As with so many controversial court rulings like the ACA mandate case, our courts keep getting put into the decision because of the massive failure that congress is. Congress should either fulfill the promise or not, or whatever. instead the judicial bodies end up making legal judgements with big ramifcations that largely should be left to the legislative body.
This is a conclusion I'm coming to more and more. It's easy to blame Presidential overreach or Supreme Court overreach, but the Congress seems to be steadily abdicating responsibility while still managing to get very little of substance accomplished.
They are supposed to be the most powerful branch of government, but instead they have deadlocked themselves into uselessness. In some ways we're probably fortunate that the other two branches have picked up the slack, as much as we (myself included) like to complain about it.
"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" he tells us in Federalist 10. The idea of a legislator who would derive self-worth not from actually doing things (good or bad) but rather by approbation from their faction solely for making the other side mad was not something they thought possible.
Edit: Since most replies are talking about the empire, I just want to reiterate that my comment was regarding the end of the Republic, which imo is a more analogous situation to modern USA. (Not to say it's identical, of course!)
The US Congress has incredibly low approval ratings, as a whole. But each individual congressperson enjoys surprisingly high approval from their constituents. I guess Madison just didn't see that those two things could happen at the same time.
There are deep divides between the branches of the electorate that have brought the representatives to office, as the United States faces a number of divisive issues. Those divides, and a preference for combat over compromise, leave us deadlocked. The center is there for the first party that chooses to leave its entrenchement.
When Congress reaches approximate agreement on an issue, particularly an emerging one, it can move fast. See the passage of the PATRIOT Act or the recent move to spend more than $1,000,000,000,000 on COVID-19 economic relief.
Unfortunately, that just isn't so. The evidence of the last three decades has been that every time the Democrats compromised a little, the Republicans just moved further to the right and re-entrenched themselves.
The 115th (2017-2018)[1] Congress had both a Republican House and Senate and it got extremely little done.
Our Congress is completely ineffective.
[1]:Fixed.
So I'm still putting the blame right on them.
No, it's not; political opinion in the US is closer to a bimodal than a normal distribution; the center of the current Overton Window is a place where you lose your base while not meaningfully appealing to people inclined to vote for your opponent, plus even if you succeed momentarily when (probably not “because”) you do that (e.g., Bill Clinton), the result is shifting the near pole of the Overton Window toward your opponents’ position which almost invariably results in a similar movement of the far pole maintaining the width of the Window.
A lot of the dynamics of this is tied to the structure of our electoral system; more effectively representative, multiparty systems have different dynamics.
eg in federal legislation: the House (majority); the Senate, representing increasingly tiny numbers of Americans (supermajority, often: cloture); the president, and the supreme court.
Ezra Klein wrote a book about it. https://simonandschusterpublishing.com/why-were-polarized/
1. What sort of compromises with the modern Republican party do you expect the Democrats to have to make, that they haven't already been making?
2. And what will their reward for making them be? Another supreme court appointment unfilled until the president is a Republican? Another crappy compromise healthcare bill that maintains the status quo? Another decade or two of inaction on climate change?
As you note, when congress sees an urgent problem worth solving, they move quickly.
When I read, "congress is abdicating its responsibility", it seems to me people are just upset a law they like wasn't passed.
In other words, people want a dictator they agree with, rather than taking the time and effort to change the minds of their fellow citizens on any given issue.
Besides, inaction is often the best path to take, particularly when there isn't a clear winning idea.
It's like the old joke about Academia: the political infighting is so intense because the stakes are so low.
If Americans cannot agree on anything, therefore, congress cannot either. People blame congress, but it's the American people who are ultimately responsible.
They were always intended to be both. Since there had to be such a powerful entity within the government (the power exists, so it has to be put somewhere), the best course of action to prevent any whim of politics doing irreparable damage is to pit congress against itself so that any actions it takes are generally too slow for transient whims to affect it.
Better that the powerful are inefficient.
Not the executive, and not he judicial (it's not even well defined in the Constitution).
The elected body of representatives is supposed to be where the action is.
They've gradually been failing more and more
That's what many Americans wanted, and voted for. A government that governs least governs best, after all.
If Congressional lockdown was useless, it would've been fixed. Clearly, there's plenty of interests that favor a Congress/Senate that isn't able to move legislation forward.
Are you talking about Congress or the country as a whole?
That isn't an invitation for the executive branch (or judiciary) to overreach.
In theory congress could go years without passing a single law, and that would be fine. It would signal that the current laws are sufficient.
(As an aside, congress has ceded much of it's lawmaking authority to federal agencies anyway -- so even if they didn't pass any new laws, the legal code will still change every year.)
"Today’s decision must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision. The Court could have made clear that the solution respondents seek must come from the Legislative Branch. Instead, the majority has decided to prolong [the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS)] initial overreach by providing a stopgap measure of its own. In doing so, it has given the green light for future political battles to be fought in this Court rather than where they rightfully belong—the political branches. Such timidity forsakes the Court’s duty to apply the law according to neutral principles, and the ripple effects of the majority’s error will be felt throughout our system of self-government."
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This was his dissent on DACA. Agree or disagree with the program that allows undocumented immigrants to stay and go to school, I don't care. It's not legislative, it's not judicial, it was a program by DHS setup under the last administration. Now the court rules the current administration can't undo the program? It's bizzare.
Things like DACA _need_ to be written in stone to avoid forcing the supreme court to become the effective legislator instead of having congress pass a law that enacts it as an actual program.
... and therefore the promise is still in force and should be upheld.
Normally this wouldn't be so bad, Congress is bad at making small evidence based changes on a reasonable timeline so instead they setup the rules for making the rules and the goals and instantiate or grant that authority to a division of the executive. Unfortunately it seems the courts have become very enthralled to varying degrees to the unitary executive theory which makes corralling that power more difficult.
This not accurate. Congress failing to act due to deadlock does not indicate that either party agrees that no change ought to be made, only that congress couldn’t come to an agreement about how it should be made.
To say otherwise is akin to saying that, because you and your husband can’t agree on where to eat for dinner, you must not be hungry.
Both parties might believe that a law needs to be changed, but changed in opposite directions: one might want it repealed, the other strengthened.
The justices' point is that congress, in its inaction, has not enabled the reduction in Creek reservations that has been perpetrated through large-scale disenfranchisement all all levels of governance, actions which are in direct conflict with the reservation treaty signed in perpetuity.
For these actions to be legal, Congress must have authorized them. This has not happened and therefore, as the justices rule, these actions are unconstitutional.
It either has to be something populist - everyone wants it so I won't get voted out of office - or it needs to be worth spending a ton of political power. When Congress is overwhelmingly in favor of a law, they can prevent a presidential veto. But that degree of unanimity is rarely free. It cost people something else, so it better be worth the opportunity cost.
I would assume (haven’t read the whole opinion yet) that nothing about this ruling now prohibits Congress from exercising their authority to take any further action.
This could mean a lot of things. Do you mean no change to the law is necessary? SCOTUS is upholding that principle. It is saying that the law as written stands.
The Judiciary is not overreaching here. They are doing exactly what their job says - they're interpreting existing laws, not writing new laws.
Agreed. Congress is way too addicted to political grandstanding and partial fighting instead of making laws to clarify the situation. It seems pretty clear that with all the 5-4 divisions the Constitution is not precise enough to decide these things unambiguously.
Yes, both are major oversimplifications to a complicated situation, with path dependencies and subtle counterintuitive cofactors. But it's good battle cry.
We need more accountability, more transparency, more democracy.
A systems engineer strives to create functional feedback loops. Today, that means closing the gaps in our broken feedback loops. Consent of the governed, and so forth.
We need more Civics classes for students.
Branches of the Federal Government being put into the decision because of a massive failure of another is exactly why we have 3 branches. It's rock-paper-scissors. Checks and balances. Which is why, for instance, people squawk so much when the executive branch imagines itself new powers it was not granted.
The normal idea behind "checks-and-balances" is that if one branch exceeds their authority, the other two branches can serve as a check on abuse of that authority. The argument being made by GP, though, is pretty much the opposite: Congress isn't overstepping their authority, they're abdicating it. It's basically like they want to be 'checked' by the Supreme Court, because they don't want to have to take a clear stand in the first place.