Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
In a gigantic blow to the federal government's ability to regulate anything, the USSC has completely overruled the Chevron defense. This opens the door to further erosion of democracy and the rule of law. The Chevron defense allowed federal agencies to write regulations based on sloppy, often incoherent laws that congress writes and passes. Those agencies are empowered to enforce the regulations they write. The idea is that since congress is incompetent and coward, federal agencies are empowered to try to translate congressional slop into coherent law. For decades, corporations and businesses have hated this system because it is so hard to corrupt. Congress is much easier to corrupt.
Live Updates: Supreme Court Overrules Chevron Doctrine,
Imperiling an Array of Federal Rules
The foundational 1984 decision required courts to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes, underpinning regulations on health care, safety and the environment
The Supreme Court swept aside a longstanding legal precedent on Friday, reducing the power of executive agencies and endangering countless regulations by transferring power from the executive branch to Congress and the courts. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said that “agencies have no special competence” and that judges should determine the meaning of federal laws.
The precedent, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, is one of the most cited in American law, underpinning 70 Supreme Court decisions and roughly 17,000 in the lower courts. Critics of regulatory authority immediately hailed the decision, suggesting it could open new avenues to challenge federal rules in areas ranging from abortion pills to the environment.
The importance of this case is hard to overstate. The damage it will cause is catastrophic. Note Roberts' assertion that “agencies have no special competence” and that judges should determine the meaning of federal laws. That is a full-blown lie. An outrageous lie. The whole point of federal agencies is to acquire special expertise that neither judges nor congress has. That is what professional bureaucrats are for.
Note that this constitutes a gigantic power transfer from congress and federal agencies to the USSC. Federal judges are even less qualified than congress to have the expertise to regulate complex industries.
This is a freaking catastrophe. The plutocrats are celebrating by guzzling champagne and unleashing their attorneys to attack every federal regulation that the Chevron defense previously protected. The USS has betrayed us and the environment. The radical authoritarian Republicans on the bench sold us out to kleptocratic plutocracy.
We are now royally fucked and totally defenseless.
Context
Radical right former US senator Ben Sasse (R-NE)
commenting on congressional slop and cowardice,
and the bitterness of Supreme Court nominations
Sasse: “. . . . . the people don't have a way to fire the bureaucrats. What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly decide to do is to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home and we pretend we make laws. No we don’t. We write giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined, and say to secretary of such and such [federal agency] that he shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. [joking] And, the House is even worse.”
Well now, the court has taken the job of rule writing away from from both congress and federal agencies and given it to itself. We are so very fucked.
In recent years, the Republican majority has also made it easier to sue agencies and get their rules struck down, including by advancing the so-called major questions doctrine. Under that idea, courts should nullify economically significant regulations if judges decided Congress was not clear enough in authorizing them. Advancing and entrenching that idea, the court has struck down an E.P.A. rule aimed at limiting carbon pollution from power plants, and barred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from telling large employers they must either have their workers vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus or have them undergo frequent testing.
Various sources are reporting that about a USSC decision that, Snyder v. United States, as far as I can tell, has legalized bribery of government officials at least at the state level. In my opinion, this constitutes what amounts to a lethal blow to democracy and honest governance in the states. (I don't know if this applies to the federal government) It opens the door and paves the path for further progress of authoritarian kleptocracy to obliterate what is left of our democracy and honest governance. Vox reports:
On a 6-3 party-line vote, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that state officials may accept “gratuities” from people who wish to reward them for their official actions, despite a federal anti-corruption statute that appears to ban such rewards.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion in Snyder v. United States for the Court’s Republican-appointed majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent on behalf of the Court’s three Democratic appointees.
Snyder turns on a distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities.” As Kavanaugh writes, “bribes are payments made or agreed to before an official act in order to influence the official with respect to that future official act.” Gratuities, by contrast, “are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation.”
It’s also notable that neither Justice Clarence Thomas nor Justice Samuel Alito, both of whom have accepted expensive giftsfrom politically active Republican billionaires, recused themselves from the case. Thomas and Alito both joined Kavanaugh’s opinion reading the anti-corruption statute narrowly.
It does not take a genius to see the massive hole in corruption laws that this decision has made. Bribery is now a gratuity, not bribery. In this decision, the USSC made bribery legal unless the briber or bribe taker explicitly writes down or is recorded saying “I’m taking/offering a bribe to do X in the future.” Otherwise it’s not corruption. This decision knowingly and purposefully enables vast corruption by ignoring how corruption works. In my opinion, this is the most insane shit possible. It basically makes corruption non-prosecutable.
The poison here
Clarence Thomas commented on at least one occasion, was that there is an constitutional absolute right of people and corporations to (i) spend unlimited amounts of money on politicians, judges or anything else, and (ii) that right includes the right do spend the cash in absolute secrecy. This decision in Snyder is the embodiment of Thomas' sentiment. Perplexity comments:
Clarence Thomas argued for a right to anonymous political spending in his concurring opinion in the 2010 Citizens United case. Specifically:
In his concurring opinion in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, Thomas pushed to invalidate all political spending disclosure laws, insisting that donors have a constitutional right to anonymously influence politics with unlimited amounts of cash.
Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion: "This court should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements". He argued that donors could face retaliation and "ruined careers" when they disclose their political spending.
Thomas contended that there exists an "established right to anonymous speech" and that transparency requirements enable private citizens and officials to implement strategies against "peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights".
I think that what Thomas articulated is where this is ultimately going to go.
Is it just me, or was Joe disappointing? DJT lied constantly and just made stuff up. But there was no fact checking. DJT's lies stand mostly unrebutted because the format didn't permit extended commentary to rebut lies and Joe was not good at rebuttal most of the time.
I suspect Joe is going to take a hit in the polls, maybe ~3% drop at least initially. Polls will come out in the next couple of days. Maybe this will not have a long term-impact, but it does not feel that way at the moment.
