Handing the power over to the dysfunctional Congress is exactly how the oil and gas industry intends to win. They own enough congressmen to make sure any such legislation never makes it out of committee.
Edit to include: And this includes administrative agencies staffed by executive branch appointees. I'd like to see the Venn diagram of confused people who think 'no we shouldn't have an imperial presidency' but 'yes courts should defer to agency interpretations when the agency is run by appointees of the President'. Like The Office meme- it's the same picture!
Of course, that's the short term "republican makes it into office" solution. Past that, to other presidents, I don't know. In my personal opinion, I think they're banking on never having to get there.
I think their logic is basically "these people function ~identically to if they were democratic political appointees, so we might as well get the benefits of them being political appointees when we're in office". Whether that's actually accurate can be debated, but it's not just "let's not worry about ever losing ever again".
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/05/2024/trump-disavows-pr...
I mean, that's how it used to work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...
Yes, the rulebooks are literally rewritten every 4-8 years. EPA examples, Trump renewed the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline (Obama had denied it), 'rewrote key rules curbing U.S. carbon emissions and other environmental regulations' (1), rolled back all of the Obama administration's fuel economy & emission standards, rolled back efficient lighting regulations, etc. He replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined what species are endangered, weakened the Coal Ash rule, revised the Mercury standards. And so on.
He did all of these directly through the EPA- not by passing new laws. Then, Biden reversed all of these
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Do...
The main assumption you are making here is that these career bureaucrats are not at all partisan, which is a pretty bold assumption to make. I'd like to see some evidence that this is true. That aside, if Congress isn't delegating something to the executive that's their fault. Write better laws. These people are mostly lawyers anyway. What, they forgot how to do it on the campaign trail?
Uhh, what? All of? There are 28 countries considered more democratic than the USA, and many of them have presidents.
I am not Juan Linz and I do not think having a president means we will automatically become an autocracy, but am more saying 'hey this is like the main danger to watch out for'
Campaign donations are a powerful motivator but they lose to real public pressure every time. The public is not very interested in this problem because it's incredibly abstract and none of the proposed solutions seem designed to actually solve it without forcing a religious level of austerity on them.
Most Americans do actually want action on climate change: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
That case has implications respecting third party advertising but it has no bearing on direct campaign contributions to candidates.
> combine that with the gerrymandering of districts into very safe districts
The purpose of this gerrymandering is to reduce the total voter turnout. Most senators get elected with less than half the voting population turning out, many as little as 25%. Which means currently only 1/8 of your population needs to vote for you to win.
It's really a vulnerability they've created for themselves, but you have to have the confidence to run as a third party candidate in order to take advantage of this. This is a uniparty game that strengthens the false dichotomy and not really material for our purposes here.
> public pressure might no longer be sufficient to sway those politicians, the jury is still out on that.
Is there a case where significant public pressure has failed? Saying "voters want action on climate change" is meaningless. Of course they do. Who actually _wants_ to ruin the planet or destroy their health? Nobody.
How do we do this? Which metrics do we use? Who is responsible for implementation? What impacts will this have on average citizens? These are the questions that need answering, and unfortunately, there's too much actual division on these issues to foment a clear _federal_ plan forward let alone anything that would be effective or enforced world wide.
It's by now become rather clear that both parties have found loopholes to get around the so called firewall between the campaigns and these third parties:
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/08/super-pacs-raise-mi...
> Is there a case where significant public pressure has failed?
I guess the best example would be campaign finance reform itself. That's an issue Democrats and Republicans actually agree on:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/money-power-...
It is actually exactly the opposite [1]. The US is a country controlled by oligarchs.
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...
In 1978 after the oil crisis Carter was already talking about getting off of foreign oil, we should develop renewable energy resources, be energy independent. Imagine where we'd be had we done even a few of the things he suggested?
Instead, the big oil companies, their lobbyists and OPEC made sure there would be abundance of cheap oil and then everybody just moved on and forgot about the long lines waiting for gas, rationing and other horrible stuff the oil crisis brought.
Not much has changed over the past 45 years which is pretty depressing.
And, now, for every new law that Congress passes, unelected bureaucrats in federal agencies create TWENTY-SEVEN new laws. https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2017/08/15/how-many-...
And the size of the federal government has become simply immense, even discounting the size of the world's largest military. It's by far the world's largest employer in terms of monetary spend.
So, overturning Chevron was just a tiny step toward curbing the massive power that government agencies have over the citizens that they purport to serve.
Delegating is how things get done, surely you wouldn't like the individual details of every single thing you do at work to decided by the C-Suite.
We need a solution for bribery (including current forms of "legal" bribery).
Is this something that's recent you're seeing? I haven't done any research to find out if this has been a thing for the entire time the court has been around. I just know the media has suddenly gone after the justices since the courts majority changed from liberal to conservative for the first time in its existence.
Not at all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era
Despite Anthony Kennedy not voting with the conservative bloc 100% of the time, he voted with them far more often than with the liberal bloc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehnquist_Court is probably a better timeline for when the court changed from liberal to conservative.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/09/new-filings-reveal-...
"Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor reportedly accepted nearly $2 million from Penguin Random House in a book deal, and then went on to sit in judgment of a copyright case involving that same company the following year."
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/4/sonia-sotoma...
Or the way she prodded institutions where she spoke to buy her books?
"Sotomayor's staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children's books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009."
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/11/1187005372/sonia-sotomayor-su...
Pot meet Kettle. Kettle meet Pot.
You do know the rules for disclosure were changed recently right? The ProPublica article used Thomas past dealings and then applied the recent changes to those dealings. That would seem, I don't know, a bit underhanded in their reporting no?
"The Smearing of Clarence Thomas"
Wall St Journal
April 2023
But it seems clear that the Court’s rules at the time all of this happened did not require that gifts of personal hospitality be disclosed. This includes the private plane trips. ProPublica fails to make clear to readers that the U.S. Judicial Conference recently changed its rules to require more disclosure. The new rules took effect last month.
Justice Thomas would have been obliged to disclose gifts that posed a conflict of interest involving cases that would be heard by the High Court. But there is no evidence that Mr. Crow has had any such business before the Court, and Mr. Crow says he has “never asked about a pending or lower court case.”
So then to review:
- Thomas had no obligation to disclose his trips
- The person he went on the trips with had no business before the court, nor did he ever inquire about any of the court's business.
- Thomas has said he will adhere to the new disclosure rules.
Yet:
- Sotomayor took $2M from a publisher who DID have business with the court
- Sotomayor was one of their clients and had an obvious conflict of interest
- She refused to recuse herself and ruled (shockingly) in favor of her beneficiary
And your take here is Thomas' was worst than Sotomayor's?
Maybe he is smeared for a reason?
> As of Dec. 13, 2019, 134 members of Congress and their spouses own as much as $92.7 million worth of stock in fossil fuel companies and mutual funds, according to an analysis of financial disclosures by Sludge. House members own between roughly $29.5 million and $78.2 million in fossil fuel stocks, while senators have between $3.8 million and $14.5 million invested in oil, gas, and coal interests. Members of Congress generally report the value of their investments in broad ranges, so it’s not possible to know exactly how much their stocks are worth.
https://prospect.org/power/members-of-congress-own-up-to-93-...
The problem isn't that you are wrong. You're right that Congress is for sale. The problem is, everyone is for sale, so that's a null argument; it cuts against you exactly as much as it cuts for you.
I mean, that totally blows. Don't mistake me for celebrating this. But it doesn't work as a "let's give the $BRANCH power over this" argument in any direction.
*becoming less illegal thanks to scotus https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-limits-scop...
The people need to demand more from their elected officials but the two parties have done an outstanding job getting us to fight with each other so we forget how the corporations are controlling everything.
There are orders of magnitude more money to be made by the billionaires with a renewable based green transition than with oil. It will be the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class into the pockets of the bastardly rich in the whole history.
I think that this is a short-term picture. The US infrastructure has been set up to make owning a car a very rewarding proposition, so, of course, lots of people own cars, and that will continue to be the case as long as things stay in the neighborhood of where they are. But there's no reason that future infrastructure decisions have to be made in a way that continues to privilege cars over other forms of transportation, and car ownership will follow, with a lag, the way that infrastructure decisions point.
Lousy, that's how. Congress has been historically terrible at that the last few years. They can't even pass a budget. (No, the Nth continuing resolution for the next M months is not the same.)
So "dysfunctional" means "can't function", not just "doesn't do what I want".
That's flagrant hyperbole.
> This is mutually assured destruction,
That's even worse hyperbole.
Anyway, yes, Congress inevitably does always manage to pass a budget. There are sometime delays, the consequence of which is exaggerated to put pressure on the other side to give up ground in the negotiations, but at the end of the day it's just politics and people carry on.
> Anyway, yes, Congress inevitably does always manage to pass a budget. There are sometime delays, the consequence of which is exaggerated to put pressure on the other side to give up ground in the negotiations, but at the end of the day it's just politics and people carry on.
These two stances don't mesh.
But that misses the even bigger point. It takes Congress months of fighting back and forth on the budget every year. They barely accomplish anything else. Saying that they need to now write all of the federal regulations down to the tiniest detail (lest they spend all of their time in court doing nothing) is clearly unrealistic. Laughably so.