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Comment by robonerd | Hacker News Reader

> it's clear democracy is dying.

If democracy died every time somebody got mad at the outcomes and made claims like that, it would have been dead before it even started, and subsequently re-died every year since. What exactly was so democractic about SCOTUS permitting the executive branch to write their own laws anyway? Writing laws is meant to be the job of Congress. You can claim Congress is insufficiently democratic due to gerrymandering, but less democratic than the judicial and executive branches? Give me a break. Congress remains the most democratic of the three, and this SCOTUS decision gives power back to Congress.

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Regardless, you can't ignore the far reaching affects of Trump as president and January 6th. Was it just a "phase"? Perhaps. But any scenario I can think of leads to more of this boneheaded nonsense. You can't simply say 'bah people disagreeing is not the end of democracy' and be done with it. The statistics are there; the US is far more polarized and contentious than it ever was before.

This country has stumbled through boneheaded nonsense after boneheaded nonsense ever since it was founded. What is going on now is not even remotely the worst it has ever been, and I don't think you can rationally plot any trajectory from the present to "death of democracy" unless you are discounting any datapoint more than a few years old.

> the US is far more polarized and contentious than it ever was before.

This is completely divorced from reality. Everything that has happened in the past 10 years is a mere candle to the bonfire that was the Civil War. You must be discounting datapoints you didn't live through if you really believe what you've said here. Shit man, the present state of affairs is tame even compared to the 60s and 70s.

We are one supreme court decision away (via the independent legislature doctrine) wherein a state legislature could overrule its own laws or constitution and federal law and flip election outcomes as they desire, both statewide and federally.

The decision to even hear the case is radical and affirming would represent a massive shift away from democracy in the US as we know it.

I'm assuming you're talking about this one [1]. It's actually an interesting and important question that could use revisiting.

>Issue: Whether a state’s judicial branch may nullify the regulations governing the “Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives ... prescribed ... by the Legislature thereof,” and replace them with regulations of the state courts’ own devising, based on vague state constitutional provisions purportedly vesting the state judiciary with power to prescribe whatever rules it deems appropriate to ensure a “fair” or “free” election.

[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/moore-v-harper-2...

I don't think a question where one possible answer is "legislatures can unilaterally decide the results of their own elections" is one that needs revisiting and its astounding that anyone could sincerely believe that that is what the framers intended

That's not what's at issue? How are you getting there. It's about who gets to decide the rules, legislatures or the court. Dunno about you, but that seems like a good question to get settled.

The legislature already decides the rules through the traditional legislative process. If the legislature alone decides the rules without judicial or executive checks it can engineer whatever result it wants. We don't let congress do whatever it wants just because the federal constitution has "vague principles" that courts try to hold them to, it shouldn't be any different for states and state elections.

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