[ExI] new covid case rates

[Dan TheBookMan]

While this sounds like a great comeback, the problem is both the cases
I mentioned had huge effects on the growth of government. I can
multiply examples, but the point still stands. This is why I made my
parenthetical comment that you've tried to turn around:

'This isn’t to say every last thing the Court has done has been bad,
but ignoring the bad — and there are more bad cases than the two very
serious ones I mentioned — here is no more cherry-picking.'

And looking at the track record of the Supreme Court overall while not
easy doesn't seem to yield a record of just a few bad decisions
peppered in a sea of good ones. Instead, it seems to vary over time
depending on the mix of justices and the overall culture. (Look at
Fourth Amendment cases, for instance. They're all over the place from
limiting police power to giving them carte blanche depending on the
case.) This means, to me, that the Supreme Court isn't really special
and somehow impervious to outside influences. The same applies more
broadly to the Constitution. To see either as a reliable brake on
power is really magical thinking in the political/legal realm. Again,
this isn't to say it never does good work -- just to point out that it
often does really bad work, bad in the sense that leaves a big impact
over a long time. Those Natives who tried to use the courts to keep
their land aren't just a minor outcome.

You might say maybe this is the best that can be done inside the ambit
of, say, having a national government. I'm not so sure. And I'm
definitely not sure that we must remain inside that ambit. One thing
you might consider, since it seems you (and Spike) don't want any
radical changes is to look at the makeup of who gets on the federal
courts. Most federal judges are former prosecutors. All things being
equal, one might expect it'd be a near even mix between former
prosecutors and former defense attorneys, btu the ratios are way off:

https://www.cato.org/commentary/there-are-way-too-many-prosecutors-federal-judiciary

Note that if this is true, the ratio is 4 to 1 or greater -- former
prosecutors to former defense attorneys. That's got to create a huge
bias in the system, don't you think? I'm sure you don't believe the
Constitution or whatnot somehow attenuates in an effective way the
biases resulting from this imbalance. Wouldn't the obvious remedy here
be to shift appointments to former defense attorneys -- and probably
do this for years to come to address the previous imbalance?

Regards,

Dan

On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 4:14 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Cherrypicking some awful Supreme Court decisions does not invalidate the role they have played in keeping us, mostly, to the promises involved in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.   It's impossible to say just how important they have been but the contributions they have made are significant.  bill w
>
> On Wed, Apr 7, 2021 at 7:35 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Apr 7, 2021, at 4:24 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> Dan, you make it sound like the Supreme Court is a useless institution.  Bill W
>>
>> I’m not sure where you’re going to go with that. Spike seems to think the Constitution prevents tyranny among many other things. Are you arguing that it does this via the Supreme Court? That’s a problem in the two cases I mentioned. With regard to the Sedition Act, the Supreme did nothing because judicial review hadn’t been established. (Interesting that the Constitution was ratified in 1788, but judicial review wasn’t established until 1803. In fact, judicial review isn’t explicitly in the Constitution. It’s an interpretation of Article VI based on an 1803 ruling.)
>>
>> The Supreme Court also had some strange rulings with regard to indigenous peoples. One merely has to look at the sad history Indian removal and treaty violations. Per the Constitutions treaties are not supposed to be set aside, but the history Indian treaties is one of exactly that. It merely shows that the powerful do what they want when the weak have only a constitution or a treaty to guard them. To pretend otherwise overlooks the entire history of the US in its treatment of indigenous peoples. (This isn’t to say every last thing the Court has done has been bad, but ignoring the bad — and there are more bad cases than the two very serious ones I mentioned — here is no more cherry-picking.)
>>
>> Also, none of this is really new here. I’ve argued these points here and elsewhere before. The usual outcome is my comments are ignored and then at a later date similar points (ones of praising the Constitution) are made as if my comments had never been made before. (I only repeat my criticisms in hopes that some here understand them, but I don’t expect much. Also, none of my criticisms are all that original. Other libertarians — George H. Smith, Roderick Long, Sheldon Richman, Michael Huemer — made much the same criticisms decades ago. I’d expect people who claim to be libertarians and especially who are older than me to know something of this — that it wouldn’t come as a shock whether they agreed with my criticisms or not.)
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Dan