[ExI] The Handmaid's Tale

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 2:05 AM Anton Sherwood <bronto at pobox.com> wrote:
> On 2020-9-26 18:01, Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote:
>> I'd also be inclined to having similar terms limits on federal judges
>> across the board, making a similar around a decade limit. This would
>> stop what we have now: one president who's really got a huge number of
>> appointments because the Senate stymied the process for the previous
>> president. (Not that the previous president was somehow better, but
>> gaming the process managed to allow one party -- more one faction of
>> one party to nearly take over the judiciary below the USSC level.)
>>
>> I hope they consider ways of making appointments to the courts way
>> less political -- maybe by using sortition or distributing the
>> process. For instance? Sortition, as mentioned elsewhere, or rotating
>> who gets to decide appoints, letting me out of the box... Other things
>> to make political input harder in the selection process. None of these
>> would be foolproof.
>
> Stop me if you've heard this one before, but here is my modest proposal:
> Abolish the Federal judiciary.  Let "federal" matters be heard by the
> courts of the appropriate State, and appealed (once by each party to the
> case) to any other State.

That could happen now in a sense if the nation as a whole adopted
something like the Principles of '98:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_%2798

Sadly, many of the folks promoting them today are ideologically unreliable.

> The Tenth Amendment would be taken more seriously; and precedents would
> develop by consensus among equals rather than by infallible decree from
> the apex.
>
> Such a reform will obviously never happen, as it must be initiated by
> Federal politicians.

If it were to happen, it would probably mean because the central
government had to do it to keep whatever power it had left... because
individual state governments had become more powerful (with respect to
the central government).

Regards,

Dan
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http://author.to/DanUst