SCOTUS and whatnot

[chasfh]

Also, ending the Stay in Mexico policy will give Republicans a solid motivating issue to campaign on to blunt the Democrats' power to campaign on choice.

[Tiger337]

7 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Republicans must have told the Court they need cheaper labor than even Americans of color will provide.

Cheap labor for business is one of the main drivers of illegal immigration.  If they punished the businesses for hiring illegal immigrants, I believe that illegal immigration would decline significantly.  

Edited June 30, 2022 by Tiger337

[chasfh]

2 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Cheap labor for business is one of the main drivers of illegal immigration.  If they punished the businesses for hiring illegal immigrants, I believe that illegal immigration would decline significantly.  

Punishing well-to-do white people won't get them the lower middle class white vote. Punishing poor brown people sure will, though.

[Tiger337]

1 hour ago, smr-nj said:

Why?????  Shit.

https://apple.news/AgsPJwB80S_mRz1QOsQaH-Q

This is the real reason the GOP donors wanted a right wing reactionary court.  They don't care about abortion at all.  It's all about giving more power to big business to do whatever they want without regard for the health and safety of employees or the country.  

[CMRivdogs]

 

[Motown Bombers]

They aren't even trying to hide it anymore. 

[Motown Bombers]

 

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

 

this a case where good policy is bad law and vice versa. It is up to Congress to legislate restrictions on the use of carbon as CO2 is not a 'pollutant' under any definition already under the EPA's jurisdiction. So as terrible a climate policy decision as this ruling is, taken as a purely legal decision, I think it is more correct than incorrect.  It's is a bad precedent to let regulatory agencies decide on their own what they are going to regulate, despite the fact that it in this case EPA is trying to step up and do something that somebody must do.

The somewhat sliver lining in this is that utilities don't need the encouragement of the law to move away from coal, they are doing it now by choice because renewables cost less. Ironic that in this case it's the market which is on the right side of change.

Edited June 30, 2022 by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

2 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

this a case where good policy is bad law and vice versa. It is up to Congress to legislate restrictions on the use of carbon as CO2 is not a 'pollutant' under any definition already under the EPA's jurisdiction. So as terrible a climate policy decision as this ruling is, taken as a purely legal decision, I think it is more correct than incorrect.  It's is a bad precedent to let regulatory agencies decide on their own what they are going to regulate, despite the fact that it in this case EPA is trying to step up and do something that somebody must do.

The somewhat sliver lining in this is that utilities don't need the encouragement of the law to move away from coal, they are doing it now by choice because renewables cost less. Ironic that in this case it's the market which is on the right side of change.

If you believe it’s bad precedent and that a regulatory agency shouldn’t regulate something clearly within their purview, then what are we doing here? What would you rather see?

[Motor City Sonics]

It has become clear that SCOTUS is now a political wing.   Thanks angry Bernie non-voters.  Go fuck yourself.   Everything Bernie fought for going down the tubes because you were a bunch of fucking babies. 

[Motor City Sonics]

Hey, you know what.....Fine.   The smarter states will still want EPA regulations.    The dumb states - the next time you fuckers have a disaster becuase you refused regulations - you clean it up.  You pay for it.  That's what you wanted.  

[pfife]

2 minutes ago, Motor City Sonics said:

It has become clear that SCOTUS is now a political wing.   Thanks angry Bernie non-voters.  Go fuck yourself.   Everything Bernie fought for going down the tubes because you were a bunch of fucking babies. 

or you could blame Republicans for what Republicans did.

Edited June 30, 2022 by pfife

[Motor City Sonics]

4 minutes ago, pfife said:

or you could blame Republicans for what Republicans did.

No, I am blaming the Bernie people who just had to sit it out even though their boy pleaded with them to vote for Hillary.   They should have known that this would happen.    this is on them.  This didn't have to happen. 

[pfife]

Just now, Motor City Sonics said:

No, I am blaming the Bernie people who just had to sit it out even though their boy pleaded with them to vote for Hillary.   They should have known that this would happen.    this is on them.  This didn't have to happen. 

Free pass for Republicans woo hoo!

[Motor City Sonics]

If Biden had any balls, and he doesn't, he would flat out tell states that if you don't want to follow any EPA guidelines then you will not get any federal money if that ignorance leads to a disaster.    You are on your own.      But again, he doesn't have the balls to do that. 

[Motor City Sonics]

I'm at the point where federal funding for states that outlaw abortions and allow pollution should just be cut off from federal funding at all.  Most of them wouldn't survive because they are all pretty much Taker States.   

[Motor City Sonics]

These fuckers are about to tear apart voting rights next.     

[1984Echoes]

2 hours ago, Motor City Sonics said:

I'm at the point where federal funding for states that outlaw abortions and allow pollution should just be cut off from federal funding at all.  Most of them wouldn't survive because they are all pretty much Taker States.   

I have a simple solution:

No state can receive more Federal Funding than the federal contributions in taxes that they make. 

There will be no more donor, and no more welfare, states. Federal funds will be cut off from all of these red welfare states at the point that they've contributed. 

Let's see how they fare.

[Motown Bombers]

I would love to see California and it's 5th largest economy in the world cut off collecting federal taxes. The US needs California more than California needs the US. It would basically be a declaration of secession and I honestly don't think we are that far away from it happening. California, along with Washington and Oregon could block all imports from the Pacific to the rest of the US. Charge massive tariffs. Deprive Trumpers of their Chinese MAGA hats. 

[Motor City Sonics]

I can't remember the name of the town but it was in West Virginia and there was some company that wound up producing a ton of leftover toxic waste and they stored it in these big tanks.  The EPA did an inspection and told them the tanks were not up to standard any any breach of these tanks would poison the nearby river.    The company started going public about this to rile 'em up (They took errr jobs!) and people literally chased the EPA out of town.    Then a little more than a year later one of the tanks ruptured and all of this toxic waste went right into the river.............the wildlife in and around the river died and the drinking water was poisoned and unusable for the whole town.     So who did they blame?   Barack Obama.   Why?  Because the Federal Government wasn't fixing it and wasn't giving them enough money to go buy bottled water to drink, cook and even bathe with.    

All Obama's fault.     All the EPA's fault    (yes someone from the EPA showed up with an axe and busted open the tank just to prove they were right,  sure, that's what happened. 

[gehringer_2]

4 hours ago, chasfh said:

If you believe it’s bad precedent and that a regulatory agency shouldn’t regulate something clearly within their purview, then what are we doing here? What would you rather see?

AFAIK, CO2 is not in EPA's purview. Maybe they changed the law but when I worked in the chemical and energy industry, the materials  - the priority pollutants that EPA had mandate over, were spelled out in the enabling legislation and CO2 was never there.  The best analog to CO2  in terms of EPA's mandate would be SO2, which like CO2 is also a material that is not an immediate toxin or ground or water pollutant but is an agent that acts in a more diffuse way on the environment like CO2,  but this exactly here the legal precedent works against regulating CO2 because SO2 regulation is specifically mandated in EPA's enabling legislation. 

I'm not saying the world would not be a better place if the EPA had CO2 regs, or that it isn't a horrible thing that the US Congress is dysfunctional, but putting agency administrators in charge of what they are allowed to regulate is a move that has just as much potential for abuse as legislatures overturning elections.  

Edited July 1, 2022 by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

Then I guess I would come back to the question: if the EPA is not allowed to regulate emissions of harmful substances, however they get there, then what are we doing here?

[gehringer_2]

3 hours ago, chasfh said:

Then I guess I would come back to the question: if the EPA is not allowed to regulate emissions of harmful substances, however they get there, then what are we doing here?

when you set up a regulatory agency, you don't just say  - "go do what you feel like." The enabling legislation defines the parameters of the agency's mission. It may possibly not be conventional wisdom, but EPA's mandate is not "Just go clean stuff up". It has been given specific mandates to do specific things in specific pieces of legislation. These mandates are often added to by Congress as new needs arise - that is the process. But Congress has never given EPA any mandate around global warming or CO2 as a pollutant in any other sense, so as bad as it it, the truth is that the Court was pretty much legally correct (IMV). In the US a regulatory agency has to have a legislative mandate that it can at least argue covers what it is doing. When the Dems couldn't get a global warming bill through they tried to argue that you could shoehorn it into EPAs existing mandates on very general grounds,  but it was a stretch from the start and I'm not surprised a court, let alone this court, sided against it. And in truth, the very fact that the issue has been brought before Congress and failed probably made the court's ruling even more inevitable because the mandate has been more or less explicitly denied by Congress.

What's good for the goose has to be good for the gander, you either want a system that follows the law or you don't. Just because short cutting the legislative process absolutely seems needed here, doesn't mean it's legally supportable doctrine. Heck, if we can't eventually make the US legislative process respond to climate change, we are doomed anyway. 

Edited July 1, 2022 by gehringer_2

[gehringer_2]

just to complete the thought on this:

There is a truly desperate need to re-balance representation in the country so that the government can actually represent the will of the democratic majority on so many of these isssues. I don't know how we do that - some ideas that would help have been kicked around on these fora, but I don't think the answer is to toss adherence to rule of law to get what we want. I think we will be lost if we stop trying to fix the former and settle for the latter.

Of course, there is a good chance we may to too far out of balance already to ever find our way back. 

Edited July 1, 2022 by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

2 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

when you set up a regulatory agency, you don't just say  - "go do what you feel like." The enabling legislation defines the parameters of the agency's mission. It may possibly not be conventional wisdom, but EPA's mandate is not "Just go clean stuff up". It has been given specific mandates to do specific things in specific pieces of legislation. These mandates are often added to by Congress as new needs arise - that is the process. But Congress has never given EPA any mandate around global warming or CO2 as a pollutant in any other sense, so as bad as it it, the truth is that the Court was pretty much legally correct (IMV). In the US a regulatory agency has to have a legislative mandate that it can at least argue covers what it is doing. When the Dems couldn't get a global warming bill through they tried to argue that you could shoehorn it into EPAs existing mandates on very general grounds,  but it was a stretch from the start and I'm not surprised a court, let alone this court, sided against it. And in truth, the very fact that the issue has been brought before Congress and failed probably made the court's ruling even more inevitable because the mandate has been more or less explicitly denied by Congress.

What's good for the goose has to be good for the gander, you either want a system that follows the law or you don't. Just because short cutting the legislative process absolutely seems needed here, doesn't mean it's legally supportable doctrine. Heck, if we can't eventually make the US legislative process respond to climate change, we are doomed anyway. 

Given how divided and dysfunctional Congress is, at this point they can’t be relied upon to do anything in the interest of the American people. We are just a tool during elections, and a punchline the rest of the time.

I get the idea that a regulatory agency can’t choose for itself what it regulates, but speaking strictly to the issue of whether the EPA should be able to regulate emissions, I’m disappointed that they’re not allowed to. And if they can’t do that, then what are we doing here?