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To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
But you're distracting from the real question, of course. It appears that even the Trump administration is coming around to the idea that it's best to go after specific things, where they are strong, and enforce them broadly, using the hook of federal funding and existing mechanisms. As I suggested months ago. Not indiscriminate chemo for no purpose, no rhyme or reason, just blasting randomly. It's not like blasting randomly is going to solve these concerns you're now bringing up. It's just silly misdirection.
Which is why this method cannot work.
If indeed the Trump administration is "coming around" to the idea that things like having ideologues pro forma swear they aren't doing things according to their ideology rather than the formal rules will help, the administration is screwing up.
is undefined, so one cannot determine how generally scoped your claim is. My comment was very clearly making a scope argument (about your own argument), so this is just non-responsive.
Alternatively, the most natural of the charitable interpretations is that you agree with my scope claim and acknowledge that your own proposal suffers at least the same defects.
Slightly less charitably, you're just doubling down on misdirection and obfuscation. Bad faith argumentation stuff.
"This method" refers to:
My claim is that this will not work. University ideologues will just lie, and it will not be possible to punish them for it.
Oh hey, if only I had an entire comment responding to that, which you seem to not have engaged with.
Don't blame him. I already addressed the "sometimes the government is held by my opponents" problem, and when I said Republicans should do exactly what Democrats have done to harden their policy achievements, and listed specific means and methods they did of achieving this, you deployed tactical ignorance and said I hadn't laid out any plan at all, or even the concepts of a plan.
I spelled out how exactly you were missing anything approaching a plan, specifically for universities.
Indeed, you did not have that. You literally had:
That's it. That's all you had. We can just read your comment and see that that's all that you had. How is that supposed to work? Give me an example, an idea, a process, an anything. You claim my ignorance is "tactical". I claim my ignorance is just ignorance. I honestly have no idea how this is supposed to work. I mean, can I just sue you right now in a way that lets my neighbor sue you some more in case I die next year? Just all out of magic or something?
The specific behavior is called a cy pres settlement; where the recipient of a settlement is not available, or where their personal damages represent only a small portion of all people harmed, a judge may authorize a large 'donation' to a third party as part of a settlement.
The easiest case is where the federal government is acting as a 'friendly' defendant. Rojas v. FAA? The FAA can suddenly have a change of hard, and decide that in addition to giving a million bucks to the harmed parties and their lawyers, they can also want to give a hundred million dollars to a I Hate Affirmative Action group.
There's limits to this approach; while cy pres settlements are very hard to challenge, it can happen, and some settlements in general end up worth no more than the value of the toilet paper they were written on after an administration changes. A naive person would argue that recent court cases have shown the willingness of Biden-friendly judges to put the kibosh on those efforts; a remotely aware one would recognize that those principles don't cut both ways.
But it's still a powerful tool, and one that's very hard to undo. Meanwhile, thanks to the very slow pace of any attempt to bring a court case to full and final judgement and the increasing tolerance of standing gamesmanship, it's near impossible to actual complete a judgement by putting a law on the books, or force an unfriendly administration to do anything.
((Though not impossible. There's another very dangerous option, and that's intentionally arguing cases as poorly as possible or with such 'incompetence' as to be sure that the courts will not 'agree with your claimed position'. As I continue to be fond of pointing out, Guiliani could absolutely use a job where making false claims, butt-dialing privileged information, and making incoherent arguments is tolerated, and the feds love two out of the three.
You would think, given the impact of res judicata, that this would be extremely harmful, and you'd be right! Too bad fewer and fewer people care.))
Thanks for a cite to the type of settlement; that's valuable information.
I guess where I'm at is that all this is fine. You and @WhiningCoil have identified a way to get money, and it is hard to undo that getting of money. But I guess I view it as that the following is the plan:
There doesn't seem to be anything special about this form of getting money as opposed to any other form of getting money (except that it's bad and the left did it, so it's a chance to get in a partisan dig). I'm not sure why I couldn't just swap some other form of getting money into this plan and conclude that it will solve the problem in the same way. I guess it's because you're deciding that you're going to get that money from the universities when you sue them? Uhhh, so how does that help? Is that what was demonstrated to work in the past? Did prior Democratic administrations actually fix something about the banks or whoever they sued when they got money from them? If not, then ??? If so, then my sense is that it would probably have been something about the thing that they actually sued about and other terms of the settlement that involved them changing some behavior (rather than just giving money) that actually 'fixed' them. And those things are totally missing from this plan.
This (bad, partisan) way of getting money may be doable and hard to undo, but it seems to not even have a passing familiarity with solving any of the actual problems we set out to solve. We were talking about ways to fix universities, the concern came up that future administrations might undo something, then we sort of jumped randomly to "this is a thing that's hard to undo!". I mean, we could have jumped to me eating a hamburger. It's hard to undo me eating a hamburger. But's it's not terribly relevant to the conversation in any other way, either.
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