Utopia Talk - Politics - SCOTUS ideology

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Utopia Talk / Politics / SCOTUS ideology

Habebe
Member Wed Jun 29 14:15:42
Ive noticed what is driving many SC arguments from the left is the idea legislating from the bench.

What I mean is that I personally agree with abortion being available.

I personally see that as entirely different than thinking that a ruling on it should be based on that view, regardless of law.

That's literally legislating from the bench.

On Roe , Im not even in the camp that says there is not a right to privacy of medical decisions in out constitution.

Im of the camp that says in legal practice that has not existed in the time of Roe, it was used almost soley for abortion.

The clearest example I use is the right to go to my doctor and buy needles and heroin.

If I have the right of privacy to have a fetus killed at whim , how can that logically not extend to shooting heroin?

If such a right existed in practice why is it not applied evenly?

earthpig
GTFO HOer Wed Jun 29 14:48:48
The majority opinion is well argued. I would encourage anyone on either side of the debate to read it, at least the syllabus, or give the whole thing a good skimming, whatever you've got in you. Same with Thomas' concurring opinion.

And I'll even grant that we probably wouldn't have had as much 'strife' over abortion, if not for Roe in the 1970s, since that 'strife' that Roe created is apparently a "strict constitutionalist" reason to rule this way or that, according to the conservative majority, the majority whom I will note declined to cite the "strife clause" of our Constitution that they claim to strictly and exclusively follow (must have been a typo).

That being said. There's no time travel. This ruling did not come out a year or two after Roe, it came out 50 years later. 50 years after a segment of our population gained, and has enjoyed, a civil right, and they strip it away by fiat after huddling in the dark, after lying to the Senate to get onto that position of high power to begin with.

Legal nuance aside, that is in fact de facto legislating from the bench, and a flagrant disregard of the centuries old United States pattern that "civil rights go up over time, not down." This is the most activist court since Dred Scott (another ruling I've found cause to re-read recently, since it also stripped civil rights from a segment of the population [freedmen in the north] who had previously enjoyed them), and it would take more than a moment of time to find a more flagrant example of "legislating from the bench" from the past couple decades than this. Furthermore if, as the conservative majority holds, mitigating "strife" is a valid constitutional reason to rule this way or that, if otherwise on the fence, the supreme court now finds themselves compelled to overturn THIS ruling post-haste (not 50 years from now).

Seb
Member Wed Jun 29 14:50:51
Habebe:

"That's literally legislating from the bench."

Yeah, that's bullshit though.

The whole point of the US constitution was an exercise in radical liberalism that aimed to enshrine the (somewhat fictional) principle that people should be free to order their lives as they like, unless there is a bloody good reason to stop them.

This idea that you need a specific right to abortion in law, or otherwise states are free to interfere is alien to that notion.

When you keep talking about it as the "left trying to impose their ideology" it is a complete inversion.

It is the Christian Right trying to impose *their* ideology on when a fetus is a person onto everyone else.

earthpig
GTFO HOer Wed Jun 29 14:51:38
I genuinely do not know the answer to this question, but are there other precedents of the supreme court removing previously enjoyed civil rights from a segment of our population, aside from Dred Scott and various firearms rulings?

earthpig
GTFO HOer Wed Jun 29 14:54:57
Shit, "strife" wasn't the word they used. Whomever is taking my advice to read the ruling, please look for the synonym they did use, and post it here, so I can overrule my uses of quotes around the word strife in my previous post, and correct it accordingly, in order to mitigate civil strife that might arise from my previous post. :P

Seb
Member Wed Jun 29 14:57:16
Habebe:

"The clearest example I use is the right to go to my doctor and buy needles and heroin."

There are two arguments there:

1. Heroin is massively addictive and bad for you. So there are reasonably strong public benefit arguments for regulating it.

2. Because it is addictive there are strong arguments that expressed desire by people to use heroin to be discounted. Yes you are "free" to use it, but also, people addicted to heroin aren't really exercising a free choice to use it.

That said there are strong arguments against criminalising buying of drugs and use of drugs. It should really be supply of drugs.

This is not comparable to abortion however - in so far as we do not regard the fetus as a person or potential person - there is no harm to society or the individual from abortion; unlike class A drugs.

Seb
Member Wed Jun 29 15:02:25
The problem is, Habebe, you keep inserting a concept that is not present in the ruling:

A fetus isn't a person (or at least not until a certain point) so there is no harm.

You keep talking about "killing a fetus" as though it is.

And deciding if someone or something is a legal person is not something that should be left to states. Hell, if the supreme court can legislated that a company needs to be considered a person for free speech purposes and not leave that up to states.

And this is the basic problem here:

When we heroin supply and consumption is being made illegal, the tension in rights is between the potential consumer being protected from exploitation.

When abortion is being criminalised, whose right is being protected? Well, allegedly the fetus. But that means the fetus is a person and its a decision for the court as to when that is.

There is a bloody good reason a conservative court will never rule that a fetus is a person though. If they do there is suddenly a whole host of state obligations to protect the interests of that fetus in a whole range of areas that might actually require them to do things like make sure pregnant woman are clothed, housed and fed.

Seb
Member Wed Jun 29 15:03:07
And we can't be having that!

Seb
Member Wed Jun 29 15:04:13
So we have this absurdity:

The fetus is not recognised as a person by the court, the mothers right to seek medical interventions are curtailed, but there is no good philosophical basis for doing so.

Habebe
Member Wed Jun 29 15:09:02
"That being said. There's no time travel. This ruling did not come out a year or two after Roe, it came out 50 years later. 50 years after a segment of our population gained, and has enjoyed, a civil right, and they strip it away by fiat after huddling in the dark, after lying to the Senate to get onto that position of high power to begin with."

Again, not arguing the law as much as pragmatism.

Also they didnt lie. The issue is that justices no longer really answer any questions.

Seb, You make no compelling argument.

"Heroin is addictive" isnt an argument against medical privacy.

And again to clarify

I see reasonable cause to say this right Does exist within the constitution.

But in practice it never has existed, atleast from Roe onward.

"This is not comparable to abortion however - in so far as we do not regard the fetus as a person or potential person - there is no harm to society or the individual from abortion; unlike class A drugs."

Me controlling what I do with my body doesn't hurt my neighbor. If I was injecting my neighbor with drugs you would have a case.

We don't have a right to privacy *except when its bad for us.*

Habebe
Member Wed Jun 29 15:10:59
"concept that is not present in the ruling:

A fetus isn't a person (or at least not until a certain point) so there is no harm."

I never said that. You keep putting words in my mouth and arguinf against them. You do this all the time actually to everyone.

Habebe
Member Wed Jun 29 15:15:39
And lets be clear, there are legislative pathways to this. Which I would support.

I don't understand how this concept works with the left. There is.no distinction between legislating and interpretation of law, it seems that as long as the outcome is what is desired.

That's what I have an issue with.

I don't want the SC to just make shit up because I want something a certain way, that's what laws are for.

earthpig
GTFO HOer Wed Jun 29 15:15:50
@Habebe -

If unsure and have to error either way, heroin loses because of the onerous burden users place, to a person more or less, on their community, on society, on the welfare safety net, and so on.

You can't really make a "oh but look at all these law abiding upstanding taxpaying citizens who are pillars of the community, who just happen to be addicted to _________ as their only vice" when it comes to heroin.

By contrast, pot passes that same "are there lots of examples of functional _____ addicts?" test, as does mushrooms, cigarettes, alcohol, I suspect cocaine might even pass that test too.... meth probably fails that same test right alongside heroin, however.

Doctor prescribed opiods technically also pass that test, my questions there surround the doctors doing the prescribing, and the can of worms thus opened is "ok, so right now all the _____ addicts suck at life, but would they cease to suck at life if it was state-sanctioned as it is with opiods?" and we can cross that bridge when we get there.

earthpig
GTFO HOer Wed Jun 29 15:19:02
As in, I know ahead of time that if you're a heroin addict, it's *NOT* going to be private for very long, because you're about to do a bunch of *other* criminal shit, and *not* just in the privacy of your doctor's office.

The privacy thing doesn't apply simply because it's not an option to begin with, the substance itself forecloses the possibility, there's no private heroin addict that takes care of their families, drives safely, doesn't steal if that's what it takes to get a fix, isn't a homeless person randomly yelling at passersby, and so on. That quite simply does not exist.

earthpig
GTFO HOer Wed Jun 29 15:46:24
Just to get back to the highly dubious abortion comparison, plenty of successful women have had abortions and done quite well (if you're a raging conservative, it goes without saying that all the women in your life will not disclose it to you, only those of us with more compassion and kindness get to know how incredibly prevalent abortion actually is), on the other hand when it's onerous to get abortions, well, that means we're looking at more welfare, prison, all that shit, higher taxes to pay for it (that the pro-life folks will of course fight to prevent) because your typical woman isn't going to make that gut-wrenching decision on a whim.

Habebe
Member Wed Jun 29 15:57:56

On a related note, its not just the left.

Once again I find Gorsuch more and more to be my favorite justice.

They ruled that the state of Oklohoma can prosecute non tribal members in Tribal lands.

Practically, it makes sense. Bybtheblaw it doesn't. I would be fine with an interim time to let the competing governing bodies come to a power sharing agreement of sorts. But this is clear government over reach.Tribal lands shoukd not be governed by the state, sort of defeats the purpose of tribal lands.

Ep,

1. I use heroin because of its general disdain by people.But the same logic would follow with other narcotics. Plenty of functional meth and coke addicts for example.

2. There may be many heroin/drug addicts that you didn't know were using as you pointed out, people keep things private.

I would never had suspected Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a heroin injector.

He wasnt out there rampantly committing a bunch of crimes.

kargen
Member Wed Jun 29 15:59:01
I'm hoping the big decision comes down Thursday morning. At least in my mind bigger than the guns, abortion, and prayer issues we have seen so far.

West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency could put an end to agencies being able to make policy. THis ruling if broadly applied would mean congress would have to enact the policies making it harder for them to hide cost and unpopular policy. Basically our elected officials would have to do their jobs instead of allowing agencies to do it for them.
Even if limited in scope it would mean congress not the EPA would have to set emission standards and regulations. I'm all for policy being made by those we elect instead of people that are appointed to the position.

Habebe
Member Wed Jun 29 16:10:34
Also I would point out that I'm not comparing abortion per say to heroin use except that they are both private medical affairs.

Heroin has a strong connotation associated with it. But many opiates are prescribed for pain. Millions of functioning opiate addicts use daily.

This doesn't mean that we cant place limitations on either. Merely that they theoretically should be covered under medical privacy.

I would lump assisted suicide in there as well.

earthpig
GTFO HOer Wed Jun 29 16:15:35
"I would never had suspected Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a heroin injector."

Wikipedia (FWIW) says he was using stupid drugs as a young adult, stayed clean for a long time, relapsed in 2012, and died in 2014.

I'm assuming you picked an example that would support your point, not refute it. If so, then the best case one-off exception anecdote... isn't so exceptional, at least not at first glance.

Habebe
Member Wed Jun 29 16:21:28
Why? Because he died? People die from dumb shit they do all the time.

He knew the risks. Again, we dont ban people from making decisions just because they are dangerous for them.

The only reason we knew he was a drug user was because of his OD.

Assisted suicide has a near 100% chance of death, I stand by it being a private medical decision.

Habebe
Member Wed Jun 29 16:26:06
That doesn't change the fact that your assertion that addicts are out rampantly breaking other laws is tainted by your negatice steretyoed perception of drug use.

Again, I use the example of probably the most hated drug out there for a reason.

There are plenty of well known stimulant users. JFK reportedly used methamphetamine while in office. Countless artists have used cocaine, from Bill Maher to basically all of the old school SNL cast.

show deleted posts

Habebe Member	Wed Jun 29 14:15:42 Ive noticed what is driving many SC arguments from the left is the idea legislating from the bench. What I mean is that I personally agree with abortion being available. I personally see that as entirely different than thinking that a ruling on it should be based on that view, regardless of law. That's literally legislating from the bench. On Roe , Im not even in the camp that says there is not a right to privacy of medical decisions in out constitution. Im of the camp that says in legal practice that has not existed in the time of Roe, it was used almost soley for abortion. The clearest example I use is the right to go to my doctor and buy needles and heroin. If I have the right of privacy to have a fetus killed at whim , how can that logically not extend to shooting heroin? If such a right existed in practice why is it not applied evenly?
earthpig GTFO HOer	Wed Jun 29 14:48:48 The majority opinion is well argued. I would encourage anyone on either side of the debate to read it, at least the syllabus, or give the whole thing a good skimming, whatever you've got in you. Same with Thomas' concurring opinion. And I'll even grant that we probably wouldn't have had as much 'strife' over abortion, if not for Roe in the 1970s, since that 'strife' that Roe created is apparently a "strict constitutionalist" reason to rule this way or that, according to the conservative majority, the majority whom I will note declined to cite the "strife clause" of our Constitution that they claim to strictly and exclusively follow (must have been a typo). That being said. There's no time travel. This ruling did not come out a year or two after Roe, it came out 50 years later. 50 years after a segment of our population gained, and has enjoyed, a civil right, and they strip it away by fiat after huddling in the dark, after lying to the Senate to get onto that position of high power to begin with. Legal nuance aside, that is in fact de facto legislating from the bench, and a flagrant disregard of the centuries old United States pattern that "civil rights go up over time, not down." This is the most activist court since Dred Scott (another ruling I've found cause to re-read recently, since it also stripped civil rights from a segment of the population [freedmen in the north] who had previously enjoyed them), and it would take more than a moment of time to find a more flagrant example of "legislating from the bench" from the past couple decades than this. Furthermore if, as the conservative majority holds, mitigating "strife" is a valid constitutional reason to rule this way or that, if otherwise on the fence, the supreme court now finds themselves compelled to overturn THIS ruling post-haste (not 50 years from now).
Seb Member	Wed Jun 29 14:50:51 Habebe: "That's literally legislating from the bench." Yeah, that's bullshit though. The whole point of the US constitution was an exercise in radical liberalism that aimed to enshrine the (somewhat fictional) principle that people should be free to order their lives as they like, unless there is a bloody good reason to stop them. This idea that you need a specific right to abortion in law, or otherwise states are free to interfere is alien to that notion. When you keep talking about it as the "left trying to impose their ideology" it is a complete inversion. It is the Christian Right trying to impose their ideology on when a fetus is a person onto everyone else.
earthpig GTFO HOer	Wed Jun 29 14:51:38 I genuinely do not know the answer to this question, but are there other precedents of the supreme court removing previously enjoyed civil rights from a segment of our population, aside from Dred Scott and various firearms rulings?
earthpig GTFO HOer	Wed Jun 29 14:54:57 Shit, "strife" wasn't the word they used. Whomever is taking my advice to read the ruling, please look for the synonym they did use, and post it here, so I can overrule my uses of quotes around the word strife in my previous post, and correct it accordingly, in order to mitigate civil strife that might arise from my previous post. :P
Seb Member	Wed Jun 29 14:57:16 Habebe: "The clearest example I use is the right to go to my doctor and buy needles and heroin." There are two arguments there: 1. Heroin is massively addictive and bad for you. So there are reasonably strong public benefit arguments for regulating it. 2. Because it is addictive there are strong arguments that expressed desire by people to use heroin to be discounted. Yes you are "free" to use it, but also, people addicted to heroin aren't really exercising a free choice to use it. That said there are strong arguments against criminalising buying of drugs and use of drugs. It should really be supply of drugs. This is not comparable to abortion however - in so far as we do not regard the fetus as a person or potential person - there is no harm to society or the individual from abortion; unlike class A drugs.
Seb Member	Wed Jun 29 15:02:25 The problem is, Habebe, you keep inserting a concept that is not present in the ruling: A fetus isn't a person (or at least not until a certain point) so there is no harm. You keep talking about "killing a fetus" as though it is. And deciding if someone or something is a legal person is not something that should be left to states. Hell, if the supreme court can legislated that a company needs to be considered a person for free speech purposes and not leave that up to states. And this is the basic problem here: When we heroin supply and consumption is being made illegal, the tension in rights is between the potential consumer being protected from exploitation. When abortion is being criminalised, whose right is being protected? Well, allegedly the fetus. But that means the fetus is a person and its a decision for the court as to when that is. There is a bloody good reason a conservative court will never rule that a fetus is a person though. If they do there is suddenly a whole host of state obligations to protect the interests of that fetus in a whole range of areas that might actually require them to do things like make sure pregnant woman are clothed, housed and fed.
Seb Member	Wed Jun 29 15:03:07 And we can't be having that!
Seb Member	Wed Jun 29 15:04:13 So we have this absurdity: The fetus is not recognised as a person by the court, the mothers right to seek medical interventions are curtailed, but there is no good philosophical basis for doing so.
Habebe Member	Wed Jun 29 15:09:02 "That being said. There's no time travel. This ruling did not come out a year or two after Roe, it came out 50 years later. 50 years after a segment of our population gained, and has enjoyed, a civil right, and they strip it away by fiat after huddling in the dark, after lying to the Senate to get onto that position of high power to begin with." Again, not arguing the law as much as pragmatism. Also they didnt lie. The issue is that justices no longer really answer any questions. Seb, You make no compelling argument. "Heroin is addictive" isnt an argument against medical privacy. And again to clarify I see reasonable cause to say this right Does exist within the constitution. But in practice it never has existed, atleast from Roe onward. "This is not comparable to abortion however - in so far as we do not regard the fetus as a person or potential person - there is no harm to society or the individual from abortion; unlike class A drugs." Me controlling what I do with my body doesn't hurt my neighbor. If I was injecting my neighbor with drugs you would have a case. We don't have a right to privacy except when its bad for us.
Habebe Member	Wed Jun 29 15:10:59 "concept that is not present in the ruling: A fetus isn't a person (or at least not until a certain point) so there is no harm." I never said that. You keep putting words in my mouth and arguinf against them. You do this all the time actually to everyone.
Habebe Member	Wed Jun 29 15:15:39 And lets be clear, there are legislative pathways to this. Which I would support. I don't understand how this concept works with the left. There is.no distinction between legislating and interpretation of law, it seems that as long as the outcome is what is desired. That's what I have an issue with. I don't want the SC to just make shit up because I want something a certain way, that's what laws are for.
earthpig GTFO HOer	Wed Jun 29 15:15:50 @Habebe - If unsure and have to error either way, heroin loses because of the onerous burden users place, to a person more or less, on their community, on society, on the welfare safety net, and so on. You can't really make a "oh but look at all these law abiding upstanding taxpaying citizens who are pillars of the community, who just happen to be addicted to _________ as their only vice" when it comes to heroin. By contrast, pot passes that same "are there lots of examples of functional _____ addicts?" test, as does mushrooms, cigarettes, alcohol, I suspect cocaine might even pass that test too.... meth probably fails that same test right alongside heroin, however. Doctor prescribed opiods technically also pass that test, my questions there surround the doctors doing the prescribing, and the can of worms thus opened is "ok, so right now all the _____ addicts suck at life, but would they cease to suck at life if it was state-sanctioned as it is with opiods?" and we can cross that bridge when we get there.
earthpig GTFO HOer	Wed Jun 29 15:19:02 As in, I know ahead of time that if you're a heroin addict, it's NOT going to be private for very long, because you're about to do a bunch of other criminal shit, and not just in the privacy of your doctor's office. The privacy thing doesn't apply simply because it's not an option to begin with, the substance itself forecloses the possibility, there's no private heroin addict that takes care of their families, drives safely, doesn't steal if that's what it takes to get a fix, isn't a homeless person randomly yelling at passersby, and so on. That quite simply does not exist.
earthpig GTFO HOer	Wed Jun 29 15:46:24 Just to get back to the highly dubious abortion comparison, plenty of successful women have had abortions and done quite well (if you're a raging conservative, it goes without saying that all the women in your life will not disclose it to you, only those of us with more compassion and kindness get to know how incredibly prevalent abortion actually is), on the other hand when it's onerous to get abortions, well, that means we're looking at more welfare, prison, all that shit, higher taxes to pay for it (that the pro-life folks will of course fight to prevent) because your typical woman isn't going to make that gut-wrenching decision on a whim.
Habebe Member	Wed Jun 29 15:57:56 On a related note, its not just the left. Once again I find Gorsuch more and more to be my favorite justice. They ruled that the state of Oklohoma can prosecute non tribal members in Tribal lands. Practically, it makes sense. Bybtheblaw it doesn't. I would be fine with an interim time to let the competing governing bodies come to a power sharing agreement of sorts. But this is clear government over reach.Tribal lands shoukd not be governed by the state, sort of defeats the purpose of tribal lands. Ep, 1. I use heroin because of its general disdain by people.But the same logic would follow with other narcotics. Plenty of functional meth and coke addicts for example. 2. There may be many heroin/drug addicts that you didn't know were using as you pointed out, people keep things private. I would never had suspected Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a heroin injector. He wasnt out there rampantly committing a bunch of crimes.
kargen Member	Wed Jun 29 15:59:01 I'm hoping the big decision comes down Thursday morning. At least in my mind bigger than the guns, abortion, and prayer issues we have seen so far. West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency could put an end to agencies being able to make policy. THis ruling if broadly applied would mean congress would have to enact the policies making it harder for them to hide cost and unpopular policy. Basically our elected officials would have to do their jobs instead of allowing agencies to do it for them. Even if limited in scope it would mean congress not the EPA would have to set emission standards and regulations. I'm all for policy being made by those we elect instead of people that are appointed to the position.
Habebe Member	Wed Jun 29 16:10:34 Also I would point out that I'm not comparing abortion per say to heroin use except that they are both private medical affairs. Heroin has a strong connotation associated with it. But many opiates are prescribed for pain. Millions of functioning opiate addicts use daily. This doesn't mean that we cant place limitations on either. Merely that they theoretically should be covered under medical privacy. I would lump assisted suicide in there as well.
earthpig GTFO HOer	Wed Jun 29 16:15:35 "I would never had suspected Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a heroin injector." Wikipedia (FWIW) says he was using stupid drugs as a young adult, stayed clean for a long time, relapsed in 2012, and died in 2014. I'm assuming you picked an example that would support your point, not refute it. If so, then the best case one-off exception anecdote... isn't so exceptional, at least not at first glance.
Habebe Member	Wed Jun 29 16:21:28 Why? Because he died? People die from dumb shit they do all the time. He knew the risks. Again, we dont ban people from making decisions just because they are dangerous for them. The only reason we knew he was a drug user was because of his OD. Assisted suicide has a near 100% chance of death, I stand by it being a private medical decision.
Habebe Member	Wed Jun 29 16:26:06 That doesn't change the fact that your assertion that addicts are out rampantly breaking other laws is tainted by your negatice steretyoed perception of drug use. Again, I use the example of probably the most hated drug out there for a reason. There are plenty of well known stimulant users. JFK reportedly used methamphetamine while in office. Countless artists have used cocaine, from Bill Maher to basically all of the old school SNL cast.
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