Congress cannot be expected to craft every bit of law and regulation down to the finest detail, and the gridlock that has been congress over the past several decades should make it clear that it's practically impossible. The regulatory power of federal agencies has never been broad and without oversight from other branches - they operate on the authority given to them by Congress.
The executive branch has not just been creating agencies wholesale and giving them sweeping regulatory powers, congress has passed laws creating them and delegating authority to them.
As others have mentioned, you can look at the joke that is the patent system and the absurd games played around the law there to get an idea of what we're in for with this decision. I don't understand how anyone can think that's the place we want to get to for everything else.
In what fantasy universe do Federalist Society members vote for Biden? They have been backing conservative and libertarians for generations. Their members are part of the Supreme Court and clearly do not want a democracy anymore. They are the antithesis of liberal political positions. I call utter bullshit.
How do their views even remotely line up with Biden voters?
But I’m flummoxed by something. What does “democracy” mean to liberals? You’re the ones who want courts to decide issues that most other advanced democracies leave to voters, right? You believe in unelected bureaucrats and experts governing the country instead of elected officials. You seem to be using “democracy” in a very odd way to refer to rule by educated elites.
An EPA employee doesn’t “rule” any more than a congressional staffer or court clerk.
The US system isn't a pure democracy, it's never been. Given that, it's a largely political matter which institutions you feel should be more democratic than others. Article III comes after Articles I and II and many believe this is the order of importance that branches are given in government. Really where we differ is our politics, this is not a debate on obvious constitutional interpretation.
This assumes that the Federalist Society cares about rule followers. It is after all the folks that gave Trump the short list of names with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, after McConnell refused to give Garland even a hearing.
What was the position of the Federalist Society on Garland's situation? Especially since Barrett was appointed just before an election.
What is your position as to why Garland was not even given the time of day but Barrett was?
Putting aside personal convenience is fundamental to loving God and neighbor at times.
No, it's fundamental to character. It's not exclusive to religion. That's just part of the myth.
Someone could come up with a definition for each that excludes this need, but that is true of character and any subjective definition.
Mixed fibers, prohibitions against eating pork, tattoos, fully submissive women, uncovered heads, slavery, divorce, etc
Some people actually do attempt to follow some of these things, but there's even contradictory information in the same book!
I realize to not do so in general makes society a pretty awful place, but most religions say you’ll go to hell if you don’t.
It’s the Supreme Court’s job to explicitly follow the constitution. In your example I want them to be religious fundamentalists. If that turns out to be an issue we have a body that can change our society’s “bible.”
This reads like the design of nightmares.
1) Courts should interpret statutes, not executive branch agencies
2) The separation of powers that the founders went to a lot of trouble to implement in the constitution must be respected
3) Judges can't gin up new "rights" from "emanations from penumbras" in the Constitution.
These are not "far right" positions--they are obviously correct. They're the version of government you learned in 8th grade. If they weren't inconvenient for your preferred policy preferences, you would think that too.
> Courts should interpret statutes, not executive branch agencies
This is, of course, impossible. If a statute creates a federal agency, the agency must, definitionally, interpret the statute. The agency cannot simply wait for a court to rule on its legitimacy to exist, much less its ability to take particular actions. This doesn't mean that executive overreach shouldn't be curtailed by the judiciary, but using a standard that good-faith, "reasonable" executive interpretations of a statute are valid is a fine standard.
> Judges can't gin up new "rights" from "emanations from penumbras" in the Constitution.
The 9th amendment (and federalist #84) would have some things to say about this.
> The separation of powers that the founders went to a lot of trouble to implement in the constitution must be respected
This is pretty dubious, there's a clear history and tradition, going back to before the founding, of debate on the level of federation and separation of powers, and the shape of the branches' and federal vs. state powers wasn't clearly established until at least 50+ years after the founding (Marbury v. Madison and to an extent Worcester v. Georgia).
> The 9th amendment (and federalist #84) would have some things to say about this.
Funny how the 9th amendment was meant to be a bulwark against textualism, isn't it? Much like the "well-regulated militia," this original text of the constitution is ignored in favor of latter-day ideology.
I doubt there are many left after last night.
EDIT: I anticipated some downvoting, but honestly how many FedSoc members are planning to vote for Trump? I can't think of any (and I'm a lawyer, so know more than a few).
Why is it only now, with the hyper-politicization of the SC, with interested parties spending significant money providing luxury and lavish accommodations to at least one member of the SC, that this previously accepted interpretation of the constitution is suddenly in question?
Chevron was always contentious, and applied by courts in a rather haphazard way. But overturning it wasn’t “political.” It was originally decided by five republicans and a Democrat (with three justices not participating) and was overturned by six republicans. What happened was an ideological shift in the Republican Party to separation of powers that’s been going on since the 1980s.
Law nerds have been talking about this for decades. The only thing "politicized" is how the media is using public ignorance of how the legal system works to attack the Supreme Court for an extremely academic legal issue.
I'm also unsure how the political makeup of the court 80 years ago has anything to do with whether or not the court is more political now than ever, particularly in reference to something that actually is controversial - a justice and his family receiving significant compensation from politically motivated companies, including those that have a vested interest in decisions that he refuses to recuse himself from.
That's not what Skidmore said. It said that courts should defer to agency interpretations to the degree they are "persuasive." Which is almost a truism--obviously courts can defer to reasoning they find persuasive. Chevron went further, and required courts to defer to agency interpretations if they were "reasonable," even if the court would have interpreted the law differently.
> I'm also unsure how the political makeup of the court 80 years ago has anything to do with whether or not the court is more political now than ever
The Court is less political than ever. In the mid-20th century, the Court was at the peak of politicization, striking down democratically adopted laws based on "emanations from penumbras" of constitutional provisions.
Regarding Thomas, you sound like you're reading from some sort of talking points. Thomas was the OG constitutional purist. The notion that he's developed this views because he want on vacations with his personal friend is absurd.
As for Thomas, I do not understand how any rational human being could make excuses for him (or Alito, to a smaller extent.) If you don't think it is a massive conflict of interest to be taking part in rulings related to the interests of Crow when he has received millions of dollars worth of perks, vacations, etc. from him, I don't know that we can have a serious conversation. How can anyone remain impartial when the interests of someone who has lavished them with the equivalent of many millions of dollars in gifts are in the balance? I'm also not stating that Thomas is newly compromised, so I'm not sure that his original positions mean much when I believe he's been compromised from the start. The difference is now that he and his compatriots are firmly in the driver's seat.
I’m talking about an academic debate around Chevron that’s been around ever since I started law school, and was already robust for a couple of decades before that. This trying to connect it to Thomas’s vacations thing has come out overnight and seems out of a script.
> But that doesn't change the fact that it was codifying existing practices, which is my entire point.
That certainly not what I learned in my administrative law class! Skidmore says judges may defer to the agency if they find the agency’s interpretation persuasive. But the judge always retains the power to decide the meaning of the statute itself. Chevron changes that significantly. The agency interprets the statute, and the court can only disagree if that interpretation is unreasonable. And Chevron allows the meaning of the statute to change with each administration.
> As for Thomas, I do not understand how any rational human being could make excuses for him (or Alito, to a smaller extent.) If you don't think it is a massive conflict of interest to be taking part in rulings related to the interests of Crow when he has received millions of dollars worth of perks, vacations, etc. from him, I don't know that we can have a serious conversation.
You’re misreporting the facts, probably because you’re reading from talking points: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2023/04/24/supreme-cou.... There was one 2004 case, involving a portfolio company of Crow’s firm, where Crow was not involved in the management. Critically: “Crow Holdings and Harlan Crow’s name do not appear on the 2004 court filings.” And the Supreme Court rejected the company’s certiorari petition.
The Supreme Court gets thousands of certiorari petitions every year. They identify conflicts based on the people who are named in the filings. (That’s how all judges do it.) The idea that he’s corrupt because he voted against hearing a certiorari petition—to the detriment of the company—in a case where Crowe’s name or his company’s name don’t appear, is ridiculous. It’s a deliberate effort to try and delegitimize the court through mudslinging.
Overnight? This has been brewing for years - we continue to receive more and more information, but it's hardly anything new.
> That certainly not what I learned in my administrative law class! Skidmore says judges may defer to the agency if they find the agency’s interpretation persuasive. But the judge always retains the power to decide the meaning of the statute itself. Chevron changes that significantly. The agency interprets the statute, and the court can only disagree if that interpretation is unreasonable. And Chevron allows the meaning of the statute to change with each administration.
I'm not sure if I'm being strawmanned here or we're just talking past each other.
My point is that federal agencies had been taking regulatory action before both Skidmore and Chevron. Do you disagree with this statement? If so, how do you suppose that these cases even got to the Supreme Court? I am not arguing that Skidmore and Chevron did not further codify the procedures, but that the status quo was Congress being able to create federal agencies with regulatory authority, and that the explicit reversal of Chevron is a significant neutering of the ability for both the legislative and executive branch to do that.
> Critically: “Crow Holdings and Harlan Crow’s name do not appear on the 2004 court filings.” And the Supreme Court rejected the company’s certiorari petition.
Crow spends significant portions of his fortune on political lobbying. He clearly has interests that the Supreme Court weighs in on that do not involve him or his companies directly as a plaintiff or defendant. I think it is ludicrous that any justice would feel it is acceptable to receive millions of dollars in benefits from someone who is so active in the political arena, and I would say the same if it came to light that liberal justices had done so. How you think it isn't a conflict of interest is beyond me. I know I have biases on, say, gun control, due to having several friends that are extremely pro-gun, and the most they buy for me is drinks on my birthday. It beggars belief that you honestly think Thomas would not be influenced in his decisions by his "personal friend's" largesse.
They're going through precedent like cordwood, that's not apolitical by any stretch of the imagination. Don't mistake your politics for neutrality
Your conclusion doesn't match your argument. The original decision was voted in along party lines, the party ideology changed, and now it's been overturned again along party lines. How is that not political?
Chevron was a unanimous 6-0 decision: there was no debate on its principles at the time.
Chevron said that it was not up to the courts to decide policy when there was ambiguity:
> When a challenge to an agency construction of a statutory provision, fairly conceptualized, really centers on the wisdom of the agency's policy, rather than whether it is a reasonable choice within a gap left open by Congress, the challenge must fail. In such a case, federal judges—who have no constituency—have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do. The responsibilities for assessing the wisdom of such policy choices and resolving the struggle between competing views of the public interest are not judicial ones: "Our Constitution vests such responsibilities in the political branches."
If there is ambiguity it is either on purpose (to allow flexibility) or by accident (unforeseen or change circumstances): it was thought that it is best for policy makers to deal with that ambiguity.
Remember: the agencies are headed by an Executive that is elected (President), and run my administrators (Secretaries, Directors) that are Senate-confirmed. There is connection to the will of The People throughout their operation.
The part that made Chevron consequential wasn’t recognised at the time.
I can see both good and bad outcomes from today's decision (though I think in the short term it will multiply litigative and executive brinksmanship without elevating legislative standards), but I really don't agree with the idea that the justices who originally decided it were just clueless about the implications.
#1 - Chevron deference as a rule comes out of Chevron, and the idea that Chevron just encoded something that was already always done is ahistorical. Both before Chevron and going forward, courts will still often defer to agency interpretation when that makes sense. They just won't be compelled to look at it so uncritically.
#2 - The idea that Chevron has been uncontroversial until now is totally detached from reality, and is a dead giveaway that you really don't know much about this.
The fact that Chevron codified things in a more structured way does not change the fact that it was a ruling about an existing practice. How are you arguing otherwise? Both rulings were about things that were already happening. Neither Skidmore or Chevron resulted in the brand new practice of federal agencies having regulatory power.
#2 - Of course there is always dissent around laws and decisions. Obviously, however, the majority of the past century has had further support for federal agencies having regulatory power. It is only the past half decade where there has been significant pushback. People are sitting here complaining about how for so long the SC increased their deference to Chevron - how would that be the case if it was controversial within the court? Weird that we had more than 70 years of the courts just strengthening their position on this if it was so controversial the whole time, rather than something that has been a significant change over the past half decade.
Congress passes laws, the agencies implement them, if you disagree you go to court. All it's saying is that you don't have to go to the Supremes to get your disagreement to win.
Imagine a patent system where the judge could never throw out a patent, because the experts at the agency (patent office) had granted it, so it must be valid.
In both reality and your supposed system, someone could always go to appointed officials and get their patent enforced - just look at how the Eastern District of Texas operated for decades. In reality, we see far more frequent turnover and shifting of opinion in federal agencies than we do in the judiciary. Just look at how often Net Neutrality has flopped back and forth at the FCC. (Constant reversal of regulatory decisions is also an issue, but it goes to show that the idea that a patent system that exists outside of judiciary control wouldn't have plenty of opportunity to make your case to sympathetic ears is silly)
The concept of administrative law did not even exist at the founding of the country -- executive-branch agencies making rules directly applicable to the public wasn't really a thing until about the turn of the 20th century.
The idea of Congress delegating certain powers dates back to 1825:
* https://constitution.findlaw.com/article1/annotation03.html
Further precedents from the 1920s and 1930s (and more recent) are listed in the above link. It's not a new idea that some ambiguities are left to the Executive to figure out.
Never mind that congress appoints the heads of the agencies, writes the laws directing them, and on an annual basis, renews funding for them.
What will happen is that anytime someone doesn't like a regulation, they'll now have many, many jurisdictions in which to shop for a judge that will rule in their favor.
In addition to funding renewals, congress can make specific tweaks at any time to correct anything they dislike with regard to the executive branch. The ruling pretends like this avenue hasn’t existed and been used the entire time.
I doubt that granting Congress more power will inspire them to be less political, more responsible, and more governed by facts. Particularly when the party that made this decision has veered completely in the opposite direction.
If anything, it will be used to prioritize "faith" over fact, like what we've seen in Oklahoma and Mississippi.
That's a pretty idealized view: The vast majority of voters just want competent governance, with guard rails to make sure the governors don't go too far, because they (the voters) have lives to live and other things on their minds.
As to persuading voters, we should remember the joke about Islamist parties' agitation for "democracy": One man, one vote — once.
If we wanted “competent governance” we would just have China or Singapore run our country.
But yeah, "opinions are greater than facts" is technically a very democratic way to do things.
Would you rather the "holistic healer" who says only drinking green juice for a week to "detox" your kidneys make laws? Or the person who actually went to med school for 12 years.
Now imagine what unelected government officials who play the revolving doors game with the industry they're supposed to regulate can do.
I'm not sure I can wrap my head around the expectation that a political institution should be 'less political' -- can you explain what you are getting at here?
> more governed by facts.
Fact substantiate 'is', but politics is about 'ought', and particularly, reconciling the contradictory 'ought's that prevail in varying quarters of society. Expecting politics to be 'governed by facts' requires taking a single set of values and interests for granted, which effectively means codifying one faction's ambitions into law at the expense of everyone else.
In what world is this even humanly possible? Is this something conservatives actually believe can happen? If so, then they're irrational almost beyond repair.
Every law is open to interpretation. If tech can barely secure the doors on machines that execute instructions near-flawlessly, you think we can construct flawless frameworks out of inherently ambiguous linguistic building blocks run and understood by deeply human executors? This just plain doesn't work when the rubber meets the road.
Someone's going to make a choice, and SCOTUS just decided unilaterally that it's going to be a body that hasn't been able to decide anything productively for a decade.
This isn't about creating better structures for the analysis of rules; it's about gutting the regulatory capacity of agencies.
An overloaded court system means that defendants are put at a disadvantage and can likely be strong-armed into an agreement that is unfavorable. At least with agencies, companies knew where they stood, after all, most companies probably have a few former agents on staff.
Now it's, better hope you don't lose an injunction and you get a judge capable of understanding the technical reasons why your company should be allowed to operate in that capacity.
I don't think this is the pro-business win that conservatives claim it is. It just changes the rule of the game in ways that I think favor the government. If an agency gets an injunction, then continues to press for continuance based on the fact that they don't have the resources right now, and a judge buys it, then the company end up in judicial purgatory.
If it's a bandwidth issue, reducing the number of extra-judicial bureaucrats and upping the number of judiciary is pretty straightforward. Seems like a pretty simple rebalancing issue.
>Now it's, better hope you don't lose an injunction and you get a judge capable of understanding the technical reasons
Why would experts (like those that were informing executive agencies on their payroll) not be called here?
It's not always that simple: Sometimes, trying to interpret "the law" in the abstract, without deep knowledge of the factual context, is like being a bull in a china shop.
The conservative justices' various obsessions with textualism, originalism, and whatever other flavor of the month comes up, are often unrealistic. Ditching Chevron deference, in the teeth of decades of precedent and congressional approval, is one of those situations.
Granted, your 3d Cir. clerking experience, seeing that aspect of how the sausage is made, does give your view a certain weight. But too many judges need to start remembering that they're hired help, bureaucrats, and when Congress says "we want the agencies we create to figure out what to do, subject to political checks," it's manifestly not on federal judges to say "oh no, you can only do that in a way that lets us judges have the dominant seat at the table."
Chevron deference, and the corpus of administrative law unsubject to judicial review it spawned, most decidedly is not.
That makes judges a bit more of a fixture in the grand scheme of things than all these "agencies" running their own pseudo-courts so that Congress critters can spend their tenure voting one another pay raises, and insider trading among themselves.
>it's manifestly not on federal judges to say "oh no, you can only do that in a way that lets us judges have the dominant seat at the table."
Actually, it manifestly is on the judiciary to say that. If Congress started adding clauses to legislation to the tune of "this law is not subject to judicial review", the judiciary is fully within it's rights as outlined by the Constitution to strike down the law, as the Legislature, by definition, cannot produce a thing with force of law contradicting a limitation placed on it by the Constitution short of another Constitutional Amendment + the requisite ratifications. An unconstitutional law, is no law at all. The issue of constitutionality is purely the realm of the judiciary. No one else. You can change what the Judiciary looks like; but you can't structurally usurp it's powers under the Constitution.
There is a reason Jefferson and Madison were really nervous about how the judiciary ended up playing out in practice though.
I'm not suggesting that Congress go that far. But don't forget the Exceptions and Regulations Clause in Article III: "In all the other Cases before mentioned [i.e., establishing various grounds of federal-court jurisdiction], the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."
That sounds pretty plenary to me. And Congress has sometimes exercised that power, e.g.:
* Severely limiting and even foreclosing judicial review of certain types of decision by immigration authorities: 8 U.S.C. § 1252(g)
* Ditto for decisions about Social Security: 42 U.S.C. § 405(h)
My vague recollection from law school is that SCOTUS has said that this is OK as long as Congress provides sufficient due process via other means.
> The issue of constitutionality is purely the realm of the judiciary. No one else.
It's astonishing how such an exalted view of the judge's role has taken root and spread like kudzu from its origins in John Marshall's brazenly-bootstrapped argument in Marbury v. Madison (and the All-Writs Act).
The Ninth Amendment is a savings clause. It says that the Constitution isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of rights. I.e., a right that can be identified somewhere else still exists, even if it's not mentioned in the constitution.
But by the same token, the constitution isn't a source of rights. You can't point to it for some right that isn't already pre-existing.
You're confusing the federal government with the state governments. State governments are not limited to enumerated powers and can do anything they want.
To overturn a duly-enacted state law, you need to assert a federal constitutional right. You're correct that the constitution "is not an enumerated list of rights." But that means it's also not a source of rights! The rights must come from somewhere else.
That's why the "emanations from penumbras" reasoning is invalid. It treats the Constitution as a source of new rights that can't be found somewhere else.
> Why is that I only see you post the most specious legal arguments, rayiner?
I think most people on here get their legal analysis from political science majors on MSNBC and WaPo.
The regulation stems from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Stevens_Fishe..., which says things like:
> United States observers required under subsection (h) be permitted to be stationed aboard any such vessel and that all of the costs incurred incident to such sta- tioning, including the costs of data editing and entry and observer monitoring, be paid for, in accordance with such subsection, by the owner or operator of the vessel
You've got it exactly backwards. The relevant expertise in interpreting law and policy resides with the judiciary. Allowing administrative officials with no background in constitutional law or statutory interpretation to decide for themselves what the law they operate under means has lead to devastating power imbalances and opened the door to wide-ranging corruption and overstepping of authority.
How on earth do you come to that conclusion? Nothing stop Congress from leveraging experts in drafting laws.
This simply requires that interpretation of law be done in a clear transparent way (courts), rather than by a nameless, faceless, unelected bureacrat.
How can anyone say "no, I'd rather have some bureaucrat do it"?
When dealing with a country of over 300 million people and a near $30 trillion economy Congress cannot possibly specify things so completely that there won't be things that need interpretation.
Congress would need to outline the limits of the executive function in the law. It would need to detail what the goals are (and are not).
To me this seems like a vast improvement rather than just passing a bill "regulate pollution" and then whatever the EPA decides is now law impervious to court challenges.
Congress passed laws that required interpretation to actually implement. If someone disagreed with the agency interpretation they went to court. The court would then figure out an interpretation.
All Chevron deference did is tell the court that if the agency interpretation was reasonable the court should go with that.
With or without Chevron, "unelected bureaucrats" end up interpreting the law.
You really feel like there is no difference between a judge, schooled in the law and some GS-10 government employee?
Really? In deciding whether or not the government is following a law passed by Congress? You know, acting as a judicial expert? The "exact same unelected bureaucrats"?
Let me give you a real life example (from the people who brought the case to the Supreme Court) - the Dept of Fisheries decided that some fisherman required an observer to be on the boat when they fished (to make sure they followed regulations) and that they had to pay for it.
That was never a part of the law, only a decision by a bureaucrat. It couldn't even be challenged in court due to Chevron.
You feel that is a better situation than Americans saying "wait a second, why am I paying for this? that's not even in the law" and bringing the decision to a court of law?
You feel like taking away that power from Americans is a good thing?
Not true.
Congress is free to continue to delegate to experts when it comes to writing laws and policy. What they are no longer free to do is write vague laws and policy and expect the judicial branch to inject their own favor when interpreting that vagueness. The judicial branch will once again do what it should have been doing all along: simply interpret the law.
Basically, Congress actually has to do its job and write better laws. And again, they are free to consult experts when writing these laws.
The judicial branch is actually once again functioning the way it was intended. It is restoring balance to the "checks and balances".
No, with Chevron deference, they expected the executive branch agencies to interpret unspecified parts of certain laws, because they were the ones supposed to implement them, e.g., the definition of "source of air pollution" in the Clean Air Act of 1963. The judicial branch actually is "injecting its own behavior" in that this means they will interpret more laws than they otherwise would have.
The House should be filled with the Common Man, if you will, but I'm certain the authors were envisioning a parvenu bootstrapper like Ben Franklin or a Paul Revere.
But the Senate should change too--repeal the 17th amendment and bring the election of US Senators back to the state legislative bodies. It's a key element that made us a Republic and I'm failing to see how we can even refer to ourselves as such since 1913. I find it grating when people say "our democracy" because it is true now, but shouldn't be.
Besides, very few doctors, engineers, and scientists want to have anything to do with politics. They generally abhor the practice of politics and generally don't see it as a skill they need to develop. Without that skill, they'll be just as ineffective as the Congress we have today.
But it's fair to argue the Senate wasn't built for politicking, yet that's what it's devolved into. I'm a political layman, but perhaps popular vote of senators is a terrible idea as it discourages people unwilling to play hardball to get involved... these engineers, doctors, scientists, etc. It takes a special kind of thick skin to be in national office and those type of people don't seem to gravitate to science-based fields, but rather law and professional politics.
But the fact the state legislature elected the state senators reflects your point that the senate was intended to be more "serious."
The main problem as I see it is that to many people have entered their own little political bubbles (a problem on both the major parties), and that on one side it has become common to lie outrageously (election denial, "Biden Crime Family", etc...) and to baselessly vilify their opponents in unfair and repugnant ways ("groomers", "killing babies after birth", etc...).
There is a real historical parallel to this: the U.S. Civil War. In the run-up to the election of Abraham Lincoln the Southern Democrats absolutely vilified him, saying things like he was going to free the black slaves (not his plans at all at that point) and make slaves of poor white folks. Many of these species were made on the floors of the House and Senate to be picked up in the newspapers in their home districts.
When Lincoln won (largely because the Southern Democrats split their vote), this rhetoric had taken on a life of its own and the populace was so enraged that it would have taken real leadership in the south to prevent war. And so we went to war with ourselves.
And about what really? Certainly slavery was the over-arching issue, but what specifically about it? Lincoln won on a platform of status-quo. There was to be no effort at freeing slaves (there were 4 slave-owning states in the Union, and slavery happened in a number of new territories like California during the war), and the only anti-slavery thing Lincoln committed to was to no expand slavery into the new territories: something that had already been agreed to.
The U.S. Civil War started because a failed political strategy to lie to their own voters got away from the Southern Democrats.
I am truly scared that we are approaching that today. There is no-one with any integrity left in Republican leadership. Their voters have been lied to so much and so long that the idea that the leaders of the Democratic Party both are tying to "groom" children and to literally suck their blood in some ritual to live longer are nearly main-stream within Republican circles. And Republican leadership is alright with that, so long as they think it will get them elected.