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The Supreme Court is Reshaping the Separation of Powers
Justice Kagan, dissenting in Trump v. Slaughter:
“On top of granting certiorari before judgment in this case, the Court today issues a stay enabling the President to immediately discharge, without any cause, a member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). That stay, granted on our emergency docket, is just the latest in a series. Earlier this year, the same majority, by the same mechanism, permitted the President to fire without cause members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merits Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. … Congress, as everyone agrees, prohibited each of those presidential removals. … Under the relevant statutes, the entities just listed are “classic independent agenc[ies]"—"‘multi-member, bipartisan commission[s]’ whose members serve staggered terms and cannot be removed except for good reason.” … Yet the majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President. He may now remove—so says the majority, though Congress said differently—any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies' bipartisanship and independence.
I dissented from the majority’s prior stay orders, and today do so again. Under existing law, what Congress said goes—as this Court unanimously decided nearly a century ago. In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, we rejected a claim of presidential prerogative identical to the one made in this case. … Congress, we held, may restrict the President’s power to remove members of the FTC, as well as other agencies performing “quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial” functions, without violating the Constitution. … To reach a different result requires reversing the rule stated in Humphrey’s: It entails overriding rather than accepting Congress’s judgment about agency design. … Because the majority’s stay does just that, I respectfully dissent. Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”
From Isaac Bradshaw via Bluesky:
Ultimately the split in US politics is between those who bear false witness against their neighbors for gain - and those who do not. The end state of this sort of split is what we see now, where there can be no compromise because there is not a common grasp of reality.
It is ultimately impossible to civilly disagree over policy when you are enabled to choose your own reality based on consumer preference.
Two Fatal Beliefs
Two harmful beliefs are that you are responsible for others' feelings and must never disappoint anyone.
Quit Social Media?
To save civil society, it’s essential to quit using harmful social media platforms and seek more meaningful ways to engage with the world.
How will we know when the frog has boiled?
From “How to Know When the Frog Has Boiled” by Damon Linker:
The point I want to make is a simple one: We tend to assume that a break from liberal democracy will take place in one blatantly illegal or unconstitutional act. When it happens, it will be obvious; if it never does, everything is fine.
But it’s also possible for a president to act in a way that is technically legal, for the Supreme Court to pronounce such acts constitutional, and for Congress to register no objection to them—while the acts themselves break substantively with principles that were once taken for granted and freely extended and applied to all. That is a circumstance in which the political system and public opinion would have evolved to the point where they are compatible with (and even mandate) blatantly illiberal governance.
To those inclined to defer to “the rule of law” and liberal proceduralism, this may look like business as usual. But it isn’t. It’s a country becoming at once something new and something worse—its outward forms remaining intact while its soul is hollowed out and degraded.
How will we know when we’ve gotten there? Perhaps only when we come to realize the extent to which our laws—and the Constitution—have already been reinterpreted to be compatible with formerly unthinkable acts.