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We have 100 senators and 435 congressmen making law but 9 (ultimately) interpreting it.
I think 100 judges would be great. I'm tired of seeing extremely important issues being decided on counts of 5-4.
the decision: http://www.scribd.com/doc/231968677/...ision-dissents
We have 100 senators and 435 congressmen making law but 9 (ultimately) interpreting it.
I think 100 judges would be great. I'm tired of seeing extremely important issues being decided on counts of 5-4.
With 100 judges, you'd likely get only a handful of cases decided in any given year, given the consensus building that would be necessary to gain a majority on any particular issue. And, at that, you'd get such fractured opinions that they'd most likely provide no real workable framework for application in real life contexts.
I'm not sure that either of those possibilities would tend to make the Court a particularly useful ins ution. (setting aside political views about the usefulness of the Court with its current makeup).
As it is, there are more than 600 other federal judges who are working on the sorts of issues that reach the Supreme Court and work through arguments concerning those issues. So, there are actually more judges deciding these types of issues than there are legislators. And, yes, I saw your word "ultimately," but the truth is that on a significant number of issues of federal (and Cons utional) law, the ultimate word on those issues is coming from the Courts of Appeals and not from the Supreme Court.
Last edited by FromWayDowntown; 06-30-2014 at 11:54 AM.
Changing the number of justices would NEVER get past the Senate Repugs (as long as their extreme right-wing, activist, political operatives hold the 5-4 advantage).
I'd probably be ok with it considering that in some instances, interpreting the law is in effect making law. I'm sure they could figure out a system to provide framework.
And sure, 100 is probably over the top, but 9 at the highest level sucks.
I tend to think that the People would prefer that their judiciary be a bit more responsive than having its Supreme Court deciding less than 20 cases a year (if that many).
If the concern is for narrow majorities, I don't think changing the number of justices will change that. The surer way to get to that end, I think, would be to elect the justices or to hold retention votes for them.
Wow. That would be crazy. It would be a double edged sword with huge pendulum swings in precedent as party majorities come and go in popularity...
To be sure, I'm not a fan of either expanding the Court or electing its justices.
Liberal tears taste so ing good!!!!!
I like the idea of electing judges vs one president appointing his party choice.
You would have loved the court when Reagan, Bush, etc. won by landslides. They would have carried the supreme court on their coattails.
The SCOTUS agrees on most everything. It's only a few cases a year that split on partisan lines. And even then its not always because red team wants this, blue team wants that. It's more "will this hinder the march towards unlimited government power" vs "how can I help my corporate overlords today?"
Without an electoral college (and with positions that wouldn't have any particularly reasonable need to be geographically fixed) I'm not even sure that landslides would be necessary to pack the Court with partisans of either persuasion at various points in time.
By a 5–4 vote on Monday, the United States Supreme Court settled a dispute that Justice Samuel Alito said was “at its core about the rights of women versus the rights of people.”
Writing for the majority, Justice Alito wrote, “It is the duty of this Court, whenever it sees that the rights of people are being threatened, to do our best to safeguard those rights. In this case, it is clear that people’s rights were being threatened by women.”
Acknowledging that some women “might argue that they, too, have some claim to being people,” Justice Alito wrote, “That is an interesting question for another day.”
While the Court’s decision caused an uproar across the country, it received a big thumbs-up from one of the Justices who voted with the majority, Antonin Scalia.
“This has been a crappy year or so around here, what with all that gay-marriage stuff, but at least we finished strong,” he said.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...orowitz%20(93)
Damn are you ever going to grasp what satire is?
If it was by election, they would probably have to have 18-year terms with one judge elected every 2 years or something like that.
heard some interesting possibilities on NPR
what if a privately held company's owners interpreted their religion as forbidding the federal law on minimum wage?
Now that the Repug SCOTUS5 has opened the door for companies' owners to trump federal law with their religious beliefs, impose their religion on their employees, where does it stop?
and you can bet very safely the self-congratulating, self-satisfied, self-righteous Christian Taleban won't stop with this one ruling.
btw, "privately held" company covers a LOT of employees:
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/eggh45efje/1-cargill-8/
My favorite flavor
U.S. Senator Agrees With Supreme Court Decision Because Women Use Birth Control ‘Largely For Recreational Behavior’
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/06/30/3455063/senator-agrees-women-use-birth-control-for-recreational-behavior-hours-after-hobby-lobby-decision/
you tea bagger libertarians really got some thorough-going nasty, ignorant assholes leading y'all around.
You sure are a hysterical little Boutons. This ruling only applied to 4 current drugs that abort the fertilized egg.
I could give a if women use the morning after pill but some people do. The SCOTUS ruling was totally consistent with the first amendment.
That's true, but only if you agree with the preliminary notion that corporations can have cons utional rights (and if you can explain why, then, they shouldn't be treated the same way as people in all other legal respects).
bull , per usual, right wingers perverting the 1st amendtment like they pervert murderously the 2nd amendment.
there was nothing FORCING the closely-held religious extremist to give the contraception to the employees. the employees were not FORCED to use the contraception
total freedom for all parties.
As Hilllary said, the slope is very slippery, and now the Christian Taleban (and why not other religions, even Flying Spaghetti Monster) will use this precedent to impose their religion on their employees, even worse in the context of the ty job market where employees simply can't go find another, equal job that doesn't have religious oppression.
suggests Hobby Lobby's (successful) RFRA claim violates the Establishment clause:
http://www.vanderbiltlawreview.org/c...ible-Women.pdf
How Many Companies Will Be Touched By Court's Contraception Ruling?
When the Supreme Court ruled Monday that "closely held" corporations don't have to pay for workers' contraception, you may have assumed the decision applied only to family-owned businesses.
Wrong.
An estimated 9 out of 10 businesses are "closely held."
However, some benefits experts question just how many of those companies would want to assert religious views.
The IRS defines a closely held corporation as having more than half the value of its stock owned by five or fewer individuals. That's individuals — not just family members.
Closely held companies tend to be small — many are far too tiny to offer any type of insurance. But some are huge and include some of the best-known names in American business, such as Mars Inc., with more than 70,000 workers, and Cargill Inc., with more than 140,000.
It appears that under Monday's ruling, such huge enterprises may be able to refuse to offer contraception coverage if they assert a religious view. The majority of the justices said: "Protecting the free-exercise rights of closely held corporations thus protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control them."
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, noting that " 'closely held' is not synonymous with 'small.' "
In her written opinion, she suggests there may be many future legal battles involving these large, complex enterprises because the Supreme Court's majority fails to "offer any instruction on how to resolve the disputes that may crop up among corporate owners over religious values and accommodations."
In other words, even if the number of owners is small, they could have big disagreements about religious issues. "How is the arbiter of a religion-based intra-corporate controversy to resolve the disagreement?" Ginsburg asked in her dissent.
The 5-4 majority opinion said that protecting the free-exercise rights of owners of corporations such as Hobby Lobby Stores, Conestoga Wood Specialties and Mardel protects religious liberty. Such owners don't forfeit their religious rights just because they choose to organize their business as corporation, not a sole proprietorship or partnership.
A study from New York University, done in 2002, showed that slightly more than half of private sector employees work for closely held companies rather than companies that publicly trade stock on open exchanges.
Still, even though most companies are closely held, the number of companies refusing to offer contraception coverage may turn out to be quite small, according to Tim Goodman, an employee benefits expert and partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney.
"There may be lots of these types of corporations, but not many that would assert" this religious view, Goodman said. "It takes effort and energy to bring these assertions, so it takes someone with very strong religious beliefs" to make the case, he said.
Hobby Lobby Ruling Cuts Into Contraceptive Mandate
Goodman said that to follow in the path of Hobby Lobby, a company would have to expend a lot of time working with its insurer to shape a special policy. And then an employee could bring a court challenge, questioning the employers' religious sincerity. And there could be bad publicity, both with customers and potential employees, he said.
( note: but it's an employer's job market now, and will be for years, PLENTY of religious-extremist-minded job candidates to choose from )
For most company owners, "you are a lot more interested in making your business work than taking this on," he said.
So most likely, changes to insurance coverage will be confined to smaller, family-owned businesses with very deeply held religious views, he said.
http://www.npr.org/2014/06/30/327071...m_campaign=app
As I said, the precedent opens the door for all kinds of . Thanks, Repugs!
How Hobby Lobby Ruling Could Limit Access to Birth Control
The Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case raises at least two questions: How will it affect access to contraception, and what do the drugs and devices the company objected to on religious grounds actually do?
A growing body of evidence shows that it is already hard to obtain certain kinds of contraception, and the ruling seems likely to increase barriers. A significant number of pharmacists — 6 percent in one study — say they would refuse to dispense oral contraceptives or other medications to patients for moral reasons if they were permitted to do so.
This dynamic played out in a recent study by a health services researcher, Tracey Wilkinson, who had callers pose as adolescents to see if pharmacies had emergency contraception and would dispense it – legally – to them.
The first key finding was that in about 20 percent of pharmacies, no emergency contraception, like Plan B, was available at all.
Even when it was, however, almost 20 percent of the time adolescents were told, incorrectly, that they couldn’t have it under any cir stances. They were told this significantly more often when calling pharmacies in low-income neighborhoods.
As part of the study, Dr. Wilkinson also had physicians call the pharmacies. Misinformation was given to them only 3 percent of the time. For some reason, those in the pharmacies were more likely to make it harder for the patients themselves to get the emergency contraception they could legally obtain.
If other family-owned corporations choose to emulate Hobby Lobby and win an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement for broad coverage of contraception, cost will become a higher barrier for more women. Emergency contraception costs, on average, $45 without insurance.
The cost of an IUD, one of the most effective forms of birth control, is considerable. It requires a visit to the doctor, and a procedure to have the device put in place. Medical exams, insertion, and follow-up visits can run upward of $1,000. Without insurance coverage, it’s likely that many women will be unable to use them.
The reason that contraception is covered at all is that the A.C.A. says that important preventive services must be covered by insurance.
After an extensive review made at the request of the government, the Ins ute of Medicine made eight recommendations for such services, including “a fuller range of contraceptive education, counseling, methods, and services so that women can better avoid unwanted pregnancies and space their pregnancies to promote optimal birth outcomes.”
The owners of Hobby Lobby told the Court that they were willing to cover some forms of contraception but believed that the so-called morning-after pills and two kinds of IUDs can cause what they believe to be a type of abortion, by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall or causing an already implanted egg to fail to thrive.
As colleagues have noted, the scientific consensus is against this idea, and it’s worth reviewing some basics here.
Even without contraception, fertilized eggs often fail to implant naturally.
Intrauterine devices are not often discussed in the lay media. That doesn’t mean they are uncommon. More than 15 percent of all women worldwide who are married or living with a partner use IUDs at the primary measure of birth control. Use in North America is lower, at around 2 percent.
IUDs come in a number of forms. They can be inert, or have copper or hormones embedded within them. Most scientists believe that they interfere with the ability of sperm to get to an egg in time to fertilize it before they die.
Research does not support the idea that they prevent fertilized eggs to implant. The journal Fertility and Sterility published a study in 1985 that followed three groups of women for 15 months. One group had an IUD, one group had their tubes tied, and one group was trying to get pregnant. They then measured hormone levels to see if fertilization occurred. It did so only in the group trying to get pregnant.
Another study found that a telltale sign of fertilization — a surge of the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin — occurred in only 1 percent of 100 cycles in women using IUDs. This would be consistent with the failure rate of IUDs in general. In other words, IUDs do not appear to work by aborting a fertilized egg.
Emergency contraception, which is really just a large dose of the hormones in a birth control pill, works in a similar manner. The pills can thicken the mucus in the cervix to make it difficult for sperm to reach the egg, and they prevent ovulation from occurring in the first place. Because the doses of medication are very short-term, they probably cannot affect the uterine lining in such a way as to affect implantation.
Moreover, the fact that both of these forms of contraception can fail, and allow pregnancies to occur, provides evidence that if a fertilization occurs, it can move on to implant and grow.
Regardless of the data, or lack of it, many still believe that these forms of contraception are different than others. Today, the Supreme Court gave those beliefs weight. This seems likely to make it harder for women to get contraception in the future.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/02...h-control.html
HL and other religious extremists, and Repugs who inflame them, DENY THE FACTS, naturally, habitiulally, that their ABORTIFACIENTS simply aren't. They "believe" bull and impose their bull on the non-believers under their control. just like the Taleban.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 07-01-2014 at 10:58 AM.
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