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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

If that party can win elections by doing that, that’s what should happen. “Expertise” carries zero weight in a democracy other than its ability to persuade voters.

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> Expertise carries zero weight in a democracy other than it's ability to persuade voters.

Would you rather the "holistic healer" who says only drinking green juice for a week to "detox" your kidneys make laws? Or the person who actually went to med school for 12 years.

> If that party can win elections by doing that, that’s what should happen. “Expertise” carries zero weight in a democracy other than its ability to persuade voters.

That's a pretty idealized view: The vast majority of voters just want competent governance, with guard rails to make sure the governors don't go too far, because they (the voters) have lives to live and other things on their minds.

As to persuading voters, we should remember the joke about Islamist parties' agitation for "democracy": One man, one vote — once.

No, it’s fundamental to what democracy means and is.

If we wanted “competent governance” we would just have China or Singapore run our country.

It's a spectrum, not a binary choice.

Or... just hear me out... we could hire experts in various fields, give them general principles to follow, let them work out the details, give them the authority to enforce it, and maintain the right to step in if they overreach.

But yeah, "opinions are greater than facts" is technically a very democratic way to do things.

But historically, it ends up causing a great deal of harm.

As an aside, I've always wondered how society will drive the response to climate change into a ditch - it'll be at the hands of lawyers (because, you know, they are policy experts).

You’re looking at it. One of the main goals of this push is utterly defanging agencies like the EPA

If this defangs the EPA then it needed de-fanging. If the EPA can't make a better case for a rule than "my way or the highway" then it's a bad rule.

The EPA can make the most reasonable rule possible, based on available facts, expertise, and public consultation, and have it overturned by a handful of judicial partisans on behalf of people willing to throw money at litigation. I think we'll see a huge increase in forum shopping and demands for injunctive relief designed to grind any kind of regulatory action on any topic to a halt. In many cases litigants will bring cases without any expectation or intention of succeeding on the merits, but rather with the sole goal of tying things up in court for the duration of an electoral cycle.

From the mouth of John Roberts himself: "courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority." This is not going to end well.

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