Comment by crocodiletears | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crocodiletears | Hacker News Reader

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Respect?

A basic perception of goodwill and competence?

The Supreme Court has a very narrow mission statement, and it generally executes on it well.

Congresspeople sabre rattle on TV, submit symbolic legislation with poison pills and take turns abstaining on legislation they don't want passed but their constituents do, and hide whatever they want to pass in unrelated legislation (budgets, usually). They eagerly devolve every responsibility they can to the executive branch, and seem incapable of voting against their own or the intelligence community's interests.

The only principled one seem to be single-issue legislators who couldn't tell the ass-end of a horse from its head if it was unrelated to their obsession.

During depositions they spend more time chasing soundbites and executing partisan jabs than trying to extract any information in the public interest.

Many of them seem to care more about the rest of the country than they ever could about their district or their states.

Edit:

As a punctuation, here's the late John McCain's wife saying 'we all knew', wrt Eptsein

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QENiaUaoJo

> This latest development should certainly call into question the haphazard rules and procedural tricks that allot Trump the power to decisively tip the scales of justice in his favor. Pressed further, one might also ask: Why should the Supreme Court, an unelected body that is richer, whiter, and more male than the United States is, continue to have such outsized power in the lives of ordinary people

I think the arguments (that go against yours) in this article are relevant: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-case-for-e...

I can understand the author's frustration with the court's decisions, and generally agree with his complaints that the court has historically served as a breaking mechanism on social progress.

But molany of the examples he cites are exactly what the Supreme Court is suposed to be doing, serving to moore the federal government's reach into daily life, and local governance by interpreting the constitution, and leveraging historical precedent.

Initial appointment is inevitably a political affair. But once the justice is in, the justice is in, and you pray that their interpretation of law is what you wanted it to be, because you're not going to remove them.

Now, you could argue that the Supreme Court will increasingly lose its legitimacy, since a filibuster is no longer enough to prevent an overtly politically motivated appointment.

You could also argue thattimes have changed, and the relatively degenerate state of state level authority means that the confirmation process should be moved to the house, rather than the senate.

But these would be relatively new criticisms and proposals that have yet to be spread and be internalized widely enough as to make the whole institution illegitimate in the public's eye.

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