Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

For context: The federal court has been perennially over-booked and under-staffed for a number of years because the confirmations of judges to open vacancies were being used as political bargaining chips.

Both parties would try to influence the ideological make-up of the judiciary. Back in the good ol' days when the filibuster was used with some modicum of restraint, this meant that a minority party could prevent over-ideological candidates from getting elected. But, over time, the process evolved to the point where the party out-of-power would try to block all nominations so that when they were back in-power in several years, they had more vacancies to fill with their own ideologically-pure candidates.

Purely in terms of government fulfilling its obligated duties to function, this is an improvement because the judiciary will now become staffed. However, the lack of a filibuster threat will probably push us away from politically neutral appointments, towards an alternating (and hopefully balanced over time?) mix of biases in opposite directions.

tl;dr this is why we can't have nice things.

I suspect moderates (and more senior folk) in both parties will tend to threaten a nay-vote on more extreme nominees, both in the interest of having a sane court system (in the case of moderates), and to avoid provoking retaliation from the other side (in the case of people who have been around a long time).

>>I suspect moderates (and more senior folk) in both parties will tend to threaten a nay-vote on more extreme nominees

In cases where very ideological nominees have been presented in recent years there is no evidence that moderates have been prone to block them. So it isn't clear now what a senator could gain could gain by blocking his own parties nominee. It would require enough senators from the majority party to switch and vote against their party and maintain that united opposition against a candidate whose ideology they agree with simply because they may have qualms about how extreme his ideology is.

I'll take a model that iterates often, with higher likelihood of variance in ideology, over one that optimizes for moderation at the expense of gridlock.

Not that I'm disagreeing, but what if the minority believes that all of the nominees are over-ideological candidates?

Then reality sets in and the majority (finally) exercises its constitutional powers to govern.

Ah, I get it, we fall back to the worst example of democracy; screw the minority.

When the minority is screwing the country, yes, screw the minority.

This is the system of governance we have. It functioned virtually without filibustering of nominees for two centuries. If you truly believe the problem here is the majority, you are far, far beyond reason.

Then we move to the next worse example; the majority defines what the minority is or is not doing.

At this point you're just trolling.

Hmmm, I thought I was giving thoughtful responses to your posts. After all, you read my first response about screwing the minority and your answer seemed to suggest your are fully willing to do so. If you're willing to accept one terrible aspect of democracy you should be willing to embrace it all. Not mildly attacking someone for pointing out your potential defects. I'm only trying to help.

Now I think I'm trolling, but it's a natural response due to your posts.

This is how any parliamentary body on the planet works. If you are concerned about this from a constitutional perspective you do exactly what the founders did: separate legislative powers into equal chambers.

If you place constitutional requirements above a majority vote on a parliamentary body then the judiciary has to step in and enforce those requirements violating the separation of powers.

What part of "you need to win elections in order to get to make the rules" is un-democratic?

I didn't say it was un-democratic. I was trying to point out that democracy can be a bad thing when the majority decides to vote themselves power to the detriment of the minority.

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