The Roberts Court is a cesspool of open corruption that works to legalize the same.
People like to describe John Roberts as an institutionalist a bit overwhelmed by how contentious his Court has become and how far and fast it has swung. Given his unwillingness to meaningfully address behavior that justifiably destroys public confidence in the Court, I don't think that's a fair description. Any "institutionalism" is eclipsed by… something else.
"It is with real chutzpah…that Roberts has claimed judicial independence in order to circumvent an investigation into judicial independence… [O]ur Supreme Court does not exist in the constitutional order as much as it looms over it, a robed tribunal of self-styled philosopher-kings, accountable to no one but themselves." @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/john-roberts-clarence-thomas-supreme-court.html
@caseyjennings (hmm… i wonder if there is a Tampa Bay local instance.)
“Preventing monopoly formation is infinitely preferable to breaking up monopolies after they form.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/27/convicted-monopolist/ ht @eARCwelder@mastodon.sdf.org
i periodically repost this, and now seems like a good moment.
Merge the Court https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7964.html
A thing I did not know, from @ryanlcooper:
The US Supreme Court "struck down a law prohibiting political candidates from repaying personal loans to their campaign with post-election donations, meaning that interested parties can effectively place bribes directly into the pockets of our elected representatives."
https://prospect.org/justice/2023-04-26-democrats-supreme-court-corruption/
@caseyjennings if i still lived in the Bay Area (i often wish i still lived in the Bay Area), i think it would be a top choice for me.
@sqrtminusone when i first migrated my attention and posting from twitter to here (i had the fosstodon.org account for years, but rarely used it previously), i was cautious and CWed politics-ish things. but the norm among the wave of fellow twitter refugees with whom i disproportionaltely interact is not to do that, and i fear CW-ing things would make a place already a bit too quiet compared to olden days even quieter. but i don't want to be a bother in spaces that prefer that norm.
@pixelpusher220 (i think how that'd work is i'd move, then reactivate the fosstodon.org account after my followers have migrated. understandably, i don't think mastodon would let me keep my followers and take them elsewhere. i can have both accounts, but the current account's followers have to be one place or the other.)
( i may switch to a different instance — i love fosstodon.org, i'm a long-time free software guy and i love that world — but most of my posts are politics-ish and i've gotten a bit of pushback that some fosstodoners prefer the local timeline to be respite from all that. i could CW politicsy posts, but that doesn't seem to be the norm among the people i converse with. anyway, i may a bit sadly be looking for a new home, and am open to suggestions. )
Jerry Springer’s passing reminds us of a more innocent, less decadent America.
some people find writing a function to reverse a string even just once to be annoying, but i've found a solution that is very concise and will reverse a string *twice*.
@dcz I had a question. I have no reason whatsoever to believe the answer it gave me was correct. If I could be confident of that, I wouldn't need the citation! It's not about some academic fetish. But without some kind of evidence, I cannot trust the answer.
@bgawalt right. you’d want people of roughly the same age as well, for a first approximation.
what if Biden cut a deal with McConnell to support an impeachment of Gorsuch and Thomas in exchange for agreeing to two McConnell-acceptable replacement nominees? the idea would be to separate ethics accountability from the political composition of the Court by holding the latter constant. would this be wise or terrible?
Apparently organic chemistry is a fake, woke discipline. https://apnews.com/article/new-college-florida-tenure-conservatives-desantis-ce711c9169ebe84e9d062ebbb281ebce
@djc i’d cleanly say “lots” and “yes, of course”. without high quality representation, there is no legitimacy of governance (and crippled state capacity, and poor quality of governance). quality representation should be a very high priority. we should be willing to spend many multiples of the almost nothing we now spend on it. (Gingrich destroyed Congressional staff budgets, delivering us to plutocratic think tanks.)
@blakeashleyjr well, it is something to work towards. much of why our governance is in such rough shape is that most of us don’t feel we are meaningfully represented at all. our votes are like little dots rival PacMen compete for, as passive and meaningless to the victors as that. no problem presses itself less urgently, or is in fact more urgent, than restoring meaningful democratic representation in my view.
@blakeashleyjr i guess if one posits a sufficiently awful quality of readership now, AI summary could be an improvement. but then maybe the right answer is reforms that improve representatives capacity and obligation to meaningful address constituent entreaties, rather than celebrating a marginal improvement to a bad baseline?
