How Silicon Valley Boys Came to Rule Politics | Hacker News Reader

How Silicon Valley Boys Came to Rule Politics

washingtonpost.com

5 pointseevilspock9 comments

It's simple. The Golden Rule. Whoever has the gold rules. $290 million goes a long way, especially to a transactional person.

Since "Citizens United", it's not one person one vote. It's one dollar one vote.

All the racism, misogyny and immigrant hate was just bait to get the middle class to vote against their own best interests by slashing services and increasing import prices (tariff money goes to the government) to give tax breaks to the wealthy and to destroy regulations, especially on tech and crypto.

Illustration (imgbb.com) https://i.ibb.co/9qS5wLJ/voterepelon.jpg

All that, and controlling the platforms people use to communicate also helps a lot to shape public discourse.

Is there a plausible path to revert Citizens United and enact aggressive restrictions on corporate donations?

Expand the court. Say, one justice per circuit. Or launch a multi-decade plan to remake the court, like the Republicans did, and methodically follow through, and hope the country's still around by then.

Those are the options. I don't think there are any other (legal) ones. If you judge neither of those plausible, then, no, there is not a plausible path.

> one justice per circuit

Choose the court by lot from the appellate bench for each case. The Constitution is intentionally vague on how the Supreme Court is constituted [1].

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-3/

This one's occurred to me and would very much be my preference, too. Other federal courts use a similar system, so it's not like we don't already do this.

It also means the Supreme Court considers every case before it. The current system of throwing out cases because they’re hard or boring is so silly.

> It also means the Supreme Court considers every case before it. The current system of throwing out cases because they’re hard or boring is so silly.

Some Supreme Courts only decide on constitutional issues, or if someone believes a constitutional right has been denied. It depends on the country. Some countries' Supreme Courts also examine all cases submitted, but, if the Brazilian example serves, it can take many years for a case to be seen. Pushing up criminal cases is a common strategy to exhaust the time window in which a case can be prosecuted.

> Some Supreme Courts only decide on constitutional issues

These are usually referred to as constitutional courts. Because the Constitution vests "the judicial Power of the United States" in "one supreme Court," ours is also the court of final appeal.

http://archive.today/f0saw

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