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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

> because Kalshi doesn't want to follow the actual law

Correction: because the federal government doesn't want Kalshi to follow the actual law. CFTC ordered Kalshi to continue operating in NY when NY tried to crack down on it. Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor for Kalshi. The US Government's conservative leaders are ignoring states' rights in order to personally profit, using Kalshi as a tool.

> this will end up at SCOTUS, and everything until then just doesn't matter

Unless Congress passes a law so SCOTUS doesn't have to. We can't keep pretending it's normal for SCOTUS to decide everything about our society. If Congress won't do its job, why do we have them?

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We have them because the Founders thought it was a good idea.

Then they thought it was a good idea to have two houses with different criteria, giving two chances to quash legislation. Plus the veto. Plus the Supreme Court (whose job they left almost completely undefined, so they made up a job description).

So we have them because we can't get rid of them. But they are practically useless. They can usually manage the bare minimum of reauthorizing the thing they said last year. Then they can rename a few post offices, have some grandstanding hearings, and then go home to campaign for reelection.

That’s the history of separation of powers, the judiciary is the final check in the loop. It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.

That’s not to say states have lost power, their reach has also grown exponentially far outpacing even the federal in terms of number of workers and written law.

It’s mostly just Congress has become self satisfied on being negotiators for spending the most money in their own states, while ignoring the minimization of their role in the greater power dynamic.

Everyone makes a big deal about president as the signal but IMO if you take a 10,000-foot view of US history Congress neutering itself is the real long term narrative. Including most major current populist issues like immigration, debt, war, abortion, etc. They are hands off unless it involves new spending.

> It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.

It's because the US is a presidential republic with no concept of a non-confidence vote. This makes the sitting head of the party ~impossible to remove, and when government fails to reach consensus, instead of... Having an election, and let the voters decide, power de-facto ends up in the hands of the executive.

I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties.

> I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties.

But why are there only two parties?

The rest of the Anglosphere–Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK–have multiparty systems–some are more multiparty than others, but none of them have the hard two-party system that the US has, in which third parties have a very marginal role (not completely marginal – e.g. in a close election, the decisions of New York's Conservative and Working Families parties can make a real difference to the outcome – but certainly at a national level third parties have no real power in the US.)

First-past-the-post is a popular explanation, but it can't by itself explain it, since the UK and Canada use it, yet lack a US-style hard two party system (and with the rise of the Reform party in the UK, the British system is becoming less two-party than it has been in a long time.)

Even if first-past-the-post could change, it's not the whole ballgame. To get on a state ballot you need thousands of petition signatures, and those signatures can be invalidated on technicalities brought up by major parties' legal teams. To be covered by the media or be included in a debate you need to poll at a high percentage. You can't get public funding to campaign unless you already had a high percentage of the vote in a previous election. Nobody will donate to you because the third party just detracts from the other two that will give the big donors what they want. And gerrymandering ensures the same people keep getting elected. All those roadblocks are in place because the two major parties put them there to prevent 3rd party challengers. The whole thing is rigged.

Just to show up and get 1% of the vote, you would need a grassroots national movement to elect someone who was wildly popular, who could build a 50-state network of volunteers (including legal, political, financial, community organizing, etc), sponsored by someone with extremely deep pockets that doesn't want anything from established political figures. And you'd still lose.

We have representatives already. The problem is we never hold their feet to the fire. We keep voting for the same useless bastards, and we don't vote them out when they do nothing. Half the country doesn't vote. That's our own responsibility we're shirking. Rather than get a new party, we need to get off our collective asses, and use the existing power we have to force the parties to do their jobs.

I dont see how the uk system's small parties are not marginalized. The larger parties still claim outright majorities with 35% of the votes or less (last time 172 seat majority with 33.2% of the votes) so they are irellevant.

If I am not mistaken all disruptions to fpp two party systems eventually settle back into them, maybe not the same parties but two nonetheless.

The smaller parties are all aligned with one of the two major parties. In a lot of ways they act more like caucuses than separate parties. Like Bernie Sanders being "independent".

That's overstating it, but it's why the largest group always can form a government. They go to the same aligned parties looking for a majority.

First past the post doesn’t explain historically why we have only two parties, but it explains why we will continue to have only two going forward unless something changes.

It explains why you end up with two parties even if you start with more. The two largest will woo minority parties until they get a majority. And minority party members know they will be marginalized unless they are aligned with the majority (or hope to be in the majority some day.)

Changing that will require a radical reconsideration of democracy, like replacing FPtP with... something.

It doesn’t because the UK has FPtP yet doesn’t have a hard two party system.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have nationalist movements that want out of the UK-state independence movements exist in the contemporary US too, but they are very fringe

But even England has not just Labor and the Tories, but also the Lib Dems, Reform, the Greens, Restore

So England proves you can have multiple parties with real power, with FPtP, even in the absence of regional-nationalist movements

I actually think the US hard two party system isn't purely due to first-past-the-post, it is actually due to four interacting factors: (1) first-past-the-post; (2) presidentialism; (3) a deeply-entrenched primary system; (4) cultural homogeneity

Point (4) will likely strike many Americans as dubious, but the US doesn't have anything comparable to Québec – there is presently no US state where English isn't the majority language; nor anything comparable to Scotland or Northern Ireland (no state where a significant percentage of its population identify with a competing national identity). So, no matter how much (undeniable) diversity the US has, in the sense that counts for this purpose, it doesn't.

Hence: while abolishing first-past-the-post would no doubt do a lot to break the US hard two-party system, it could also be broken while retaining it if something happened to (2) or (3) or (4) instead.

But, in US politics, changing (2) or (3) is even more politically fringe than changing (1) is. Maybe that might change at some point though, who knows what the future holds.

And (4) will likely eventually cease to be true, but only in the long-run in which we are all already long-dead.

I don't mean that the two party system we have is due to first-past-the-post, it almost doesn't even really matter why we have it. But first-past-the-post is the mechanism which currently entrenches it and is the most likely to change. I think that (3) is a result of the system, not a cause.

the lesson congress learned from the Hillary Clinton coronation getting derailed by Obama was to absolutely never ever vote on anything important

Can you elaborate what you mean?

In 2002, Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War. In 2008 Obama used that fact successfully to [help] win the Democratic nomination and went on to beat McCain.

> It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.

It's not just about executive power. In recent times, Congress failed to adjust the written law when societal consensus shifted, and the discrepancy was resolved the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court. I don't think Congress would pass something like the Civil Rights Act under the current circumstances. This isn't good for a democracy because the political debate that is part of the regular legislative process is lost.

I think it does largely explain it. Congress can't do even necessary things. On the rare occasions they can, they create an executive branch agency and give it the power to write regulations. They know that Congress is neither qualified nor capable of handling it.

Then when the executive takes more power they have little ability to opposite it. Especially since there is a significant Congressional delegation who believes in the Unitary Executive theory, who will interfere with attempts to rein it in.

I believe it is entirely due to the Founders being intent on pitting Congress against itself, while the President is a single person. They initially tried a half-assed version of that by making the runner up Vice President, but that was quickly seen to be useless.

There is a lot more to be said over a quarter millennium, but that is the fundamental design flaw.

That’s a great point.

Congress largely just generates new federal agencies, where there is now about 400+, and then mixing responsibilities for running them. Combine that the executive order mandate scheme and appointment/independence thing being vaguely defined. So it basically continuously empowers the executive each generation while Congress is scared to respond.

Which is other half in how the two parties perfected building loyalty schemes, where the president or leading opposition candidate can kill off a congressional candidate with their influence and easily stack congress with their people.

I’d personally ban a sitting president or ex president from getting involved in Congress or senate run. Also maybe a similar scheme for the Supreme Court.

Well, one should also remember that they thought protecting the opulent minority was so important that an entire house ought to represent them. Secure the permeant interests of the country and all that.

Not that the other house isn't also tilted that way, but it seems to be that they, and the appointments approved by them, are functioning exactly as was intended (as shown by the supreme court suddenly caring about executive overreach when it came to money). Who knows whether they would care about the social issues affecting the poors nowadays, but they certainly didn't care to let the people be in charge without a veto from that opulent minority.

They also thought owning slaves was a good idea. Perhaps we shouldn’t let men dead for centuries dictate how to run the country anymore?

As Donald Trump and the Republicans have so aptly proven, all checks and balances depend on an elaborate system of conventions, manners and personal honor, and a general spirit of compliance. As soon as the electorate votes for a party and administration choosing to simply ignore all that, the system folds entirely.

That is also the core problem for reestablishing trust with the rest of the world: Even if a Democrat or just a sane Republican wins in 28 and tries to revert many of the destructive policies the current administration enacted, there is now solid evidence the much-hailed system of checks and balances doesn’t work as advertised. And that means there is not really a legitimate argument to trust the US as much as countries and businesses did, which calls a lot of things into question—the bond market, the petrodollar, investments in the USA, dependency on American services…

> We have them because the Founders thought it was a good idea.

The US Founders also did not have political parties, and the tribal/clan thinking that goes along with them.

They had factions, which turned almost immediately into parties: the Federalists and Anti-federalists, which morphed into the Democratic-Republicans. There were always two after that, until the former died off and the latter split into what we have had since.

Thankfully, the CFTC can't actually order Kalshi to continue operating in NY despite being in violation of NY law. They have no authority to override any judge's order/etc, and at least so far, have not pretended they do.

As for me, i've never pretended it's either normal or desired for the courts to make policy, whether congress is dysfunctional or not. Among other things. My comment was basically pointing out that the current supreme court seems perfectly willing to throw out decades of settled law on an ideological whim, and actually, for that matter, happily interpret very clear congressional statutes in very odd ways.

So your comment there is mistargeted, at least as applied to me.

> the current supreme court seems perfectly willing to throw out decades of settled law on an ideological whim, and actually, for that matter, happily interpret very clear congressional statutes in very odd ways

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Supreme Court has always been willing to do that. This court has been overruling decisions of the Warren Court, just as the Warren Court overruled decisions from the Lochner Era.

Overruling bad decisions is not a problem. Following is a problem:

> decades of settled law on an ideological whim, and actually, for that matter, happily interpret very clear congressional statutes in very odd ways

This court is not like the previos one. Things are not the same

> We can't keep pretending it's normal for SCOTUS to decide everything about our society.

That's not what this is. As the 9th Circuit points out, states already have quite extensive laws about gambling. We don't need Congress to step in to either reinforce or displace them. The courts are doing their job by ruling on existing laws.

Unless Congress passes a law so SCOTUS doesn't have to.

Congress doesn't need to pass a new law. Federal gambling laws were not removed from the books when Congress created the CFTC because they did not intend for gambling transactions to be regulated by the CFTC. (Federal gambling laws were not struck down until 2018, by SCOTUS, on First Amendment grounds. Yes, the decision was written by one of the justices known to have accepted gifts from companies doing business before the Court.)

absolutely nothing in going to happen in the US congress until 2029

we're essentially one year of three into one of the least effective lame duck legislative bodies we'll ever see

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