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akuma587 on 26 November 2008
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Kasz216 said:
akuma587 said:
Kasz216 said:

Couldn't that have been changed via say... actual legislation?

I think letting the courts change the deicsions let politicans off the hook for making important yet unpopular decisions.

Bad politicans are smart people who do dumb things for bribes and reelections.

Why worry about gay rights legislation when we can wait for the courts to do it?  I mean they don't need reelection!

Good polticians seem to be the people who do dumb things simply for reelection now a days.

 

 

The Supreme Court was already interpreting a piece of legislation.  And you underestimate how slow Congress can be to respond to a problem, and how willing the Supreme Court can be to strike down Congress's obtuse attempts to get around the Supreme Court's decisions.

Sometimes judges have to make those unpopular decisions.  That is one of the reasons why they in most cases aren't elected officials.  They are there to be the arbiters of the law and the Constitution, even if that means going against popular opinion.  I'm all for politicians who have there act together and aren't afraid to stand up for the issues they believe in, but the American public is about as fickle as it can be.  I'm not excusing politicians, but we are as much to blame as anyone for their shortcomings.  I mean we elect them every year after all.

 

What changed in the piece of legislation to change the interpretation?

Congress can be slow to a problem... maybe because they know the Supreme court can clean it up for them?

I mean hell, that bailout got passed pretty quickly considering pretty much everyone in the government was against it.

 

Nothing whatsoever, the Supreme Court just admitted that the previous decision (about 40 years prior) was a bad one and essentially apologized for screwing it up so badly.  They said that they had flat out interpreted the statute differently than its plain meaning since they were trying to force the states into uniformity on their laws, which the states heavily resisted.  It just turned out so badly that they gave up and overruled the previous decision.

Once again, we elected the members of Congress, so we are as much to blame as they are.

America is based on bitching about something and then doing it anyways.  Haven't you learned that already :)

 

 



We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.  The only thing that really worried me was the ether.  There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke

It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...."  Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson