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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

Does this decision do that, or does it just move the accumulation of power to a different branch? From bureaucrats who can be fired to unelected judges with lifetime tenure. How would you argue that this is an improvement?

The response may be that Congress makes far more specific legislation, along with all the weird pitfalls that will come from that, and outsources the actual text to corporate lobbyists. That seems like a win only if you implicitly trust that corporations are working in our best interests. Is that a core plank in the conservative platform?

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> How would you argue that this is an improvement?

Not all branches have the same risk of tyranny. The Executive branch consists of about 1 million unelected government employees, following a rigid command hierarchy who wield power over every aspect of society. The Judicial branch consists of about 900 federal judges who work on a limited backlog of cases. No one from the Supreme Court is going to come knocking on my door if I defy one of their edicts, but as for the Executive branch, you can count on it.

My Trojan program is written on only about 5000 lines of code, but runs on 5 million machines around the world. It’s really not my fault you should blame the computers for stealing your data. I’m not personally doing it.

Can you be more direct?

> Does this decision do that, or does it just move the accumulation of power to a different branch?

Yes, it does do that; no it does not move the accumulation of power to a different branch. It restores the distribution of power among the distinct branches of government, and stops executive-branch agencies from operating as legislature, executive, and judiciary all rolled into one.

It's not moving power from the executive to the judicial branch, it's forcing legislative responsibility back on Congress.

Note that constituents in the U.S. have the worst representation of any OECD country. Worse than Commie China. America's biggest problem is the "Permanent" Apportionment Act of 1929.

I agree. Congress is far too small. Both the house and senate. There's too much work for them to do.

I would go even further: maybe congress should be expanded such that we have different chambers for different aspects of life. This way we could elect a lawmaker for each domain... e.g. 1 focused on environmental legislation, 1 focused on financial legislation, etc... rather than trying to cram all sides into a single unicorn lawmaker.

Government Domain Driven Design sounds like something only a consultant could come up with. None of these domains are free from side-effects in the other domains.

> it's forcing legislative responsibility back on Congress

I mean it's not really going to do this in practice, because Congress can and will continue to be dysfunctional it just means that the court rather than the agency is going to make the call on what the law means. Without a way for the judiciary to be say, "this law is too ambiguous to rule on, Congress must pass a law right now clarifying their intent, then we will issue a ruling" it's just going to be the judges making a call.

If Congress doesn't want to do anything, and this one clearly doesn't (they look to be on pace for the fewest acts ever), then that just effectively kicks the responsibility down to State legislatures. Good for distributing power. You know, laboratories of democracy.

Judges are generally less politicized than bureaucrats.

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