Let me bring you up to speed. First, I don't consider being occasionally unable to immediately agree on a budget to be a problem - no matter what drama happens to be going on in the media. Second, the poster that I was replying to was implying that the parliamentarian system was somehow better because it put an election in between each attempt at budget negotiation.
Fuck you. Do your own research. Can't reason your way out of a wet paper bag, but you have heard of the word "reference".
Who seriously thinks that anyone was keeping track of several competing versions of a 2000 page, constantly changing bill? The House certainly didn't have a copy of the completed bill because they didn't approve the version (from the Senate) that moved on to the President. The Senate version was passed on using rules that were meant for final adjustments of spending bills.
In most other democracies, if the government can't pass a budget, then the legislature is dissolved and an election is called.
Why do you think there is a problem with how the US operates? For example, I don't see any evidence that it would take longer to negotiate a budget. After all, budget negotiations of those other governments are delayed by the elections. And there's no guarantee that the new parliament will be any more cooperative than the old one.
Different versions were passed in each branch. The House one was modified under rules that only applied for modifying budget numbers to agree with the senate. They needed to do this because they were about to lose their filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate.
Then the president signed it.
Then two different provisions were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. One was upheld and the other not. And the court, despite a lack of authority to drop pieces of law from a bill without a severability clause, proceeded to do so.
So sure, it is a de facto law since none of the powers that be are contesting it. But I doubt, if there was a stronger respect for law in any of the three branches of the federal government, that it would be.
If you REALLY want to know what the American public wants, let's have a direct vote on the issue.
The US doesn't do it that way. And looking at the mess that direct votes (via propositions) did in California, I wouldn't suggest it either. Most people don't know what they want and don't know when they aren't being offered what they think they want.
Obamacare was already voted by the representatives of the people. Refusing to fund it is ignoring the will of the people.
Your same logic applies to any action of the House. So it is enforcing the will of the people to defund Obamacare.
It's a corruption which could ultimately be used to override nearly any law, because 1) Nearly every measure costs money; 2) the House could just refuse to budget for *anything* in particular until *any* law it doesn't like is repealed.
First, it's not corruption because that is the prerogative of each lower legislative body. Second, there is an easy safety valve - vote the culprits out of office. If the public happens to be comfortable with the mess, then that's it.
Your proof is invalid. Roberts found it isn't valid under the commerce clause. He found that it WAS constitutional under Congress's authority to tax.
He also found that it wasn't a tax. There is an opinion by five of the justices, including Roberts that determined the tax wasn't a tax for the purposes of a bit of legislative law.
Further, what's the constitutional justification for the individual mandate. The Ninth Amendment prevents federal activities which aren't expressly allowed. Just because the federal government can create new taxes of a form allowed by the Constitution still by this amendment requires them to have a reason for doing so such as the Commerce or the "Necessary and Proper" clauses. Roberts didn't provide such a reason.
I note you fail to question the state medicaid mandate. I guess that just fell off your radar once it was shown that you were wrong here.
Thanks for playing. Seeing as you can't even read your own sources, I'm going to stop arguing with you- you'll obviously accept any excuse to continue to believe what you want to believe.
And then we have the face-saving retreat. It remains despite your feeble arguments to the contrary that the Obamacare law was found unconstitutional in two different ways and that the Supreme Court chose an unconstitutional means for upholding the majority of the law. I bothered to look up the court arguments and all I got was a bit of worthless backtalk. Thanks for playing.
I hate it when people can't be bothered to do simple research. From the collection of opinions for the ruling, it states exactly what I claimed. First, that individual mandate was determined as unconstitutional by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito. The dissenting opinion of the last four starts on page 126. Roberts's opinion is first referred to on page 2 where he states that the individual mandate isn't backed by either the commerce or the "necessary and proper" clauses.
Similarly, the opinions on the state medicaid program are in there with only two justices supporting the program.
I find it rather annoying how the matter can be a statement of record, easily found on the web, and yet still be questioned by the ignorant.
You say that throwing out a part of a law is counter to the will of Congress. Throwing out a whole law is even more so.
You obviously don't get it. Congress can always pass the law again in a modified form that addresses the Supreme Court's concerns. By allowing the Supreme Court to decide what law is valid and not, without direction from Congress is to allow the Supreme Court to upset political compromises and subvert the written will of Congress. There is no balance here. The Supreme Court never was given the power to make law.
If your view is that SCOTUS should attempt to not overrule the will of Congress, then the ability to strike parts of a law is absolutely necessary.
This is a non sequitur since striking parts of a law is just as clear an overruling of Congress as reversing the whole law is.
Because he would have paid his dues to society. Similarly, if I were in a hiring position I wouldn't ever hire someone who I knew had committed a felony and not get punished. But I might, depending on the job, hire a convicted felon.
I doubt you have a clue what wasting a vote looks like. But I kept hearing of people who said that they voted for Obama only because the other guy was somehow worse - or vice versa. That sounds like a wasted vote to me.
You'd think that in 80 years or so a country with almost 2 billion people might be able to produce a few individuals smart enough to work out and advance on these concepts. The only - the ONLY - reason why America has been a source of innovation is because America is where the money was.
Well, that's pretty damn stupid even for the internet. As other people noticed, it being kind of obvious and all, the US didn't invent money. If the US has "money" and a much larger country, China doesn't, then you need some explanation for that peculiarity. Because if you look at history, the US didn't always have the money.
Because you're 100% wrong. Show me where in the majority opinion it says that. You can't, because it doesn't. And it's the majority opinion that states what is and isn't constitutional. There is no such thing as the supreme court ruling that something is unconstitutional but allowed- its either constitutional or it is overturned. No third path.
Well, then it is unfortunate for your worldview that we're discussing a counterexample to that.
As for your opinions on the power of the court- sorry. If you want to argue that they don't have the ability to strike down part of the law because it isn't in the Constitution, then you have to argue they don't have the ability at all.
Don't be silly. If Congress provides a severability clause, then the Supreme Court has a means to strike down part of a law. I just pointed out that Obamacare didn't have such a clause.
Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash.
So what? The power to temporarily depress the value of goods or services is something a lot of people possess. But they don't use it because they aren't dumb and don't want to lose a lot of money.
You're absolutely right. When you have a Honda and want a Porsche, first you trash the Honda, then you try to figure out how to get the Porsche.
That's a pretty good car analogy for Obamacare since it trashes private health insurance, the "Honda" of this example. I gather the end goal, the "Porsche" is single-payer.
Also John Roberts ruled that the mandate was effectively a tax and therefore fell within the powers of Congress to legislate. Where the bill "originated" is an arcane arguement with little clarity... Per the constitution, in the case of appropriations the "Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills,"
I didn't bring this up, but I really am not surprised that you think this is "arcane" rather than merely "unconstitutional". What's another violation when you've already brushed off so many?
I see what you did. A temporary oversupply of labor doesn't imply what you think it does. China is experiencing a vast and rapid economic growth, but even in that situation you can still train too many people. US and Europe have been experiencing their sort of conditions for decades.
Why do you keep insisting that? They found both the individual mandate and the state Medicaid mandate to be unconstitutional by a majority of the justices. This is a matter of record.
The former was determined as such by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito. But Roberts despite that opinion upheld that aspect with the other four justices. Similarly, the state Medicaid mandate was found unconstitutional by all but two justices, Ginsberg and Sotomayor, but there was considerable disagreement on what to do about it.
So is overriding only a small part of a large law as unconstitutional. Finding they have 1 power without the other is ridiculous.
This is obviously wrong.For the power of judicial review, the Supreme Court is that. It is the highest court which can rule on matters of law. If they can't rule on matters of the Constitution then no one can - else that other group would be a higher court than the Supreme Court which is not allowed by the Constitution.
In other words, deciding whether laws and actions of the federal government are compatible with the Constitution has to be a necessary power of the Supreme Court because no one else can have that power.
In comparison, severability is a legislative matter. When parts of the law are overturned, Congress can describe how that occurs. And there are good reasons for this such as determining how a law should decompose, should it cease working in its entirety.
For example, if a law should have a benefit and cost for a group and one or the other is determined unconstitutional, then the law now has either a naked benefit or cost without the balance of the original law. There it is intended to be fully implemented. A partial implementation breaks the intent of Congress.
Congress can always pass a new law to reimplement the intent of the old law in a more lawful manner. There's no need for the Courts to exercise severability. So that's a second difference between judicial review and severability.
That's why I think judicial review is a fundamental power of the Supreme Court, but the ability to severe portions of law is not. They are, as I noted originally, upsurping the power of Congress and performing legislative actions for which they have not been granted authority.
There's really no arguing with the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution.
Well, I just did and will continue to do so.
Instead, the legislative branch should be legislating fixes. Instead, the House is refusing to vote on the Senate bill, and therefore blocking legislation, and therefore failing at their job as legislators.
Looks to me like they are. Once again, I find it interesting how easily certain people ignore and brush off fundamental law when it doesn't go their way and want to dot every "i" and cross every "t" when it does. Everyone is doing their job as I see it including the House.
The Democrats and Barack Obama did not personally call the Parks department to "shutdown" particular monuments if that's what you are implying.
[...]
What you have really is that the Republicans want to shut everything down but don't want the political blame for shutting things down.
Let's not get hasty here and claim things that just might not be true. Last I checked the NPS really was going out of their way to close things down which hadn't been closed down in previous shutdowns. Who knows, that might have been due to a direct call from Obama or merely strongly implied in a meeting with the Secretary of the Interior.
Second, Republicans are known to want to shut down Obamacare to the point of forty-something votes to that effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me bring you up to speed. First, I don't consider being occasionally unable to immediately agree on a budget to be a problem - no matter what drama happens to be going on in the media. Second, the poster that I was replying to was implying that the parliamentarian system was somehow better because it put an election in between each attempt at budget negotiation.
"Some new law will make me personally worse off, so taking advantage of this exploit in the US system of government is okay this time."
Sounds like a good reason to me. No different than the people who argue that we should obey the law, only because Obamacare swings their way.
You surely realise that this tactic could effectively be used to put an end to the balance of powers in US government.
It's been around for centuries and hasn't happened yet. Just wait a few weeks. You'll see why it isn't a ticket to absolute power.
Fuck you. Do your own research. Can't reason your way out of a wet paper bag, but you have heard of the word "reference".
Who seriously thinks that anyone was keeping track of several competing versions of a 2000 page, constantly changing bill? The House certainly didn't have a copy of the completed bill because they didn't approve the version (from the Senate) that moved on to the President. The Senate version was passed on using rules that were meant for final adjustments of spending bills.
I have great difficulty accepting these spurious allegations that the ACA was passed in an undemocratic manner.
Do you have a serious reason why you have this "great difficulty"? A lot of those were proposed with the intent of sabotaging the bill.
In most other democracies, if the government can't pass a budget, then the legislature is dissolved and an election is called.
Why do you think there is a problem with how the US operates? For example, I don't see any evidence that it would take longer to negotiate a budget. After all, budget negotiations of those other governments are delayed by the elections. And there's no guarantee that the new parliament will be any more cooperative than the old one.
An ability to halt the working of government for any reason gives you effective supremacy.
Pay attention over the next few weeks and be enlightened. There's good reasons this isn't effective supremacy.
this one passed and is law of the land.
IF you can get it funded. People don't get how legislation works and doesn't work. Not funding a law is a classic and legal way to break it.
Just exactly how long after a law is enacted do you think it should be OK for one or the other party to bring it back up for debate?
The very next day.
You do realise that the House could stop ANY law it doesn't like in this way, right?
That is the intent. And that's in large part why they have terms of two years too. If they abuse this substantial power, they'll be out quickly.
ACA was passed in the house, passed in the senate
Different versions were passed in each branch. The House one was modified under rules that only applied for modifying budget numbers to agree with the senate. They needed to do this because they were about to lose their filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate.
Then the president signed it.
Then two different provisions were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. One was upheld and the other not. And the court, despite a lack of authority to drop pieces of law from a bill without a severability clause, proceeded to do so.
So sure, it is a de facto law since none of the powers that be are contesting it. But I doubt, if there was a stronger respect for law in any of the three branches of the federal government, that it would be.
If you REALLY want to know what the American public wants, let's have a direct vote on the issue.
The US doesn't do it that way. And looking at the mess that direct votes (via propositions) did in California, I wouldn't suggest it either. Most people don't know what they want and don't know when they aren't being offered what they think they want.
Obamacare was already voted by the representatives of the people. Refusing to fund it is ignoring the will of the people.
Your same logic applies to any action of the House. So it is enforcing the will of the people to defund Obamacare.
It's a corruption which could ultimately be used to override nearly any law, because 1) Nearly every measure costs money; 2) the House could just refuse to budget for *anything* in particular until *any* law it doesn't like is repealed.
First, it's not corruption because that is the prerogative of each lower legislative body. Second, there is an easy safety valve - vote the culprits out of office. If the public happens to be comfortable with the mess, then that's it.
Your proof is invalid. Roberts found it isn't valid under the commerce clause. He found that it WAS constitutional under Congress's authority to tax.
He also found that it wasn't a tax. There is an opinion by five of the justices, including Roberts that determined the tax wasn't a tax for the purposes of a bit of legislative law.
Further, what's the constitutional justification for the individual mandate. The Ninth Amendment prevents federal activities which aren't expressly allowed. Just because the federal government can create new taxes of a form allowed by the Constitution still by this amendment requires them to have a reason for doing so such as the Commerce or the "Necessary and Proper" clauses. Roberts didn't provide such a reason.
I note you fail to question the state medicaid mandate. I guess that just fell off your radar once it was shown that you were wrong here.
Thanks for playing. Seeing as you can't even read your own sources, I'm going to stop arguing with you- you'll obviously accept any excuse to continue to believe what you want to believe.
And then we have the face-saving retreat. It remains despite your feeble arguments to the contrary that the Obamacare law was found unconstitutional in two different ways and that the Supreme Court chose an unconstitutional means for upholding the majority of the law. I bothered to look up the court arguments and all I got was a bit of worthless backtalk. Thanks for playing.
So how do you define 'winning' and 'losing' in this situation?
Like with terrorism in general, they win by not losing; we lose by not winning.
Welcome to asymmetric warfare and propaganda. Either one on its own would explain this.
Once again, no proof.
I hate it when people can't be bothered to do simple research. From the collection of opinions for the ruling, it states exactly what I claimed. First, that individual mandate was determined as unconstitutional by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito. The dissenting opinion of the last four starts on page 126. Roberts's opinion is first referred to on page 2 where he states that the individual mandate isn't backed by either the commerce or the "necessary and proper" clauses.
Similarly, the opinions on the state medicaid program are in there with only two justices supporting the program.
I find it rather annoying how the matter can be a statement of record, easily found on the web, and yet still be questioned by the ignorant.
You say that throwing out a part of a law is counter to the will of Congress. Throwing out a whole law is even more so.
You obviously don't get it. Congress can always pass the law again in a modified form that addresses the Supreme Court's concerns. By allowing the Supreme Court to decide what law is valid and not, without direction from Congress is to allow the Supreme Court to upset political compromises and subvert the written will of Congress. There is no balance here. The Supreme Court never was given the power to make law.
If your view is that SCOTUS should attempt to not overrule the will of Congress, then the ability to strike parts of a law is absolutely necessary.
This is a non sequitur since striking parts of a law is just as clear an overruling of Congress as reversing the whole law is.
Because he would have paid his dues to society. Similarly, if I were in a hiring position I wouldn't ever hire someone who I knew had committed a felony and not get punished. But I might, depending on the job, hire a convicted felon.
or waste their votes
I doubt you have a clue what wasting a vote looks like. But I kept hearing of people who said that they voted for Obama only because the other guy was somehow worse - or vice versa. That sounds like a wasted vote to me.
You'd think that in 80 years or so a country with almost 2 billion people might be able to produce a few individuals smart enough to work out and advance on these concepts. The only - the ONLY - reason why America has been a source of innovation is because America is where the money was.
Well, that's pretty damn stupid even for the internet. As other people noticed, it being kind of obvious and all, the US didn't invent money. If the US has "money" and a much larger country, China doesn't, then you need some explanation for that peculiarity. Because if you look at history, the US didn't always have the money.
Because you're 100% wrong. Show me where in the majority opinion it says that. You can't, because it doesn't. And it's the majority opinion that states what is and isn't constitutional. There is no such thing as the supreme court ruling that something is unconstitutional but allowed- its either constitutional or it is overturned. No third path.
Well, then it is unfortunate for your worldview that we're discussing a counterexample to that.
As for your opinions on the power of the court- sorry. If you want to argue that they don't have the ability to strike down part of the law because it isn't in the Constitution, then you have to argue they don't have the ability at all.
Don't be silly. If Congress provides a severability clause, then the Supreme Court has a means to strike down part of a law. I just pointed out that Obamacare didn't have such a clause.
Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash.
So what? The power to temporarily depress the value of goods or services is something a lot of people possess. But they don't use it because they aren't dumb and don't want to lose a lot of money.
You're absolutely right. When you have a Honda and want a Porsche, first you trash the Honda, then you try to figure out how to get the Porsche.
That's a pretty good car analogy for Obamacare since it trashes private health insurance, the "Honda" of this example. I gather the end goal, the "Porsche" is single-payer.
Also John Roberts ruled that the mandate was effectively a tax and therefore fell within the powers of Congress to legislate. Where the bill "originated" is an arcane arguement with little clarity... Per the constitution, in the case of appropriations the "Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills,"
I didn't bring this up, but I really am not surprised that you think this is "arcane" rather than merely "unconstitutional". What's another violation when you've already brushed off so many?
I see what you did. A temporary oversupply of labor doesn't imply what you think it does. China is experiencing a vast and rapid economic growth, but even in that situation you can still train too many people. US and Europe have been experiencing their sort of conditions for decades.
No such thing. They found it constitutional.
Why do you keep insisting that? They found both the individual mandate and the state Medicaid mandate to be unconstitutional by a majority of the justices. This is a matter of record.
The former was determined as such by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito. But Roberts despite that opinion upheld that aspect with the other four justices. Similarly, the state Medicaid mandate was found unconstitutional by all but two justices, Ginsberg and Sotomayor, but there was considerable disagreement on what to do about it.
So is overriding only a small part of a large law as unconstitutional. Finding they have 1 power without the other is ridiculous.
This is obviously wrong.For the power of judicial review, the Supreme Court is that. It is the highest court which can rule on matters of law. If they can't rule on matters of the Constitution then no one can - else that other group would be a higher court than the Supreme Court which is not allowed by the Constitution.
In other words, deciding whether laws and actions of the federal government are compatible with the Constitution has to be a necessary power of the Supreme Court because no one else can have that power.
In comparison, severability is a legislative matter. When parts of the law are overturned, Congress can describe how that occurs. And there are good reasons for this such as determining how a law should decompose, should it cease working in its entirety.
For example, if a law should have a benefit and cost for a group and one or the other is determined unconstitutional, then the law now has either a naked benefit or cost without the balance of the original law. There it is intended to be fully implemented. A partial implementation breaks the intent of Congress.
Congress can always pass a new law to reimplement the intent of the old law in a more lawful manner. There's no need for the Courts to exercise severability. So that's a second difference between judicial review and severability.
That's why I think judicial review is a fundamental power of the Supreme Court, but the ability to severe portions of law is not. They are, as I noted originally, upsurping the power of Congress and performing legislative actions for which they have not been granted authority.
There's really no arguing with the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution.
Well, I just did and will continue to do so.
Instead, the legislative branch should be legislating fixes. Instead, the House is refusing to vote on the Senate bill, and therefore blocking legislation, and therefore failing at their job as legislators.
Looks to me like they are. Once again, I find it interesting how easily certain people ignore and brush off fundamental law when it doesn't go their way and want to dot every "i" and cross every "t" when it does. Everyone is doing their job as I see it including the House.
The Democrats and Barack Obama did not personally call the Parks department to "shutdown" particular monuments if that's what you are implying.
[...]
What you have really is that the Republicans want to shut everything down but don't want the political blame for shutting things down.
Let's not get hasty here and claim things that just might not be true. Last I checked the NPS really was going out of their way to close things down which hadn't been closed down in previous shutdowns. Who knows, that might have been due to a direct call from Obama or merely strongly implied in a meeting with the Secretary of the Interior.
Second, Republicans are known to want to shut down Obamacare to the point of forty-something votes to that effect.