Re: Discussion of the 2020 American Federal Election
@339
yeah, I know. Fortunately gay marriage is safe because it's too expensive to undo (what do you do about all the suddenly not married people?).
But, in fairness to the Republicans--and with the clarification that I don't agree with what they're doing at the moment in the slightest--a 5-4 liberal majority would be equally likely to go too far left and do stuff like strip corporations of all protections (got a papercut at office depot? $1 million lawsuit), take sexual harassment and make it so that even saying hi to someone of the opposite gender can get you into deep shit, etc. It's an institution with (1) the last word on anything in front of it, (2) a longstanding "we interpret the law as written and don't make policy" culture/background (which is all judges in the U.S., mind you), (3) a very small number of members who are entirely insulated from consequences, and (4) everyone can use it as the nuclear option when they don't have the majority on an issue (as in, like 10-100 people can block the entire country up on it for years, see also Trump taxes).
It's just a fundamentally broken piece of the government. The only way to fix it is things like term limits or presidents going "I want to be fair to the other side, how about some moderates?" or whatever. But in honesty I think it needs to be done away with entirely.
Court packing is only a temporary solution. By modern standards that'll just start a back-and-forth where every 4 years the other side adds a judge and uses it to get whatever they just passed set in stone until the end of time. At least that's where my money is. So maybe Biden needs to do it for short-term wins, but however many judges he added, the republicans can just add that many plus one more next time they get control of things. Obviously at some point someone will go "this court has 1000 judges, what the hell is going on, let's get rid of it" or something, but eventually that won't fly. The democrats should probably have been more firm in 2016 and used the tools at their disposal, but in my opinion court packing is just pushing another leg out from under the table that is U.S. politics--and we can only really lose so many before the table collapses.
A lot of U.S. politics relies on people obeying social norms. Fair play is part of it but not entirely what I mean. Something like, only take action commensurate with how much you want a thing. Turns out that haha, social norms are just guidelines and it's totally winner take all if you stop caring about being liked. I hope that the next batch of politicians was paying attention. I doubt the next Democratic congress is going to care to patch the system, they're too close to the issues, but maybe someone will before it's too late for us as a country.
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