Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

Re:Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions by scottLobster on Thursday June 30, 2022 @11:35AM (#31933967)

It doesn't change dramatically with EVERY election, it just changed dramatically with the last one due to a lot of judges retiring/dying off at once. Just a generational phenomenon.

SCOTUS leaned liberal (in the sense that liberal justices tend to believe in larger-scope interpretations of Constitution) for a long time, now for the first time in a while they're leaning conservative (the Constitution says what it says and if we want it to say something different Congress should pass an amendment).

Honestly I find myself falling into the more Conservative camp from a judicial perspective. I'm all for gay marriage and a woman's right to choose, but I feel like we used SCOTUS to do an end-run around Congress to get both at a federal level, and from my layperson's reading the constitutional justifications for both feel stretched to me. In the same sense that you can use creative interpretations of the Bible to justify basically anything, you can do similar things with the Constitution. That isn't how the system is supposed to work

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Re:Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions by peter422 on Thursday June 30, 2022 @11:43AM (#31934128)

It doesn’t matter what camp you fall into, or if you think the courts decisions in the past were “wrong” (though obviously there is no absolute right or wrong interpreting how a 250 year old document interfaces with modern society).

The court as an institution has a responsibility to maintain some sort of consistency if it wants any legitimacy.

How can people make decisions about where and how to live if their fundamental rights are changing year to year (and most recently being taken away)?

You are also not aligned with the current public opinion. The court is at its lowest approval rating ever, and that is before overturning Roe. If the court cannot maintain it’s appearance of legitimacy then it essentially fails as an institution. The court could have chosen to move more slowly, with more restraint, but it didn’t.

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Re:Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions by scottLobster on Thursday June 30, 2022 @12:01PM (#31934451)

The whole idea of the court is to be above public opinion. This is not the first time in history that the court has made sweeping overturns of previous precedent that large swaths of voters disagreed with. It's also not the first time the legitimacy of those rulings has been challenged. Remember Eisenhower sending the 101st Airborne and federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to enforce integration? Or Kennedy doing similar for Alabama? Those actions were enforcement of a controversial SCOTUS ruling against the local public opinion.

And you can say "yeah but racists were the bad guys", but that's not how any of this works, regardless of what narratives we decide to apply to history after the fact. Did the court's lack of perceived legitimacy in Birmingham or Little Rock (among many other places that required less extreme enforcement) cause it to fail as an institution?

The court only fails as an institution when it's decisions are no longer enforced. Last I checked we haven't reached that point yet. And even if we do, worth remembering SCOTUS survived the last civil war intact.

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Re:Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions by peter422 on Thursday June 30, 2022 @12:10PM (#31934612)

So your argument is because the court regained hard earned approval in the past it is guaranteed to do so again?

Or the court can function perpetually against the public will?

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Re:Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions by frumper on Thursday June 30, 2022 @12:25PM (#31934857)

His argument is that Congress should legislate these issues either through proper laws or constitutional amendments. Turns out 9 judges might disagree with the previous set of 9 judges. That disagreement swings both ways and in the absence of proper legislative action will become the law of the land.

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Re:Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions by josephcsible on Thursday June 30, 2022 @12:25PM (#31934861)

What part of this argument wouldn't apply to Plessy v. Ferguson being overturned by Brown v. Board of Education?

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