Supreme Court might destroy voting rights.

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Agema

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And they've potentially just gutted the EPA's ability to regulate fossil fuel use too.

Boy, those corporate donors sure got their money's worth with Trump.
 
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Buyetyen

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Can we refer to the conservatives on the SCOTUS as the Supreme Cunts? Is that sort of thing still allowed?
 
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Silvanus

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Quick reminder that part of the reasoning the SCOTUS employed to strike down Roe v. Wade was that the Constitution should be read in the way the writers intended/expected. I.E., when it refers to 'privacy', that should be taken to mean what the writers understood by 'privacy'.

The writers knew fuck all about the climate crisis or any of this environmental stuff.

My point being that if SCOTUS rules environmental protections are "unconstitutional", they'll be speaking with utter, gross hypocrisy and inconsistency.

And no, i expect nothing else.
 

tstorm823

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My point being that if SCOTUS rules environmental protections are "unconstitutional", they'll be speaking with utter, gross hypocrisy and inconsistency.
The Supreme Court did not rule that environmental protections are unconstitutional. They ruled that a regulatory agency can't make major decisions for the country without a specific dictate from the legislature to do so, especially in the case where the legislature has voted against passing specifically that legislation. If congress considers a cap and trade program and votes it down, it's not a reasonable interpretation by the EPA that the Clean Air Act authorizes them to do precisely that thing.
 

Bedinsis

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They've been on a roll recently. Just a week ago they in essence removed the reading of the Miranda rights for criminal suspects.

Edit: I misread Wikipedia, thanks for the correction @tstorm823
 
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immortalfrieza

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Taking bets, how long before they throw out the Constitution and declare themselves dictators for life? A month? A year? The closest gets a new police state first! And in this game there are only losers.

It's scary just how little of a joke this really could be.
 

Casual Shinji

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Taking bets, how long before they throw out the Constitution and declare themselves dictators for life? A month? A year? The closest gets a new police state first! And in this game there are only losers.

It's scary just how little of a joke this really could be.
They don't need to declare it, overturning Roe was the unspoken declaration.

God Bless that I don't live in the United States of America. Though the fact that the US is openly setting its foot into facism should terrify the whole world.
 

Silvanus

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The Supreme Court did not rule that environmental protections are unconstitutional. They ruled that a regulatory agency can't make major decisions for the country without a specific dictate from the legislature to do so, especially in the case where the legislature has voted against passing specifically that legislation. If congress considers a cap and trade program and votes it down, it's not a reasonable interpretation by the EPA that the Clean Air Act authorizes them to do precisely that thing.
Note the "if", since that post was written before the ruling.

I mean, the ruling itself is still arbitrary and politically-motivated, but via different reasoning.
 

Trunkage

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The Supreme Court did not rule that environmental protections are unconstitutional. They ruled that a regulatory agency can't make major decisions for the country without a specific dictate from the legislature to do so, especially in the case where the legislature has voted against passing specifically that legislation. If congress considers a cap and trade program and votes it down, it's not a reasonable interpretation by the EPA that the Clean Air Act authorizes them to do precisely that thing.
Are... you serious?

A senator might not know the exact parts per million of CO2 might be considered safe before it does damage to the environment. They don't know the exact number of particles of lead or other toxins that can be allowed in water. They don't know what level of containments can be inside food before it become dangerous. Anytime a new discovery of a substance being dangerous to people/animals/environment, they have to make a whole new law just to cover that and if they get it wrong, they have to start again. Let's say that you only got the most brilliant senator in the universe, a senator does not have magic 8 ball powers, and they dont know the future. They cannot predict what is happening but somehow, now, they magically have to predict what's going to happen in 2025

This would be like having to make a new law on what the secret service has to do each day to look after presidents etc.... but you have to do it today for the next whole year because I doubt a new law could be made within a shorter time frame. You have to predict today what the president would be doing at Xmas and they are not allowed to deviate. What you are imagining is having to make a law about how each day is to be run in Iraq that the Department of Defence has to follow. You wouldn't restrict Yellan to the exacting word of a law because what's the point of employing them if you aren't going to use their expertise. It wouldn't make sense.

But then, that's not really what this is about, is it. See, the court can freely choose to let any regulation through that they want and block those they don't like. So, you would never actually worry about following this new ruling with, say, the FBI or CIA. Well... as long as they do exactly what their bosses (i.e. the president) wants.

It's a threat, to force people to act like Supreme Leader. Congrats. You created the Soviet Union
 
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Agema

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I mean, the ruling itself is still arbitrary and politically-motivated, but via different reasoning.
At core, the principles underlying all of these are the same: crippling the power of the federal government wherever it can. This necessarily transfers power elsewhere: chiefly to state goverments and other entities (chiefly businesses). As the federal legislature is crippled by polarisation and gridlock, the more that requires action at that level the less gets done.

It doesn't really matter how vital or ruinous something is requiring federal action: 40 senators, well purchased by corporate money and right-wing specialist groups in a system disposed to favour Republican senate majorities, can block it.
 

tstorm823

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They've been on a roll recently. Just a week ago they in essence removed the reading of the Miranda rights for criminal suspects.
No, they didn't. They didn't change anything about Miranda rights. Someone was suing a specific cop personally for not reading the Miranda rights, and the court said that's not how it works, but the confession given after failing to read them was still inadmissible in court. I don't actually know if anyone has ever successfully sued that way for that reason, or if this was the first such case ever, but certainly nothing meaningful changed.
Are... you serious?
I am, and your response had absolutely no connection to either my post or the ruling on the EPA's powers. It has nothing to do with predicting the future, they did not say an agency can't exist to handle problems the way you want, they said that the particular solution the EPA was trying to impose was both beyond their purview and in contradiction to recent decisions from the legislature they answer to.
 

Silvanus

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I am, and your response had absolutely no connection to either my post or the ruling on the EPA's powers. It has nothing to do with predicting the future, they did not say an agency can't exist to handle problems the way you want, they said that the particular solution the EPA was trying to impose was both beyond their purview and in contradiction to recent decisions from the legislature they answer to.
It certainly was not outside of their purview, because they had been granted the right to choose their own approach to regulation. Their method was not prescribed for them; it was explicitly left to the EPA to decide. And no restriction was set out that they could not pursue this approach.

And Congress opting not to pass legislation to that effect means absolutely nothing with regards to the rights of other entities to use that approach. If Congress doesn't pass something, that doesn't mean its banned or disallowed. It just means Congress didn't pass it.
 
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tstorm823

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It certainly was not outside of their purview, because they had been granted the right to choose their own approach to regulation. Their method was not prescribed for them; it was explicitly left to the EPA to decide. And no restriction was set out that they could not pursue this approach.

And Congress opting not to pass legislation to that effect means absolutely nothing with regards to the rights of other entities to use that approach. If Congress doesn't pass something, that doesn't mean its banned or disallowed. It just means Congress didn't pass it.
"The executive branch can do literally anything they want that hasn't been explicitly banned" is not our system of government, and I'm quite glad it isn't.
 

Silvanus

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"The executive branch can do literally anything they want that hasn't been explicitly banned" is not our system of government, and I'm quite glad it isn't.
That's not even remotely relevant to the post.

The EPA was given the explicit ability to determine its own method of regulation for a specific industry, on a specific metric, stopping short of direct fines for infringement. It developed a (relatively modest) one.

Then the SCOTUS-- which, unlike the executive branch, apparently can do whatever it wants-- shot it down, because a majority of its members are avowed members of a party that's heavily subsidised by the industry in question. How on earth is that not a gigantic conflict of interest, by-the-by? The industry can essentially pay its way out of being regulated.
 

Thaluikhain

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Taking bets, how long before they throw out the Constitution and declare themselves dictators for life? A month? A year? The closest gets a new police state first! And in this game there are only losers.
Eh, getting rid of it would take a while, they can get away with weird interpretations and maybe move on to constant emergency powers first.

Though the fact that the US is openly setting its foot into facism should terrify the whole world.
If for no other reason that it normalises that behaviour elsewhere, I daresay that the UK's and Australia's recent disastrous rightwing governments would have had to be much more restrained if Trump hadn't made rightwing disasters the new normal.
 

tstorm823

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The EPA was given the explicit ability to determine its own method of regulation for a specific industry, on a specific metric, stopping short of direct fines for infringement. It developed a (relatively modest) one.
The Clean Air Act being used to justify their regulations had an overwhelming amount of very specific crap. It was not "do your own thing, bros."
Capping carbon emissions comes with the inevitable implicated result of shutting off electricity in some cases, that's not modest.
 

Agema

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The Supreme Court did not rule that environmental protections are unconstitutional. They ruled that a regulatory agency can't make major decisions for the country without a specific dictate from the legislature to do so
What you mean is what is often called the "major questions" doctrine.

However, the major questions doctrine is something justices made up, with no definitions to explain such that they can apply it or not at their own whim, and which right wing justices are deplaying with increasing frequency and aggression. It's an ideological fad to serve political ends. There are other laws heading to SCOTUS along similar issues, and I expect we will see the same that SCOTUS will empower itself over the executive and to some extent legislature; although of course SCOTUS's appropriation of power in matters of governance are deployed for the empowerment of protecting state governments and the businesses.

That is basically that: SCOTUS has taken upon itself to decide matters of governance in a way it has not previously done. Its motivation is political ideology.
 

dreng3

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That is basically that: SCOTUS has taken upon itself to decide matters of governance in a way it has not previously done. Its motivation is political ideology.
At a closer look one would discover that the SCOTUS is a big fan of making up rules without any legal backing.
Just look at the non-delegation doctrine, qualified immunity, the right to strike down federal laws, and rulings like Korematsu.