I'm not surprised. I know exactly what you're gonna write tho, so here's my response anyway.

This is the problem you're having Wookie06:

Uniquely among other extant systems, the United States government (and the constitution that describes it) was not designed with political parties in mind. In fact, it totally falls apart once you introduce them - something that was well understood by the founding fathers and, contrary to their saintly status among certain Americans, exploited by them to gain power within the first decade that the constitution was ratified.

The problem with parties is that the American separation of powers is based on personal ambition. President, senators, representatives, and supreme court justices all have different personal interests. Congressmen have an interest in legislation that is favorable for their states, even at the expense of others, and presidents have an interest in vetoing legislation that is unfavorable for the nation as a whole.

Without political parties, the power of judicial review (which the constitution invests in the judiciary) is not problematic. Supreme court justices are chosen by both the president and congress. The president already has veto power, and congress already has legislative power, so it's not an issue if they nominate and confirm a supreme court justice they each find agreeable (respectively). The powers of the other two branches are effectively being devolved to the judiciary.

(Historical footnote: the anti-federalists wanted a permanent judicial review board, consisting of the president and the supreme court justices. This eventually turned into the presidential veto, on recognition that judges already had this power. Judicial review predates the presidential veto.)

With political parties, however, the interests of the president, congress, and (eventually) the supreme court all align. Laws become meaningless and the constitution is void. Yay. What a great system.

Inadvertently becoming Nazi is merely the small price to pay for engaging in multiple levels of tenuous irony.

AFAIK though the original movie that clip is from isn't anti-Semitic at all (it stars Ryan Gosling and is an ordinary Hollywood production). (Although I can clearly see why anti-Semites are attracted to that clip.)

lmao wtf

This isn't accurate. Judicial review is not an explicitly enumerated power in the US constitution. It wasn't until Marbury vs Madison in 1803 that the Supreme Court asserted that it had the power of judicial review. However, the presidential veto is an enumerated power. So leaving aside whatever historical precedents there are in the British legal system, in a strict sense, judicial review does not predate the presidential veto, which is an enumerated power in the constitution.

Here's what Wookie / Levin think about that court case (page 30).

From one of the first paragraphs (starting on page 30) where he outlines his grievances about judicial review:

[quote=Mark Levin]The shorthand label given to this Court-made authority is "judicial review". And this, quite literally, is the foundation for the runaway power exercised by the federal courts to this day. What is far less recognized is that Marbury started out as anything but the ominous precedent it has become.[/quote]

Speaking of "literalism", I miss when right-wing populism was Herman Cain saying that legislation shouldn't be more than two pages long

Long story short, the framers framed the constitution without knowledge of game theory.

Factionalizing is always a factor in politics.



From the summary it's not anti-Semitic at all, but given you can take those lines out of context, people will.

Maybe factionalization is always a factor in politics, but it hasn't always been the case in American politics that party affiliation was the most relevant factor determining how factions sort. There used to be much more ideological diversity within parties than there is now, and a lot more similarity between various members of the two parties (i.e., liberal Republicans, conservative Democrats, blah blah blah).

Just to be clear, the character​ speaking those lines in the movie is definitely an anti-Semite.

The Supreme Court may not have asserted (used) the power, but they certainly had it. The constitution explicitly assigns judicial power to the Supreme Court and whatever other subordinate courts congress sees fit to create. The constitution doesn’t explicitly say that judges are authorized to hear cases, either. That authority is implied by “judicial power” in the same way that judicial review is, by inheritance from British common law.

oh okay, so leaving aside what the authors of the constitution understood “judicial power” to mean,...

where does that stop, by the way? that’s a thread Americans really shouldn’t be pulling.

“speech” was 18th century slang for healthcare.

Uh... I don't know man. Judicial review can be said to be inferable from the constitution. But of course it is. The "right to privacy" that people talked about during the 1960s is obviously derivable from or at least consistent with the constitution. If it weren't, it wouldn't be constitutional.

Judicial review is "implied" by judicial power, but of course it matters who determined that it was implied. The Trump administration could make the legal argument that article II, section 2 gives the president the power to conduct an all out assault on Canada, or, in other words, that the power to wage an all out invasion of another nation is "implied by" the constitution. Ultimately, however, the Trump administration's lawyers are not the arbiters of what is constitutional. That power belongs to the Supreme Court. The ruling of the Supreme Court that it has the power of judicial review is what was decisive in granting it that power, not "British inheritance".

The funny thing is--regardless of how you view Marbury v. Madison--if you read the excerpt from Mark Levin's book on the Supreme Court on page 30, where he talks about that case, you'll find that the vast majority of it is actually a rant about partisan politics of the day (he does this because he wants to make the actual judicial consequences of the court ruling appear incidental, a mere side effect of political warfare between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists).

So in a sense, Mark Levin and Jon`C actually agree on something huge: that the United States has been severely damaged by political parties (although they each give different reasons).

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 78

“whenever a particular statute contravenes the Constitution, it will be the duty of the judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter and disregard the former.”

The federalist papers are not law but they clearly represent the intent of the founding fathers because they were written by them.

IDK man, I saw a movie in the 80's where a fat Republican calls a vegetarian a vegetarian, then she calls him a fat Republican. Pretty apt description of politics today.



Was it the SS badge or the Mein Kampf screed?

the founding fathers disagreed and argued at each other about these things, too. there isn't even a single cohesive interpretation one can give to them.

I dunno. It's a movie loosely based on the life of this guy, who (like the character in the movie) was an anti-Semitic ("self-hating") Jew.

Well, that was flippant.

Perhaps the founding fathers disagreed on many issues, but anti-federalist paper 78 also assume that the Supreme Court has the power to declare laws unconstitutional and void. So it's fair to say that it wasn't an important point of contention among the founding fathers whether the constitution granted judicial review to SCOTUS.

FLASHBACK: one of my favorite pages of this thread https://forums.massassi.net/vb3/showthread.php?67768-Inauguration-Day-Inauguration-Hooooooraaay!/page124

that page reads like some kind of Trump-themed fanfic

if Trump declares himself king we can merge this thread with the NES thread

Anybody offering odds on whether highly principled Republicans will appoint a gambling addict rapist to the Supreme Court?

It’s a good thing Republicans are so principled, because it sure seems like it would be easy to blackmail most of them.

Its not blackmail. Its that many of them happen to take lots of Russian cash during the time period they realize Russia isn't so bad.

What are the odds Russia has a gang of prostitutes working in DC who happen to record mot encounters?

pee tape? try pee tapes.

Republican behavior and hypocrisy defending Kavanaugh is really disgusting, but I am repulsed by the Democrats' opportunism as well. Senate Democrats forced Al Franken to resign in order to take the moral high road against Roy Moore, so that when Republicans tried to "both sides" Democrats and point out that Bill Clinton had been accused of rape, they could nonetheless say (at least to their own base) that they deal with the riffraff in their own party.

But I'm trying to imagine whether any of this #metoo stuff ever would've happened if Hillary won and Bill was the first husband. Can you imagine? Attacks against Bill would be deemed anti-feminist and puritanical. Making a case for Trump's unique unfitness to be president is the subtext of all the entire movement, if you ask me.

That being said, it's totally pointless pointing out the hypocrisy of the parties. And maybe it just doesn't matter. After everything that's happened since Trump became president, there's a strong willingness to see the present moment as a radical departure from the past. As unprecedented. But if this SCOTUS is any different from any other SCOTUS hearing, it's probably only a difference in degree rather than in kind. It's just a little bit more nasty than it usually is, but politics is usually nasty business, and it's always been.

So would it have been better to let Franken keep his seat? I know plenty of Democrats thought he was innocent, and Republicans sure as hell wouldn't have blinked an eye had the same accusations been laid against one of their own. In fact around the time I mostly read on social media like 4chan that the Democrats were hilarious for "eating their own", based on their ridiculous standards of purity.

Not sure. But maybe they at least should've conducted the ethics investigation first.

Actually, probably not. I think once the #metoo cat was out of the bag, there's no stopping it. It's not bad holding men accountable for grotesque and violent acts against women. Society is better for holding men to higher standards. But it doesn't mean the motivations aren't cynical.

Opportunism by Democrats here I don't think is comparable. Actually punishing people for sexual misconduct, regardless of how they use it, means they still actually punish people.

Like haven't you been upset before when people make "whataboutism" arguments?

Al Fraken's only mistake was taking his goofy photo with an unprincipled conservative. Are we really comparing his situation to, oh, for example, a serial rapist with a history of suspicious rotating debt?

"which one?" you ask

The difference between the Democrats and Republicans isn't about hypocrisy or eating their own or whatever. The difference is, the Democrats know these issues are going to come up eventually, so they deal with them. The Republicans close ranks to hide their incredible number of crimes and then *shock* people like Putin hack the GOP and use the information to blackmail them.

You don't need the Russian government to run a brothel in DC. They don't need any help to be unprincipled sleazes.

Agreed.



Upset? No. But I've pointed it out.

Well, in the case of the first photo. And then there were the seven other women who accused him of inappropriate sexual advances...

Democrats were trying to project the image that they "deal with them", but I'd be shocked if there were no Democratic congressmen or senators whose poor sexual conduct is an open secret within elites of the party, who will be protected until their story is made public. Democrats only deal with it when it's politically necessary to.

The difference is that they try to project that they're different from Republicans by dealing with problems of this sort only once they've become public scandals. They don't want to preempt them, because they aren't actually driven by political principle either. They're driven by expediency.

And when it comes to Republicans, they're also driven by political expediency. For them, it's all about Trump: the reason why Republicans don't deal with their own is because they can't without suggesting that Trump needs to be held to the same standard. It's all about incentives.

I think rather than pressuring people like Al Franken to resign right away, we should require him to be investigated. And then if he resigns before such an investigation has completed, that he may as well be guilty. I would hope that he didn't resign just out of fear that it would damage the party for reasons of mere appearance.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how to handle this kind of situation when there is a vote rapidly approaching. With Roy Moore, there was plenty of time for journalists to get to the bottom of the story before the election, but now we only have a few days before the Senate vote for Kavanaugh's appointment (David Frum says the vote should be delayed).