> I hear that a fair bit: "that's what the legislature is for". Has the Congress ever responded by actually passing a law?
I’m not 100% clear on what the question is, in the sense that I want to give you a good-faith reading but, of course, the answer is obviously no. I doubt congress has even read any of our posts, haha.
I think the general expectation is that when chatting about politics the best hope we could have is that we could cause the other person (or some other person reading along) to vote differently, and maybe we’ll all get some better representatives if this conversation repeats enough times. It is a pretty indirect strategy, I don’t think it will have any big obvious wins.
> Passing a law is a very high bar, especially with the filibuster, and a President can still veto it. It's supposed to be for checks and balances, but I see a lot of checks and very few balances.
I agree that our system has a lot of checks and might be too logjam-prone. (Although, over the last 8 years we’ve probably both appreciated this feature at some point or another, maybe at different times). But that’s the system we have, we should fix it in an above the board fashion, not hope for judges to circumvent it.
> I know that it's not the court's responsibility to fix the rest of the system. But it feels disingenuous to say that the legislature could fix it when they know perfectly well that they won't.
Well, to be entirely transparent, there’s a dual purpose to this. So maybe it is a bit disingenuous. I mean the ingenuous element is there: it is always good to keep in mind how our system works, and I do think people should target their irritation at the correct party.
But also, not many of our (democratically elected) representatives are willing to argue for increasing surveillance. So the reminder that it is their job is a slightly circuitous way of indicating that it is maybe not a popular idea. If it were, somebody would run on it.
I’m not 100% clear on what the question is, in the sense that I want to give you a good-faith reading but, of course, the answer is obviously no. I doubt congress has even read any of our posts, haha.
I think the general expectation is that when chatting about politics the best hope we could have is that we could cause the other person (or some other person reading along) to vote differently, and maybe we’ll all get some better representatives if this conversation repeats enough times. It is a pretty indirect strategy, I don’t think it will have any big obvious wins.
> Passing a law is a very high bar, especially with the filibuster, and a President can still veto it. It's supposed to be for checks and balances, but I see a lot of checks and very few balances.
I agree that our system has a lot of checks and might be too logjam-prone. (Although, over the last 8 years we’ve probably both appreciated this feature at some point or another, maybe at different times). But that’s the system we have, we should fix it in an above the board fashion, not hope for judges to circumvent it.
> I know that it's not the court's responsibility to fix the rest of the system. But it feels disingenuous to say that the legislature could fix it when they know perfectly well that they won't.
Well, to be entirely transparent, there’s a dual purpose to this. So maybe it is a bit disingenuous. I mean the ingenuous element is there: it is always good to keep in mind how our system works, and I do think people should target their irritation at the correct party.
But also, not many of our (democratically elected) representatives are willing to argue for increasing surveillance. So the reminder that it is their job is a slightly circuitous way of indicating that it is maybe not a popular idea. If it were, somebody would run on it.