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zataomm  4mo ago (text post)   5354 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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This whole subject reminds me that I’ve long thought it would be a good change for the president to be appointed by state legislatures on a weighted majority-of-majorities basis, with a weighting system based on census data. So much of the issues with American politics are because congress has zero accountability to the states’ governments themselves, only to individual voters to some extent.

In general, direct elections to the federal level could be done away with as much as possible. It’s inefficient and confusing for people not only to elect 3+ levels of representative but then to do so in multiple forms (eg bicameral states, and congress itself for both senators and reps).

Recentering more politics around the states makes state politics more important and means that any president with a more radical plan is likely to be supported by a large ground-up movement in state houses across the country, instead of Trump being a one man band whose movement largely begins and ends with him.

My understanding is that basically the reason we don't do that anymore is that as the federal positions mattered more, the state legislature elections turned into proxy elections for the federal positions and the state issues were getting ignored. If you're going to have an indirect system for selecting the federal positions, you would probably want to either (1) keep it separate from state elections or (2) decide to go even harder on giving power to the federal government (so it doesn't matter as much if the state legislatures aren't governing).

How about (3) - go back on giving all power to the federal government? If most issues are state or local issues, because the federal constitution's short allowlist is respected, you pretty much have to pay attention to non-federal candidates.

That ship sadly sailed

All we need is a slightly sane judiciary branch to revisit Wickard v. Filburn. From there most federal laws would be rightly determined to be unconstitutional.

I think if we just took the takings clause seriously that would be better than overturning Wickard. And honestly, the judiciary is starting to take takings more seriously b

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