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The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

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Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

joecct said:
Yep. But wouldn't it be fun if a legislature could not redistrict its own state, but had to do another. Oh! the fun of Maryland being redistricted by Texas, and Texas by Massachusetts!
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Now that would be seriously entertaining! Kep, can we work that into our 2016 platform? And maybe you can have states trade rights, so you package redistricting rights to the Dakotas and Montana to get a chance to redistrict California?
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

joecct said:
Noted Catholic Canon Lawyer Ed Peters on the Scalia dissent.

He's not happy.
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This isn't the Vatican and the US Constitution is not subject to nullification by canon law.

Catholic intellectual tradition is a fine and wonderful thing, and he can write amicus briefs till the cows come home, but if the bone he picks with the justices is that they didn't recognize natural law theory as the basis for their Obergefell opinion, then bully for the justices.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

Kepler said:
This isn't the Vatican and the US Constitution is not subject to nullification by canon law.

Catholic intellectual tradition is a fine and wonderful thing, and he can write amicus briefs till the cows come home, but if the bone he picks with the justices is that they didn't recognize natural law theory as the basis for their Obergefell opinion, then bully for the justices.
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Probably should just ignore this dissent wanking that these wankers are trying to engage in. It's just a distraction from how derpy the states are.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

Bob Gray said:
Now that would be seriously entertaining! Kep, can we work that into our 2016 platform? And maybe you can have states trade rights, so you package redistricting rights to the Dakotas and Montana to get a chance to redistrict California?
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I like the idea of a "right to be named later." Maybe have the South trade recognition of gay marriage in exchange for early picks in the Rapture Lottery. "With its first pick, Alabama chooses Roy Moore..."
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

5mn_Major said:
I don't know that much about Catholicism, but my honest question is what's 'church teaching'? In my book, 'church' is an intermediary that has its functions...but in terms of being the source of info, has the risk of distorting things.
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In Roman Catholicism, Jesus is the operating system, the church fathers write the software, and the believers are the users running the software. (Nature is the hardware. God is the OEM.) The clergy is in charge of software QA, release management, documentation, and customer support. Users aren't supposed to run software that hasn't been formally added to the baseline by the clergy.

Peters thinks SCOTUS is allowing American citizens to run bootleg software from unapproved software manufacturers, which is true. What he doesn't understand is we users aren't bound to run the church's software. We're even free to dump the OS and load MacOS (Buddhism) or even Atheism (Linux).

Soon we'll know enough about biology to build our own hardware, and then everything's going to hit the fan.
 
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Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

Kepler said:
As if on cue.

It's official, "religious freedoms" has become the new "separate but equal." I don't think a single right wing news outlet has omitted it from their stories today.
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I honestly can't believe it's going to come to this. This is embarrassing. To those alive back then, is what I'm feeling about the same as you felt after Brown v BOE?
 
dxmnkd316 said:
I honestly can't believe it's going to come to this. This is embarrassing. To those alive back then, is what I'm feeling about the same as you felt after Brown v BOE?
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Same kind of thinking as me. Hasn't this been done before? We know how it ends.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/roy-moore-court-order-gay-marriage-alabama

What could happen to a state's SC justice if he goes against a SCOTUS ruling? Can he be removed from the bench? Disbarred? (IIRC, you don't need to be a lawyer to be on the SCOTUS.) Could only the citizens of Alabama punish him? If so, what's to stop other justices from doing the same thing without worry of punishment?

Edit: Looks like there's a handy dandy guide to this
http://www.judicialselection.us/judicial_selection/methods/removal_of_judges.cfm?state
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

I thought this was a great read about Lincoln:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/05/the-great-interpreter
Excerpt: "...the Constitution’s meaning cannot be left simply to the whims of the Supreme Court. Rather, faithful constitutional interpretation is the shared responsibility of all government officials. The duty of determining the Constitution’s meaning is not something “We the People” can resign into the hands of any one organ of national government."

While I don't agree with those who disagree with the ruling in obergefell v. hodges that link explains some of the reasons that the Supreme Court isn't exactly the end.

In other news that I'm sure I'll get yelled at for...there is nothing wrong with separate but equal, the problem always was the lack of actually being equal.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

Shirtless Guy said:
I thought this was a great read about Lincoln:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/05/the-great-interpreter
Excerpt: "...the Constitution’s meaning cannot be left simply to the whims of the Supreme Court. Rather, faithful constitutional interpretation is the shared responsibility of all government officials. The duty of determining the Constitution’s meaning is not something “We the People” can resign into the hands of any one organ of national government."

While I don't agree with those who disagree with the ruling in obergefell v. hodges that link explains some of the reasons that the Supreme Court isn't exactly the end.

In other news that I'm sure I'll get yelled at for...there is nothing wrong with separate but equal, the problem always was the lack of actually being equal.
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All you need to make them equal is to sprinkle them with some unicorn tears...

Lincoln has a point that it is up to every government official to act "constitutionally," and there may very well be things that come up in one's day-to-day job where the SCOTUS has not issued any relevant opinions and things are ambiguous. It would then be that person's duty to determine the meaning of the Constitution as best he can and act accordingly. If the other parties involved disagree, they can take it to the courts, all the way up to SCOTUS if necessary, to decide. Once the SCOTUS has ruled on a topic, however, that *is* the end - until there's another countermanding opinion (e.g. Plessy and then Brown) OR a Constitutional amendment.

Lincoln's "every official for himself" doctrine worked out nicely for him in the prosecution of the Civil War, but that neither makes it right nor useful in today's political structure. Might does not make right - and neither does charisma.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

LynahFan said:
All you need to make them equal is to sprinkle them with some unicorn tears...

Lincoln has a point that it is up to every government official to act "constitutionally," and there may very well be things that come up in one's day-to-day job where the SCOTUS has not issued any relevant opinions and things are ambiguous. It would then be that person's duty to determine the meaning of the Constitution as best he can and act accordingly. If the other parties involved disagree, they can take it to the courts, all the way up to SCOTUS if necessary, to decide. Once the SCOTUS has ruled on a topic, however, that *is* the end - until there's another countermanding opinion (e.g. Plessy and then Brown) OR a Constitutional amendment.

Lincoln's "every official for himself" doctrine worked out nicely for him in the prosecution of the Civil War, but that neither makes it right nor useful in today's political structure. Might does not make right - and neither does charisma.
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The Supreme Court is not last because it is infallible. It is infallible because it is last.

Someone has to have the final word on what the Constitution says. Our process says that is the judicial branch's role. If you don't like their determination, your recourse is to change the Constitution.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

unofan said:
The Supreme Court is not last because it is infallible. It is infallible because it is last.

Someone has to have the final word on what the Constitution says. Our process says that is the judicial branch's role. If you don't like their determination, your recourse is to change the Constitution.
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Well said.

Of course there is one more recourse - to bring another suit to the courts to give them a chance to reconsider. Naturally, something would have had to change for the courts to grant cert - the national political/moral mood, some subtlety that makes your new case slightly different from the old one, etc. If you just keep bringing the same suit and expecting different results...
 
LynahFan said:
All you need to make them equal is to sprinkle them with some unicorn tears...

Lincoln has a point that it is up to every government official to act "constitutionally," and there may very well be things that come up in one's day-to-day job where the SCOTUS has not issued any relevant opinions and things are ambiguous. It would then be that person's duty to determine the meaning of the Constitution as best he can and act accordingly. If the other parties involved disagree, they can take it to the courts, all the way up to SCOTUS if necessary, to decide. Once the SCOTUS has ruled on a topic, however, that *is* the end - until there's another countermanding opinion (e.g. Plessy and then Brown) OR a Constitutional amendment.

Lincoln's "every official for himself" doctrine worked out nicely for him in the prosecution of the Civil War, but that neither makes it right nor useful in today's political structure. Might does not make right - and neither does charisma.
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So, by that logic Dredd Scott, Plessy were right and it was the moral duty of every American citizen to follow in lock step with the rulings.

If we had done that, then we'd still have them.
 
joecct said:
So, by that logic Dredd Scott, Plessy were right and it was the moral duty of every American citizen to follow in lock step with the rulings.

If we had done that, then we'd still have them.
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Well Dredd Scott got turned over by the 13th Amendment and Plessy was overturned because it was argued that "separate but equal" cannot be achieved because separation always leads to some sort of inequity, i.e. they took a different tact.

I'm sure some legal scholars can come up with valid argument but, "I don't have to listen to you" has been tried and just leads to troops and rioting.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS Part VII - The Bedrock of the Republic!

Jimjamesak said:
Well Dredd Scott got turned over by the 13th Amendment and Plessy was overturned because it was argued that "separate but equal" cannot be achieved because separation always leads to some sort of inequity, i.e. they took a different tact.

I'm sure some legal scholars can come up with valid argument but, "I don't have to listen to you" has been tried and just leads to troops and rioting.
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My retort is that if nobody opposed them, then they would not have been overturned. But because people thought that Dredd Scott and Plessy (among others) were incorrect decisions of the SCOTUS, they were overturned either by the amendment process or by successful suits before the Courts.
 
joecct said:
So, by that logic Dredd Scott, Plessy were right and it was the moral duty of every American citizen to follow in lock step with the rulings.

If we had done that, then we'd still have them.
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Read. Think. Post.

In that order, please.
 
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