The U.S. already has a problem honoring its international agreements. This would create one more obstacle to concluding those agreements in the first place.
Our Congress is barely able to choose the name for a new post office much less intervene in foreign policy. That gives us such embarrassments as Obama not submitting the JCPOA to the Senate since he knew the Israel lobby would shoot it down, thus making it easy for Trump to kill it. Of 18 international human rights treaties passed by the United Nations, the US has only ratified 5.
Subjecting international relations to our deeply partisan political process has already made it obvious to the world that the US cannot be trusted to meet any obligations or keep any promises it makes in a treaty. Of course, they should have been aware of that long ago but it's easier to keep up the facade.
It’s not only “our deeply partisan political process.” The anti-majoritarian design of the Senate, combined with the anti-democratic filibuster rule make it nearly impossible to pass anything that is even slightly controversial. Add to that an anti-democratic and unaccountable Supreme Court that can invalidate acts of Congress on a whim and you end up with a ruling class oligarchy that flaunts its indifference to the needs of its people.
I would basically agree with your analysis vis-a-vis the Senate. If it was up to me, the federal government would have a unicameral legislature based on proportional representation. I am not terribly keen on the filibuster but would only point out that before pretty recently, the filibuster wasn't used for every piece of substantive legislation that went through Congress. At this point, however, given how hyper-partisan the political scene has become, any attempt to work with members of the opposite political party is deemed to be unacceptable. Hence ambitious members of the GOP who want to make a name for themselves will do so by making asses of themselves and reading "Green Eggs and Ham" on the Senate Floor in their irritating voice with their hobgoblin face in order to get said disgusting hobgoblin face on Fox News Channel -- not that I'm thinking of any in particular here, and certainly not Ted Cruz. But I digress. I agree in principle about the Senate.
I do not agree with your characterization of the Supreme Court. They do not strike down laws passed by Congress "on a whim." They issue written opinions detailing their reasoning. They reason they will strike down laws passed by Congress is because they deem those laws to be unconstitutional. There is a large body of case law indicating the bases for striking down laws passed by Congress as unconstitutional, and the grounds upon which a law can be struck down for unconstitutionality are relatively narrow. Does this mean that it is "anti-democratic" and "unaccountable"? In terms of the political process, yes, and that's a good thing. We need to have a court system that does not face the same degree of political pressure as the elected branches. That allows the court system to do things that aren't popular -- namely, to strike down laws and executive actions when they violate the Constitution. This does not mean that the Court is a "super-legislature" that strikes down acts of Congress simply because they do not suit the personal preferences of the Justices (though you might be able to make that case for the current liberal wing of the court). There are well-defined reasons for striking down acts of Congress; the default rule is "Congress can do what it wants" but it cannot do things that violate the Constitution.
If you are referring specifically to the Citizens United decision, I will say that I do not personally agree with the outcome of that decision but the reasoning behind it was not crazy and its application was much narrower than most people have been led to believe by the media.
Sorry, but I could not disagree more. The Supreme Court has a long and sordid history of ignoring the Constitution whenever it suited its ruling class bias. Dred Scott, Plessy v Ferguson, Holder v Shelby County, Bush v Gore, and yes ,certainly Citizens United. As far as being unaccountable, I believe lifetime appointments (by the anti-majoritarian Senate) are antithetical to democratic values. Protecting the Court’s independence could easily be accomplished with a more limited terms.
I would highly recommend the book “The Case Against the Supreme Court” by Erwin Chemerinsky. He not only reviews the Court’s history of failing in one of its most important roles—protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority— but also offers some really outstanding suggestions for reforming the court.
It sounds like you actually could disagree much more. You acknowledged that it is in fact a good thing to have a branch of government that is capable of doing unpopular things. That is what the judiciary is supposed to do. That is true both at the trial court level but also at the appellate level as well. The idea of limited-term appointments does not do anything to make the institution less "unaccountable" because the kind of "accountability" you seem to be describing would require elections in order for Justices to keep their jobs. That would defeat the purpose of judicial review of acts of the President and Congress for Constitutionality -- the whole point of the Bill of Rights and the Equal Protection Clause is to retard democracy in specific limited instances. A majority vote cannot establish a state church, an elected governor cannot permit the death penalty to take place by breaking upon the wheel, and so forth. That's the point of having a Constitution that lists specific limits on the powers of government, whether that government is democratic or otherwise. And that's a good thing.
You claim that the Court has a "history of ignoring the Constitution" whenever it suits "ruling class bias." While I do not contest that the Supreme Court has issued some terrible decisions, the idea that these decisions suited "ruling class" biases is simply ill-informed and reductive to the point of blatant inaccuracy. Dred Scott, horrible as it was, was obviously supported by slaveholders. Slaveholders were not the "ruling class" of the United States writ large; they were an increasingly marginalized group whose power and influence were rapidly slipping away to the industrialized modern capitalism that existed in the North. Dred Scott was a foolish and repugnant attempt by the Supreme Court to take the red hot political issue of slavery "out of bounds" and it failed spectacularly. In so doing, it invoked a doctrine that is now a favorite of liberals: substantive due process. It was in fact the first SCOTUS case to use the doctrine and the first time, if memory serves, that the Court actually struck down a federal law on Constitutional grounds. It was also probably influenced by the fact that most of the Justices on the Court at that point were from the South. But it had nothing to do with "serving the interests of the ruling class."
Plessy was equally repugnant but it did not involve the Court "ignoring the Constitution." It involved the Court *interpreting* the Constitution. The Court's task was to determine if the Equal Protection Clause permitted states to allow segregation. I do not know what this has to do with "serving the interests of the ruling class" but I do know that the galleries of Congress were segregated when the 14th Amendment and that the language of the 14th Amendment, sadly, did *not* prohibit racial segregation. As horrible as Plessey was, it was not a case of the Court "ignoring" the Constitution, much less "ignoring" it to suit the "ruling class." If anything, the decision was most popular among Southern Confederate veterans who had lost their ability to vote as a result of the passage of the 15th Amendment.
Shelby County was likewise decided on much narrower grounds than you have probably been told. It did not rule that the Voting Rights Act's provision requiring federal pre-clearance of changes in voting regulations for specific states and localities was per se unconstitutional. Instead, it only required Congress to provide an updated coverage formula in order to determine what states that provision would and would not apply to. Congress could pass a new coverage formula tomorrow, or it could make the coverage formula apply to the entire country without singling out specific states or localities. In my view it probably should do so. But to say that this was "ignoring the Constitution" based on the serving the interests of the "ruling class" is nonsense.
Bush vs. Gore is likewise a widely misunderstood decision and the public's perception of it is largely shaped by the political outcome it produced. It involved a 7-2 equal protection issue and a 5-4 decision on the appropriate remedy for the fact that the Florida Supreme Court had issued a ruling that would have been incompatible with a federal statute. The fact that this decision resulted in a President I despise assuming office does not render it legally erroneous. Likewise, ask yourself if "the ruling class" truly feared Al Gore compared to George W. Bush. These were both candidates who were well within the bounds of conventional politics.
It is strange indeed to assume that a group of lawyers with guaranteed compensation and lifetime tenure would feel any need to "suit the interests of the ruling class"; the reason they are "unaccountable" in the first place is to make sure that they do not bow to political pressure. Perhaps you do not like the outcomes of the Supreme Court's decisions. I do not always agree with them. My disagreements are not based on the idea that the judges on the Court are "biased" towards the interests of one "class" or another. Why would they be? They have lifetime appointments and guaranteed salaries. When I disagree with the Court, it's because I disagree with their interpretation of the Constitution or the relevant statutes at issue. It is not because I have decided in advance that anything I don't like must be unconstitutional (reality check: the Constitution permits A LOT of stuff you wouldn't like in principle) or that if a judge issues a ruling I don't like, he must be a jerk. If a judge is doing their job correctly, they SHOULD issue at least some decisions that you do not like.
"It is strange indeed to assume that a group of lawyers with guaranteed compensation and lifetime tenure would feel any need to "suit the interests of the ruling class"; the reason they are "unaccountable" in the first place is to make sure that they do not bow to political pressure."
How do you get to be a SC Justice in the first place? It's not by crashing whatever the the elite consensus is at any given time, but by pleasing authority.
SCOTUS judges are all appeal's court judges prior to their elevation to the Supreme Court. In their capacities as appeal's court judges, they ARE "authority," they're just not the highest authority because their decisions can be overturned by a further appeal. Their incentive if they want to advance their careers is just to apply precedent uncontroversially and mechanically; once they're on the SCOTUS, they can't be reviewed further and they are free to do what they want, including "crashing the elite consensus" whatever that means.
Notice how this ever always only goes in one direction - that of war and of empire unfettered by any law. The president can more or less make war as he sees fit, but God help him if he tries to make peace.
Excellent question, but one not likely to asked or answered by our mainstream media. Panicked firing by troops after the attack was alleged in a BBC video report.
While I agree that congressional oversight would make diplomacy much more difficult, the separation-of-powers argument against it is weak. The Founding Fathers did intend for the Senate to exercise some executive powers such as the ratification of treaties and confirmation of executive appointments. Unfortunately, the Constitution puts such important powers in the hands of a weak and unfit institution.
Interestingly, this reminds me of the old Bricker Amendment. The Bricker Amendment was a series of proposed Constitutional amendments championed by Ohio Senator John Bricker following World War II.
The Post-World War II era led to a significant amount of internationalism within the top levels of American government. This included many members of the Republican Party including Dwight Eisenhower, who was supportive of new international institutions like the United Nations and who supported many UN Conventions and Treaties. The rise in internationalism, however, led to backlash from members of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, which included many Republicans from the Midwest and Democrats from the South who favored a more isolationist foreign policy (not in the sense that the term is used as a smear now, but a more truly isolationist policy.)
To further the aims of the Conservative Coalition, Senator Bricker annually proposed a series of substantively similar amendments to the Constitution every year in the 1950s. These amendments came to become collectively known as the "Bricker Amendment." The Bricker Amendment would have required explicit Congressional approval for treaties and similar international agreements that were increasingly becoming negotiated by the President alone.
Back then, the arguments in favor of the Bricker Amendment were based on the idea that treaties and other international agreements would "threaten American sovereignty." One popular argument intended to appeal to provincial racists was that the UN Convention on Genocide would result in a scenario where a white motorist would accidentally strike and kill a black pedestrian and the United States would then be dragged before a UN panel who would then consider genocide charges. Similar arguments regarding the possibility of international bodies outlawing segregation were the most popular talking points for the Bricker Amendment at the time. One must note that the US is not a party to the International Criminal Court, in large part because America's foreign policy elites do not want the otherwise utterly powerless peoples of the countries we invade to be able to seek justice in court for the many crimes of the modern empire. Israel too, surprise surprise.
Funny enough, the article that Daniel has highlighted here seems to be making a different argument. This author wants to make it harder for the US to disengage from military occupations or reconstructions of foreign states, and knows that making such disengagement dependent on Congressional approval will ensure that like everything else that gets handed to Congress, it will end up dying of sclerotic partisan gridlock.
Our Congress is barely able to choose the name for a new post office much less intervene in foreign policy. That gives us such embarrassments as Obama not submitting the JCPOA to the Senate since he knew the Israel lobby would shoot it down, thus making it easy for Trump to kill it. Of 18 international human rights treaties passed by the United Nations, the US has only ratified 5.
Subjecting international relations to our deeply partisan political process has already made it obvious to the world that the US cannot be trusted to meet any obligations or keep any promises it makes in a treaty. Of course, they should have been aware of that long ago but it's easier to keep up the facade.
It’s not only “our deeply partisan political process.” The anti-majoritarian design of the Senate, combined with the anti-democratic filibuster rule make it nearly impossible to pass anything that is even slightly controversial. Add to that an anti-democratic and unaccountable Supreme Court that can invalidate acts of Congress on a whim and you end up with a ruling class oligarchy that flaunts its indifference to the needs of its people.
I would basically agree with your analysis vis-a-vis the Senate. If it was up to me, the federal government would have a unicameral legislature based on proportional representation. I am not terribly keen on the filibuster but would only point out that before pretty recently, the filibuster wasn't used for every piece of substantive legislation that went through Congress. At this point, however, given how hyper-partisan the political scene has become, any attempt to work with members of the opposite political party is deemed to be unacceptable. Hence ambitious members of the GOP who want to make a name for themselves will do so by making asses of themselves and reading "Green Eggs and Ham" on the Senate Floor in their irritating voice with their hobgoblin face in order to get said disgusting hobgoblin face on Fox News Channel -- not that I'm thinking of any in particular here, and certainly not Ted Cruz. But I digress. I agree in principle about the Senate.
I do not agree with your characterization of the Supreme Court. They do not strike down laws passed by Congress "on a whim." They issue written opinions detailing their reasoning. They reason they will strike down laws passed by Congress is because they deem those laws to be unconstitutional. There is a large body of case law indicating the bases for striking down laws passed by Congress as unconstitutional, and the grounds upon which a law can be struck down for unconstitutionality are relatively narrow. Does this mean that it is "anti-democratic" and "unaccountable"? In terms of the political process, yes, and that's a good thing. We need to have a court system that does not face the same degree of political pressure as the elected branches. That allows the court system to do things that aren't popular -- namely, to strike down laws and executive actions when they violate the Constitution. This does not mean that the Court is a "super-legislature" that strikes down acts of Congress simply because they do not suit the personal preferences of the Justices (though you might be able to make that case for the current liberal wing of the court). There are well-defined reasons for striking down acts of Congress; the default rule is "Congress can do what it wants" but it cannot do things that violate the Constitution.
If you are referring specifically to the Citizens United decision, I will say that I do not personally agree with the outcome of that decision but the reasoning behind it was not crazy and its application was much narrower than most people have been led to believe by the media.
Sorry, but I could not disagree more. The Supreme Court has a long and sordid history of ignoring the Constitution whenever it suited its ruling class bias. Dred Scott, Plessy v Ferguson, Holder v Shelby County, Bush v Gore, and yes ,certainly Citizens United. As far as being unaccountable, I believe lifetime appointments (by the anti-majoritarian Senate) are antithetical to democratic values. Protecting the Court’s independence could easily be accomplished with a more limited terms.
I would highly recommend the book “The Case Against the Supreme Court” by Erwin Chemerinsky. He not only reviews the Court’s history of failing in one of its most important roles—protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority— but also offers some really outstanding suggestions for reforming the court.
It sounds like you actually could disagree much more. You acknowledged that it is in fact a good thing to have a branch of government that is capable of doing unpopular things. That is what the judiciary is supposed to do. That is true both at the trial court level but also at the appellate level as well. The idea of limited-term appointments does not do anything to make the institution less "unaccountable" because the kind of "accountability" you seem to be describing would require elections in order for Justices to keep their jobs. That would defeat the purpose of judicial review of acts of the President and Congress for Constitutionality -- the whole point of the Bill of Rights and the Equal Protection Clause is to retard democracy in specific limited instances. A majority vote cannot establish a state church, an elected governor cannot permit the death penalty to take place by breaking upon the wheel, and so forth. That's the point of having a Constitution that lists specific limits on the powers of government, whether that government is democratic or otherwise. And that's a good thing.
You claim that the Court has a "history of ignoring the Constitution" whenever it suits "ruling class bias." While I do not contest that the Supreme Court has issued some terrible decisions, the idea that these decisions suited "ruling class" biases is simply ill-informed and reductive to the point of blatant inaccuracy. Dred Scott, horrible as it was, was obviously supported by slaveholders. Slaveholders were not the "ruling class" of the United States writ large; they were an increasingly marginalized group whose power and influence were rapidly slipping away to the industrialized modern capitalism that existed in the North. Dred Scott was a foolish and repugnant attempt by the Supreme Court to take the red hot political issue of slavery "out of bounds" and it failed spectacularly. In so doing, it invoked a doctrine that is now a favorite of liberals: substantive due process. It was in fact the first SCOTUS case to use the doctrine and the first time, if memory serves, that the Court actually struck down a federal law on Constitutional grounds. It was also probably influenced by the fact that most of the Justices on the Court at that point were from the South. But it had nothing to do with "serving the interests of the ruling class."
Plessy was equally repugnant but it did not involve the Court "ignoring the Constitution." It involved the Court *interpreting* the Constitution. The Court's task was to determine if the Equal Protection Clause permitted states to allow segregation. I do not know what this has to do with "serving the interests of the ruling class" but I do know that the galleries of Congress were segregated when the 14th Amendment and that the language of the 14th Amendment, sadly, did *not* prohibit racial segregation. As horrible as Plessey was, it was not a case of the Court "ignoring" the Constitution, much less "ignoring" it to suit the "ruling class." If anything, the decision was most popular among Southern Confederate veterans who had lost their ability to vote as a result of the passage of the 15th Amendment.
Shelby County was likewise decided on much narrower grounds than you have probably been told. It did not rule that the Voting Rights Act's provision requiring federal pre-clearance of changes in voting regulations for specific states and localities was per se unconstitutional. Instead, it only required Congress to provide an updated coverage formula in order to determine what states that provision would and would not apply to. Congress could pass a new coverage formula tomorrow, or it could make the coverage formula apply to the entire country without singling out specific states or localities. In my view it probably should do so. But to say that this was "ignoring the Constitution" based on the serving the interests of the "ruling class" is nonsense.
Bush vs. Gore is likewise a widely misunderstood decision and the public's perception of it is largely shaped by the political outcome it produced. It involved a 7-2 equal protection issue and a 5-4 decision on the appropriate remedy for the fact that the Florida Supreme Court had issued a ruling that would have been incompatible with a federal statute. The fact that this decision resulted in a President I despise assuming office does not render it legally erroneous. Likewise, ask yourself if "the ruling class" truly feared Al Gore compared to George W. Bush. These were both candidates who were well within the bounds of conventional politics.
It is strange indeed to assume that a group of lawyers with guaranteed compensation and lifetime tenure would feel any need to "suit the interests of the ruling class"; the reason they are "unaccountable" in the first place is to make sure that they do not bow to political pressure. Perhaps you do not like the outcomes of the Supreme Court's decisions. I do not always agree with them. My disagreements are not based on the idea that the judges on the Court are "biased" towards the interests of one "class" or another. Why would they be? They have lifetime appointments and guaranteed salaries. When I disagree with the Court, it's because I disagree with their interpretation of the Constitution or the relevant statutes at issue. It is not because I have decided in advance that anything I don't like must be unconstitutional (reality check: the Constitution permits A LOT of stuff you wouldn't like in principle) or that if a judge issues a ruling I don't like, he must be a jerk. If a judge is doing their job correctly, they SHOULD issue at least some decisions that you do not like.
"It is strange indeed to assume that a group of lawyers with guaranteed compensation and lifetime tenure would feel any need to "suit the interests of the ruling class"; the reason they are "unaccountable" in the first place is to make sure that they do not bow to political pressure."
How do you get to be a SC Justice in the first place? It's not by crashing whatever the the elite consensus is at any given time, but by pleasing authority.
SCOTUS judges are all appeal's court judges prior to their elevation to the Supreme Court. In their capacities as appeal's court judges, they ARE "authority," they're just not the highest authority because their decisions can be overturned by a further appeal. Their incentive if they want to advance their careers is just to apply precedent uncontroversially and mechanically; once they're on the SCOTUS, they can't be reviewed further and they are free to do what they want, including "crashing the elite consensus" whatever that means.
Notice how this ever always only goes in one direction - that of war and of empire unfettered by any law. The president can more or less make war as he sees fit, but God help him if he tries to make peace.
A mystery --- 170 dead Afghans and 13 US soldiers...
Just how a suicide bomber, in densely packed crowd, can kill 183 people?
Excellent question, but one not likely to asked or answered by our mainstream media. Panicked firing by troops after the attack was alleged in a BBC video report.
While I agree that congressional oversight would make diplomacy much more difficult, the separation-of-powers argument against it is weak. The Founding Fathers did intend for the Senate to exercise some executive powers such as the ratification of treaties and confirmation of executive appointments. Unfortunately, the Constitution puts such important powers in the hands of a weak and unfit institution.
Interestingly, this reminds me of the old Bricker Amendment. The Bricker Amendment was a series of proposed Constitutional amendments championed by Ohio Senator John Bricker following World War II.
The Post-World War II era led to a significant amount of internationalism within the top levels of American government. This included many members of the Republican Party including Dwight Eisenhower, who was supportive of new international institutions like the United Nations and who supported many UN Conventions and Treaties. The rise in internationalism, however, led to backlash from members of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, which included many Republicans from the Midwest and Democrats from the South who favored a more isolationist foreign policy (not in the sense that the term is used as a smear now, but a more truly isolationist policy.)
To further the aims of the Conservative Coalition, Senator Bricker annually proposed a series of substantively similar amendments to the Constitution every year in the 1950s. These amendments came to become collectively known as the "Bricker Amendment." The Bricker Amendment would have required explicit Congressional approval for treaties and similar international agreements that were increasingly becoming negotiated by the President alone.
Back then, the arguments in favor of the Bricker Amendment were based on the idea that treaties and other international agreements would "threaten American sovereignty." One popular argument intended to appeal to provincial racists was that the UN Convention on Genocide would result in a scenario where a white motorist would accidentally strike and kill a black pedestrian and the United States would then be dragged before a UN panel who would then consider genocide charges. Similar arguments regarding the possibility of international bodies outlawing segregation were the most popular talking points for the Bricker Amendment at the time. One must note that the US is not a party to the International Criminal Court, in large part because America's foreign policy elites do not want the otherwise utterly powerless peoples of the countries we invade to be able to seek justice in court for the many crimes of the modern empire. Israel too, surprise surprise.
Funny enough, the article that Daniel has highlighted here seems to be making a different argument. This author wants to make it harder for the US to disengage from military occupations or reconstructions of foreign states, and knows that making such disengagement dependent on Congressional approval will ensure that like everything else that gets handed to Congress, it will end up dying of sclerotic partisan gridlock.