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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

That's a decent question. Mainly, I feel like most congress critters should be required to wear patches of their corporate sponsors like NASCAR drivers. That's who I feel they represent much more than their constituents. In that sense, I feel they get no respect from me.

Don't get me started on the respect for the constituents themselves. That's such a non-HN friendly conversation.

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Fair enough, thanks for responding. For the record, my belief is that you don't need to be so pessimistic - democracy is always messy, and I think the perception of corruption in the U.S. way exceeds the reality, and most reps are really trying to do what their constituents want... we just have constituencies that really want to bicker with each other. But, maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part. Good luck out there!

> I think the perception of corruption in the U.S. way exceeds the reality

So the stacked Supreme Court issuing absurd rulings is not actually corrupt, but just appears corrupt?

Citizens United and further erosions of campaign financing laws that give corporations direct access to politicians isn't actually corruption, just legal free speech?

My belief is that you have to be beyond naive to hand-wave away the current generation of bad-faith politic

>>So the stacked Supreme Court issuing absurd rulings is not actually corrupt, but just appears corrupt?

People ruling against what you want is not corruption.

You’re right, it’s not, so why are you bringing up?

Sure, did I say what I want anywhere?

Do you think that a ruling that went 7-2 and 8-1 in the past being reviewed for a third time for some reason that happens to go 6-3 along party lines makes sense in any light besides corruption and "legislating from the bench"? Please discuss.

I said the perceived corruption is bigger than the actual corruption. I didn't say "Citizens United is a good ruling." Not sure why you leaped to that.

But, since you brought it up, can you point out any laws passed since CU that were pushed by lobbyists, but were broadly unpopular with the general public? Or laws that failed to pass due to a lobbying effort, despite being broadly popular with the general public? Anything were we can trace this supposed corrupting effect of direct corporate influence and see a result that is actually contrary to what the electorate wants?

I agree it was a bad ruling and should be overturned, but I don't think the doomsday scenarios predicted after the ruling have actually happened. I'm open to being proven wrong though, show me what you got.

Supreme court doesn't pass laws, so we're crossing the streams of two subjects in the same comment thread.

The Supreme Court has decided that corporations are people and we're dealing with the aspects of that. The Supremes then decided that civil rights were okay to no longer have protections, so we're now dealing with that. The Supremes decided that men get to decide what health care women can have.

Why would Congress need to act when the Supremes are legislating from the bench on their behalf, only they don't take the hit because it was the Supremes that did it.

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