staffed entirely by unimpressive and unimaginative people that virtually guarantee mediocrity and terrible communication at every step.
What you're implying is a concession the voting population is so pathetic they cannot successfully organize themselves sufficiently to overcome and push back against a handful of people.
If I take this to the logical conclusion, though, basically the takeaway is "Clearly, you should just become a politician yourself." Well, I think that's not really productive either. Telling people "It's actually partly your fault our society has systemic issues for not helping to fix it somehow" is silly--not really false, but silly in the sense that it doesn't really provide much useful insight--and telling them "You should just be a career politician" is even sillier. At this point, being a career politician is basically a privileged position. (e.g. people with more wealth and connections will always have a default advantage over the commoners. People with 'cleaner' backgrounds have more luck campaigning for more important offices. Not really surprising a lot of politicians are related to other politicians.)
Rather than do anything to improve the situation, it's easier to point fingers and argue against a false choice between being a career politician and nothing else.
A television game show host won the presidency against a career politician in 2016 and spent about half as much on their campaign. This flies in the face of the all the idiotic rhetoric that money buys elections i.e., Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and that the media can assassinate the character of a candidate. If you're a conspiracy theorist thinking the boogieman got him elected in 2016, the same boogieman certainly didn't help in 2020 when he had four years to prepare and the advantage of already being POTUS.
A few years ago the NYT reported about 20% of Congress were outsiders -- double the success rate of startups. And despite the obstacles in front of them, people start businesses and take massive pay cuts every day. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run a campaign and get elected while waiting tables and tending bar at a taqueria in NYC.
These events should inspire readers to start getting involved. It's the only way to change things.
I'm pretty sure the pessimism came as a result of where we're at and not as a cause of it. Nobody really needs to collude for corruption to seep into things; it kind of seeps in on its own if left unchecked.
> Rather than do anything to improve the situation, it's easier to point fingers and argue against a false choice between being a career politician and nothing else.
> A television game show host won the presidency against a career politician in 2016 and spent about half as much on their campaign. This flies in the face of the all the idiotic rhetoric that money buys elections i.e., Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and that the media can assassinate the character of a candidate. If you're a conspiracy theorist thinking the boogieman got him elected in 2016, the same boogieman certainly didn't help in 2020 when he had four years to prepare and the advantage of already being POTUS.
For one thing, I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue that what you have to do to win office is outspend your opponent. On the other hand, you definitely have to have and spend a lot of resources. "Half as much" (versus who, the opponent?) is still the same magnitude of money, which is to say, a lot. I don't know about you, but I don't have $325 million dollars laying around.
That said, honestly, I really think your analysis of Donald Trump is ridiculous. Donald Trump had been a celebrity since the 80s at least; a recognizable face that you could see on McDonalds advertisements. In 2016 it seemed like you had to pay television stations to stop talking about Trump for 5 minutes; he had become a spectacle of the election, especially as he continued to succeed. This is not a story of someone who succeeded in spite of a lack of resources. It's someone who succeeded because of the immense amount of resources they had, including a brand they had been building for many decades prior.
> A few years ago the NYT reported about 20% of Congress were outsiders -- double the success rate of startups. And despite the obstacles in front of them, people start businesses and take massive pay cuts every day. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run a campaign and get elected while waiting tables and tending bar at a taqueria in NYC.
> These events should inspire readers to start getting involved. It's the only way to change things.
Yeah, this just isn't going to work. I mean don't get me wrong, good for AOC and all of the others who follow in her lead, but this is not sustainable. It's maybe a hope to get a foot in the door, but seriously: if this is the incentive structure that remains for politicians, you can expect ~no change in the longer term. So I hope the ones that get through are able to do something about this quickly.
People, especially the lower you go down on the economic rungs, depend on each-other. People depend on me. I am not going to throw away my current career to go wait tables for shit pay and no benefits so I can have some minuscule chance at becoming one AOC among hundreds to thousands of dog shit career politicians. And even if I didn't have obligations and people who depended on me, I would not want to. It's not my life, it's just that simple. I don't care enough about this to build my life around it. I would find it boring and unfulfilling. I am sure I am not alone.
That doesn't mean I don't care about politics at all. I'd love to do something to improve the situation if I could. But, people who want to dedicate their entire lives to hitting the campaign trail already probably know what they're doing; I already know what I'm not.
And of course, even if I don't do anything, I absolutely have the right and reason to complain about things like this. Does complaining solve anything? Well, it solves one thing: it fulfills my desire to complain. And this is a thing that seems to mostly impact the American and maybe a bit more generally the English-speaking side of the internet a lot: Just because someone is complaining or venting about something, does not mean they are necessarily soliciting an answer. The first post in this thread reads as follows:
> Glad to see that so many large corporations and billionaires can set their petty differences aside and work towards a common goal of screwing the little people.
No doubt, it was poorly received on HN, as it's currently grayed out. Maybe it's just because it's a cliche take, maybe because it's pessimistic, maybe it's because there's not really much constructive to add to it. Either way, to me it isn't asking for someone to come in and try to solve it, it's lamenting how depressing the situation is. It's not necessarily that this is a super valuable or original take, but it's one that I think a lot of us can relate to deep down.
I understand that this entire tangent probably isn't really going to go over well in the court of public opinion, but it struck a nerve in me. And if there's one thing I can do, it's write way too much text meandering on about something. In this case, I really, genuinely just wish, that people would allow others on the internet to vent when they want to vent. But even if the person had ended their post with,
> So, is there anything we can do about this?
I still suggest that telling them they ought to upend their life for the cause is unlikely to resonate strongly with anyone who ever reads it. So if you have any ideas between that and nothing, by all means.
Second, the news media is 90% owned by six corporations [0] (vs 50+ in 1983), all of which are all-in on preventing administrations that would bring back conditions in which they pay a fair share of taxes. These news operations are marginally profitable at best, are being massively cutback, and their coverage is designed to perhaps appear liberal, but in fact support corporate goals. What major corporation is going to allow a media org to advocate that it be taxed more and face more regulation?
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...
[1] https://www.transcend.org/tms/2022/04/the-monopoly-on-your-m...
Administrative agencies are not criminal courts: prosecutor, judge, and jury.
All the people piling on Amazon should realize that, someday, a 2nd Trump administration could appoint people to an agency who do things you really don't like. That's why everyone should care about separation of powers.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws (or not have a Congress).
This argument against executive agencies is nonsense. Complete nonsense. The executive only has power delegated to it by legislature. If it's misusing that power the legislature can always pass a law that makes the agency do something else. If Congress isn't passing such laws, it's clearly happy with the current state of the agency.
If you don't like the NLRB, vote for a Congress that will dissolve it. I can't imagine that will be a popular campaign platform, but you never know...
(I know why this nonsense argument is so popular these days - the Republican plan for governance is having a Congress that won't do anything - so in order to implement their reactionism, they need to do it through unelected, appointed judges, who don't need consensus when imposing their agenda.)
Read the Constitution and the Federalist papers someday. Also read about "Chevron deference" which is going away soon.
Every administration in my lifetime has done this. Administrative power is the boogey man, not the New York real estate developer who temporarily holds it.
It depends on what you mean by "this". Every administration has used political appointees and has some bias toward the president's policies. The Trump administration took it much further than anyone before, putting political appointees in traditionally non-partisan positions (e.g., approving health policy), and using the powers of government to benefit the president personally and politically. The Trump campaign has put together extensive plans to take that much futher, to maximize it.
The 'matters of degree' are all that matter in life. Nothing is absolutely pure or evil. But the differences are life and death, freedom and servitude. There is some freedom in North Korea, some servitude in the US, but I wouldn't say they are the same.
To do something beneficial, you have to do both. You have to make some mechanism by which the government can accomplish things, and then vote in a government that does what you want. It's an ongoing process.
Separation of powers is the reason that the legislature is practically useless for defending your rights. You have to get many different groups to sign off: the House and the Senate (by a filibuster-proof margin) and the President, and hope that the Supreme Court doesn't just throw it all out. There are so many places where a defender of the status quo can just put their foot down and say "no".
The executive branch is just about the last place where action can actually be taken. And that, too, is incredibly slow and cumbersome, but it's at least not impossible.
Separation of powers is actually very useful for defending your rights from the government, which was the original motivation.
It’s also worth pointing out that there’s much less impetus to amend the constitution when you can just circumvent it, which both parties have consistently done for quite some time now.
For what it’s worth, even Antonin Scalia was of the opinion that it is too hard to amend the constitution. So I don’t think that’s an entirely unreasonable idea. I just don’t think that’s an excuse to just ignore it or attempt to game the system with court packing and the like.
"Too hard" really means "we're not getting what we want." Again, that is As Designed. Amendments really are supposed to represent an overwhelming consensus. Not just the blue states (or the red).
And please, Antonin Scalia was not just “one conservative justice”.
In much of the "democratic" world, changing the constitution is something every dictator does to allow himself to stay in office. What's to guarantee that we don't end up with that?
Props to Scalia. But he wasn't an Ultimate Authority.
That’s what happens if it’s too easy to amend the constitution. If it’s too difficult, the government either ignores it entirely or interprets it in increasingly ludicrous ways because it’s impossible to get anything done any other way. I think the US is clearly experiencing this particular failure mode, and if we want to get back to operating within the text of the Constitution, we need to tune the amendment threshold accordingly.
Right now it takes 38 states to amend the constitution. For the sake of comparison, 30 states are blacklisted from doing business with the city of San Francisco because their laws aren’t progressive enough. That’s actually the highest interesting number of states I can find that all fit on any one side of an interesting partisan divide—when it comes to guns, abortions, and other similarly divisive issues, it’s almost impossible to find even 30 states that all land on one side or the other.
This is about Amazon’s desire to be allowed to threaten and discriminate against unionizing workers.