That's the strategy of the Federalist Society, make rulings via the undemocratic SCOTUS under the guise of giving states/congress power, but then also making sure that state elections are undemocratic via gerrymandering, voting laws, etc.

It doesn't help that taking action on matters of national importance is inherently difficult in a Federalist government.

from Wikipedia '... The Federalist Society provides its 70,000 members with "intellectual sparring and professional grooming.'

without taking sides on this attorney gang, it seems to be like a bunch of professional boxers and others here are mad because they cannot fight. I do not want to fight lawyers, but calling them a conspiracy, when they specifically engage and practice debate professionally, is sort of pathetic honestly.

I grew up going to FedSoc. officially, it's just a debate society - the panels are streamed on CSPAN, it's all public. unofficially, it's a Mecca of networking for conservative lawyers. the upper echelons are nearly exclusively Catholics, and the founder provided Trump with shortlists of Justices he could pick from. and all that networking made it happen. it's no coincidence all the recent nominees are Catholic.

as an aside it is actually sort of humorous to describe the center of bunches of Catholic Attorneys as Mecca

> but calling them a conspiracy, when they specifically engage and practice debate professionally, is sort of pathetic honestly.

Debating professionally precludes conspiracy? What if a high-school debate club decides to rob a bank?

Well there was once a Congress that passed the Missouri Compromise which institutionalized hyper-partisanship and another that was so ineffective its successor Congress literally fell apart when several States seceded from the Union and those States then went to War with the Union.

So, cut the hyperbole. Partisanship has always been a political reality. The EPA is capped to the powers that Congress gave it, and does not have the autonomy to expand that power at will because they’re subordinate to the President and the President cannot unilaterally and legally make laws on his own, nor can any of the agencies which answer to him.

I fear what a lot of what outspoken "progressive" types (and yes, before anyone asks, also the MAGA crowd) want is a CCP-style political system as long as they're the ones in control. Concepts like separation of powers and rule of law are merely obstacles to smash through on their road to utopia.

Correct. Which is why both of those groups you listed along with many others need to continue to lose elections and fail to attain power because the endgame for them is eliminating the possibility that they ever lose an election again. Like the CCP has.

Few progressives want sprawling bureaucracy. Rather, that’s typically what we get out of social safety nets due to conservative sabotaging of the process and text.

Sprawling bureaucracy is a byproduct of what you get from investing the government with additional functions. Every office you open whether Civil Rights or Agriculture or Patent Office needs staff. If we had a single payer system, there would necessarily be an enormous bureaucracy attached to it, most likely an expansion of the existing Medicare/Medicaid bureaucracy.

You just don’t get one without the other, even if you cut the staff down to the bare minimum that can still efficiently manage government programs you still end up with a sprawling bureaucracy.

There’s a difference between sprawling bureaucracy and necessary bureaucracy. Are you really suggesting that all bureaucracy is inherently bad and defaults to wasteful sprawl?

Are you saying a “necessary” bureaucracy is necessarily not a sprawling bureaucracy?

In any case, if the function invested in the government is a misapplication of public money then the bureaucracy servicing it would also necessarily be unnecessary. If the function is necessary, that does not mean the bureaucracy servicing it isn’t sprawling. The military has what could be termed sprawl, but that’s a function of the broad scope of its missions and global reach.

But it would eliminate the massive health insurance bureaucracy that we currently have to deal with.

Correction: it would replace multiple competing staffs (“bureaucracies”) of private insurers with the ability to take losses and go out of business with one bureaucracy with a chain of command spearheaded by the POTUS backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. My example was not an invitation to discuss the merits and demerits of single payer healthcare in a different topic, but to point out that for every function you invest the Federal government with, you get a corresponding bureaucracy ultimately subordinate to basically one guy. Doesn’t matter what the function is, you’re expanding his staff.

The EPA is under the executive branch, they should not "have to go through congress" for anything. That is entirely out of their scope of operation.

They are supposed to be enforcing and upholding the laws that congress enacts.

The Executive branch is not a king. They cannot make new laws. We live in a democracy.

And yet, fixing that problem -- the problem of the ineffectiveness and hyper-partisanship of Congress -- would have so many positive effects for all of our lives regardless of our ideological perspectives that it should be our number one priority as the electorate.

The ineffectiveness and hyperpartisanship of Congress is directly attributable to the ideological perspectives of the electorate.

Also, Congress is not as ineffective and hyperpartisan as you think. It's only on issues that have public attention that they act this way. When nobody is looking they move quickly and decisively.

So true, see the Patriot Act, DMCA and all the anti-network Neutrality bills.

Eliminating partisan gerrymandering would go a long way.

Less than 10% of congressional districts this year will be competitive (defined as the most recent presidential election margin was within 10 percentage points). Only 41 seats!

I haven’t really seen a realistic plan to do it though.

OTOH, results of elections to congress (house of representatives) looks balanced - total seats gained by each party matches popular vote with deviation < 1%. Which is much better than i expected considering single-seat system leads to advantages for dominant players even without gerrymandering.

Even in my home country, which is european country with proportional system and no gerrymandering, such deviation is higher (< 2%) due to rounding effects.

Gerrymandering is main issue in (some) state elections (e.g. Wisconsin 2018 is egregious example), not federal elections.

The totals are a little misleading because there is partisan gerrymandering on both sides, so they somewhat balance each other out. Courts have also been highly involved in rejecting the most brazenly disproportionate maps, but that may soon change next year due to the newly constituted Supreme Court.

The bigger problem is that it incentivizes partisanship and extremist views in uncompetitive districts because the representative is effectively decided in the party’s primary election, not the general election which has higher turnout and a more representative electorate.

Also the fact that 90%+ of congressional seats are safe except for the occasional primary opponent discourages accountability. Our districts are so distorted, they make no geographic sense. And it means a large percentage of our population is permanently disenfranchised, which dampens voter participation. It really is one of the biggest structural problems of our democracy right now.

Yes the EPA, created by congress and given a mandate by congress, must go to congress if it wasn't new powers or authorities....

Do you have a source for that claim? I find it hard to believe that partisan conduct didn't exist on the hot topics of the day throughout history.

For example, it took years to create a constitution, then more years for a bill of rights. There was a lot of federalist vs anti-federalist debate. Then things like slavery, segregation, etc. I mean, we fought a civil war. How much more partisan can it get than that?

We used to admit states to the Union in pairs so that there was an equal number of free and slave states. THAT is partisanship.

Perhaps there is a hyper-partisan congress because it’s a reaction to what some have viewed as a hyper-partisan Supreme Court.

On a positive reading, the Court is now saying states have the right to choose these issues for themselves. There are means in the constitution for overruling a minority of states, that is by passing a constitutional amendment. By allowing and even encouraging the Court to make these decisions, Congress has built up a democratic deficit which has exploded in its face.

On a negative reading, sadly, the Court is just as partisan now but in the other direction. Thus the deficit won’t go away.

The previous court was conservative on a linear scale. The current court is radically conservative with fascist imperialist theological trends becoming more apparent by the day.