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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Field Marshal of Cracked
Sounds about right. And by "right", I mean "appropriately advances the Republican agenda of abolishing poverty by setting the poor on fire."
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
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You're assuming that democracy is always good. Remember that American republicanism was built on the principle of balancing democracy with liberalism (as in, people's personal liberties, not the modern definition). The judiciary has (since Marshall) been seen as one of the anchoring points of liberalism over democracy - it's one of the mechanisms that exist to tell "We the People" that no, we can't do that because it would be a violation of an individual's rights. Hence, insulating it from public pressure is probably a good thing. Alexis de Tocqueville once said that the judiciary kept American democracy from being "all sail and no anchor," and it can't do that if judges have to campaign for their positions.
So yeah, if the people might vote to remove the restraints on democracy in the Aristotelian sense (mob rule), the idea that they might vote wrong is an argument against letting them vote.
And if the appellate judges are elected, it's an election year and the defendant is black?
edited 26th Apr '16 11:48:08 AM by Ramidel
A racist judge usually is not going to apply a sentence that exceeds the federal maximum.
What he IS going to do is apply the federal maximum to every black defendant given a guilty verdict in his courtroom. He doesn't need to exceed the limit because the limits already tend to be a pretty wide margin to allow context-driven flexibility in sentencing.
Context, here, is supposed to have the definition of situations like, "THIS guy committed vehicular manslaughter while texting on his phone, and THAT guy committed the same crime while driving at 140 mph with enough alcohol in his system to kill a rhinoceros." But it gets interpreted by certain judges to mean, "That guy is black, so he gets the federal maximum."
edited 26th Apr '16 11:53:48 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.That only guarantees you a public defender. As I understand it, the LSC gives actual legal counsel and a real attorney, while a public defender's job is basically to convince you that the prosecution's plea bargain sounds really good and you should probably take it because if it goes to court, you're going to lose.
If you have to rely on a public defender, you might as well represent yourself because your chances of winning are about the same: circling the drain 'round "hopeless".
edited 26th Apr '16 11:58:44 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver covered that, too.
TL;DW - it's less that Public Defenders aren't interested in helping people, it's that most of them are severely overworked, to the point that they can only spend minutes on each case that's part of their workload.
edited 26th Apr '16 2:20:54 PM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"The basic idea behind all judges being appointed is that that's how checks and ballences work, you have the directly elected leader (president, governor, mayor), the proportionally/representatives elected legislator (congress, state legislator, town council) and the professional appointed judiciary (supreme court, state courts, local judges). The idea is that the three systems compliment one another, the judges avoid tyranny of the majority while the elected groups avoid tyranny of the minority.
The system of separation of powers works, there's nothing special about a very local level that means it doesn't work out that level, if anything at a local level it's most important, because that's where the risk of tyranny of the majority is at its greatest.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI voted! Sucks that I knew almost none of the names in the downticket primary races. Which is, I suppose, my own fault for not paying attention to them. Some dude was outside trying to get Democrats to write in the name of a local assemblyman candidate who was on the Republican ticket. I have no idea why. Democracy is weird.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"If you've pulled one of the three groups then it's even more important to keep the two remaining groups separate, if there aren't three groups keeping each other in check then you need the two remaining groups to function differently so that they don't become one and undo all separation of power.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranTrump’s Right That The GOP Primary Is Unfair — It Favors Him
. An analysis on how unbalanced the weight of votes in the Republican primary is - in some polities it takes 52 votes to elect a delegate in others over 10,000. This kind of imbalance has been banned for Congress for a long time.
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Which is why I'm saying they should both be elected? If the executive branch appointed the judicial branch, as with traditional three-part separation of powers, then at the local level where the legislative branch is effectively nonexistent, that would mean that the elected executive can basically do whatever the hell they want. Faced with a judge that's also elected, however, that means the judge's loyalty is (at least theoretically) to the voters, rather than to the executive that appointed them, which means they're less likely to go along with whatever the executive wants just because the executive wants it.
edited 26th Apr '16 3:30:00 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.@post 120163: "It's so" doesn't mean "it's good". The fact that the States themselves lack a legislature is another artefact of the weird way the United States were "built", as it were. Arguing that it means that you need to further tear down the putting-spokes-in-wheels act named "checks and balances" is like arguing that since the plumbing's not working, we might as well flood the house with sewage.
On empty crossroads, seek the eclipse -- for when Sol and Lua align, the lost shall find their way home.
X4 But shouldn't the judge's loyalty be to the law? Not to either the local electorate or to the local elected officials? They should be appointed but not by local politicians, I'm pretty sure my county council don't have any power over the country judiciary (as much as there is one) that would be insane. The local judges will be beholden to national judges, the chain of command only merges at the very top.
I'm pretty sure that's how most of the rest of the developed world does it, the judiciary is its own entirely self contained thing with links at the top to the rest of government, but the bottom level isn't linked at all.
edited 26th Apr '16 4:50:06 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranNow, at the local level, there's basically no legislative branch, so it's essentially just the executive and the judicial. If the executive appoints the judicial, then the executive controls everything because they'll just appoint people who agree with them, so there's no checks and/or balances against the executive. By making judges an elected rather than appointed position, then they're able to serve as an effective check on/balance against the executive, since they're not beholden to the executive for their position.
In other words, in local politics, electing rather than appointing judges adds effective checks and balances rather than removing them.
And yes, adding a legislature at the local level and running everything just like at the higher levels of government would probably be an even more effective system, but doing so would require rewriting almost every state constitution in the country. Unlike the federal constitution, which reserves powers for the states, state constitutions give very little power to local governments — which is why there aren't any real legislatures below the state level. Whether this is a good thing or not you can decide for yourself, but it's the system we have at the moment and it's not changing in the foreseeable future, so in the meantime elected low-level judges is the best compromise we have.
Being bound by the law and loyal to it are two different things, all judges are bound by the law, because you know it's the law, but being loyal to it? In both word and spirit? That's far from guaranteed. A judge's interpretation of the law should be based purely on the law and the case at hand, not on personal political concerns.
You've literally got judges handing out harsher sentences during election years, that's relay fucked up. A system where your punishment is determined not only by the crime you commit but also how close to an election you commit it one that is in need of change.
So yes we'e back to square one, how do you ensure a fair system that doesn't punish people extra harshly for political reasons while still ensuring judicial independence? By giving the power to appoint judges not to voters or local elected officials but to the judges higher up the judicial chain. The same way you don't vote on who's head of your local military base, their appointed by someone up the chain and the chain I'd st the top monitored by the proper oversight officials/other branches.
edited 26th Apr '16 5:45:17 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranUpdate: Trump has swept all five primaries tonight; Clinton takes Delaware.
Sanders seems to be holding on in Connecticut and has a decent early lead in RI though.
edited 26th Apr '16 5:41:13 PM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
