As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years. If Dems don't try to do something to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
[1] tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court.
Uh. What are they supposed to do with a Republican trifecta? Do you mean "win votes in future elections so they can govern?"
Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
Yes, they've refused to do certain things until lower courts rule, but I dont see that as a huge incongruence.
SCOTUS legislate from the bench as instructed and POTUS decrees from a throne.
Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch.
Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive.
Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out).
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative"
First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept.
Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that:
“In the history of the Republic, there have been 168 filibusters of executive and judicial nominees. Half of them have occurred during the Obama administration — during the last four and a half years,” Reid said.
As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame.
Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
That's the core problem. The game is rigged
The Democrats are not good, but it’s intentional. They work for their donors not their voters.
> The first observation we have to make on this clause is that it puts at rest both the questions which we stated to have been the subject of differences of opinion. It declares that persons may be citizens of the United States without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States. That its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase, "subject to its jurisdiction" was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/83/36/
Wong Kim Ark, meanwhile, is a weird fucking case that spends a huge number of pages analyzing everything except the 14th amendment.
The Original Intent of the 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, primarily to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that decision, the Court had held that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a U.S. citizen.
The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to create a clear constitutional rule that would prevent this from ever happening again. Senator Jacob Howard, a key drafter of the amendment, stated that its citizenship clause "will, of course, include the children of all parents... who may be born in the United States." He specified only two exceptions: children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces.
The language of the amendment was a direct refutation of the racist rationale of the Dred Scott decision. While the concept of "undocumented immigrants" as we know it today did not exist, the amendment's framers used broad language to ensure that citizenship was based on a principle of birth on American soil, not on race or the legal status of one's parents.
The Role of Wong Kim Ark
The Wong Kim Ark case became necessary because the government's interpretation of the 14th Amendment had narrowed. Following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. government began arguing that Chinese people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. They claimed that Wong Kim Ark was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because his parents were still subjects of the Emperor of China.
The 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark was a crucial reaffirmation of the original intent. The Court's 6-2 majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, systematically dismantled the government's arguments. The Court looked to the history of English common law and the intent behind the 14th Amendment.
It concluded that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" applied to all persons who are subject to U.S. laws and not under the authority of a foreign government, such as diplomats. The Court found that Wong Kim Ark's birth in the U.S. automatically made him a citizen, despite his parents' ineligibility for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In short, the Wong Kim Ark decision did not create a new standard; it prevented the government from creating a new, more restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It affirmed the foundational principle that birth on U.S. soil is the basis for citizenship, a principle that has been a cornerstone of American law ever since.
The *Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)* famously narrowed the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, particularly its Privileges or Immunities Clause. While the case primarily focused on that clause, the Court also touched upon the "subject to the jurisdiction" language in the citizenship clause.
The 14th Amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
In the Slaughterhouse Cases, Justice Samuel Miller, writing for the majority, briefly clarified the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." He stated that this phrase was intended to *exclude certain categories of individuals from automatic birthright citizenship*, even if they were born on U.S. soil. Specifically, he mentioned:
* *Children of foreign ministers or consuls:* These individuals are considered to be under the jurisdiction of their parents' sovereign nation, not the United States. * *Children of citizens or subjects of foreign states born within the United States:* This was a general exclusion for those whose allegiance was considered to be to another country, such as children of enemy aliens during wartime.
The primary purpose of this clause, in the context of the post-Civil War era, was to firmly establish the citizenship of formerly enslaved people, overturning the Dred Scott decision. However, the "subject to the jurisdiction" language ensured that certain exceptions to territorial birthright citizenship were maintained, consistent with international law and diplomatic practice.
It's important to note that while the Slaughterhouse Cases introduced this interpretation, the scope of "subject to the jurisdiction" for birthright citizenship was later more definitively addressed and affirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which held that a child born in the United States to Chinese immigrants who were not citizens was indeed a U.S. citizen because he was "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.
The Roberts court has overturned precedent less often than any other recent court. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/us/supreme-court-preceden....
By your definitions, the Roberts court is the most conservative court, and the Warren Burger court from 1969 to 1986 was the most extremist.
You don't care about overturning precedent. The above facts will not change your mind about the Roberts court. The real issue is there in the article I linked to:
"What distinguishes the Roberts court is ideology. In cases overruling precedents, the Warren court reached a liberal result 92 percent of the time. The Burger and Rehnquist courts reached liberal outcomes about half the time. The number dropped to 35 percent for the Roberts court. Since 2017, it has ticked down a bit, to 31 percent"
The Roberts court is in fact conservative. It does not often overturn precedent, but when it overturns precedent it does so with conservative results. That's why you and other liberals don't like it.
You are commenting on a thread about Republican Party gutting one more scientific research department. But you have audacity to say Democrats are bad. One of the commenters on this thread had described very appropriately the current political environment- mass weaponization of stupidity. Those people are running at a very high speed in the opposite direction that there’s no coming back for them.
> They work for their donors not their voters
Voters are donors too. Maybe you meant big donors like Musk. You know how that turned out.