Death Panels

[pasithea]

BTW, if you want to jibber about 'Death Panels' in the US, how about the Republican appointed Death Panel leaders like Scalia and Thomas?

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/17/scalia-actual-innocence/

Lifetime appointment for Supreme Court is probably one of the least forward-thinking parts of the constitution. It was probably fine when the average person only lived to be 40 or 50 but we can expect to have these ass clowns for many more years to come. :(

Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, I wish there were more justices like Scallia. His stance on "actual innocence" appeals both to my self flagellating masochistic and misanthropic religious convictions as well as my organizational theories that managers and administrators should not be bogged down with metaphysical arguments about the nature of history or the existence of evidence as it relates to history. Really Troy should just take his death sentence like a man "innocent" or not. We're all sinners after all, if he didn't do one thing certainly he deserves to die for another, like slowing down a well oiled administrative process for instance! My god, imagine the paperwork. In the name of his own ego this man probably forced some subsecretary's third assistant to buy a new filing cabinet that simply wasn't in the annual budget! Where that little snafu is going to work itself out we all hold our breaths to see!

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

Not sure what the political maneuver is called when you do something reprehensible and then blame your opponent for doing THAT EXACT THING. This situation sounds a lot like that.

That would be interesting if the public had 'veto' power on Supreme Court Justice appointees. Every 4 years, during elections which we vote for senate and house of representatives but not president, list the judges with []Maintain []Retire as an option. Supermajority (60%) 'Retire' would 'publicly veto' them out of office.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure politicizing the court (more than it already is) would be a very good idea but perhaps if they were appointed for say 25 years instead of life or something.

Of course, there's other parts of our government which are broken as well.

House and Senate for instance. I don't think it was in the original plan to have mega-states with millions of people and because of that, the senate has a LOT more power than it really should and it skews strongly in favor of the rich and powerful.

If we broke up the larger states and had say ~120 states instead of 50, the house would draw most of its power from populous states and the senate would draw most of its power from rural states. In order for large interests to buy up congress, they'd have to solicit a lot more senators meaning smaller amounts they could bribe and thus less people they could entice.

It would also be much harder for the rural states to unproductively suck up large portions of taxes and industrialized areas would have a tougher time blocking environmental policies. I suspect you'd also reduce the bureaucracy by doing this because there would be fewer divergent interests at stake on a state by state basis.

Simple statistics stuff. It'd do a LOT to give control of the country back to the people of the country.

Of course, no one would let it happen and even if the people were 100% behind it, the powerful would still control the redistricting and would do everything they could to stack the deck in their favor. *sigh*

[pseudomanitou.livejournal.com]

The odd thing about Scalia and Thomas is that if Scalia croaked, Thomas would simply turn in his chair in circles till he passed out... every day.

Anyway, Scalia is 74 years old. I can wait him out :)

The real problem is that the majority of members on the Supreme Court, left or not, are favorable to business needs over citizen needs -- and they excuse that by giving corporations the same rights as a single individual. That needs to stop.

[centauress.livejournal.com]

This, totally. Thomas has written only one majority and one dissent in his entire eighteen years on the court.