Do we still need a legislature?

[rodoheel]

Here's the conclusion (which apparently couldn't fit in my other post):

While I ultimately agree with you on many of the problems we're facing, and share your frustration with the current Supreme Court, I can't agree with your proposed solutions, because I think you are ignoring (or too easily dismissing) the further degradation of the constitutional order and rule of law they would cause. America's constitutional order may be dying, but it is not dead. And in your haste to essentially pronounce it beyond hope and put a bullet in its head, I think you are not accounting for the fact that whatever rises to replace it not only might not be better, but could be a whole heck of a lot worse.

 

[Paine]

Here's the conclusion (which apparently couldn't fit in my other post):

While I ultimately agree with you on many of the problems we're facing, and share your frustration with the current Supreme Court, I can't agree with your proposed solutions, because I think you are ignoring (or too easily dismissing) the further degradation of the constitutional order and rule of law they would cause. America's constitutional order may be dying, but it is not dead. And in your haste to essentially pronounce it beyond hope and put a bullet in its head, I think you are not accounting for the fact that whatever rises to replace it not only might not be better, but could be a whole heck of a lot worse.

I appreciate how seriously you’re engaging here. You’re right that Congress has ceded far too much authority to the executive, and I agree that restoring legislative power is essential. But here’s where I think your argument hits a wall: you’re putting a lot of faith in Congress to reform the Court through legislation: eliminating the filibuster, passing new ethics rules, even expanding the Court, but what’s to stop this Court from simply striking all that down?

Even if we manage to scrap the filibuster, we’re still stuck behind the same veto gate. A 6-3 Court with no ethical constraints and lifetime tenure can simply overturn anything that threatens its ideological project. That’s not just an obstacle, it’s a structural dead end. You can’t legislate your way past a tribunal that claims unchecked review power over every policy arena.

And that’s where jurisdiction stripping comes in, not as a cure-all, but as a way to create space for democratic lawmaking. It doesn’t eliminate courts, but it removes the most captured, least accountable one from areas where the public already strongly supports action.

You raised a real concern about how the public would react to a move like this; how the concept of “lawless rulings” might be too abstract or easily manipulated. But people already know something is wrong. Trust in the Court is plummeting. The idea that a handful of unelected judges can override laws passed by elected representatives offends a basic sense of fairness. We don’t need to trick anyone, we need to tell the story clearly.

That’s what FDR did. He didn’t succeed in packing the Court, but he won the argument. He named the stakes, made it about the people vs. the bench, and forced the justices to blink. The moment Congress started moving, the Court reversed course. That wasn’t institutional collapse, it was a democratic check.

If we avoid acting out of fear that people won’t understand us, we guarantee they never will. The answer is not to manage around public confusion, it’s to organize against it. That means telling the truth plainly: this Court is blocking the policies majorities want, in service of interests that do not serve the public. If we’re afraid to say that out loud, we’ve already lost.

Yes, the right will retaliate. That’s politics. The only question is whether we’ll ever do something worth defending. If we don’t contest the Court’s power now, we risk locking in minority rule by default.

You want to restore balance between the branches, and so do I. I think it starts by taking on the structural veto at the heart of this crisis.

 

[Paine]

One more thought building on this:

Rodo suggested earlier that Congress “voluntarily” gave away its power. And while there’s truth to that, I think we have to ask why they did. It’s not just spinelessness, it’s structural. The modern American system actually incentivizes Congress to abdicate power.

Why take hard votes when you can hide behind the filibuster? Why pass bold legislation if the courts will strike it down and you can blame them? Why govern at all when it’s safer to let the President take all the heat?

In this setup, Congress gets to posture while the presidency and the courts do the actual work and take the blame. This is the real engine behind what people call the “imperial presidency” or “judicial supremacy.” It’s not just theft of power. It’s a system that rewards lawmakers for letting someone else take the fall.

So when we talk about restoring the balance of power, we have to go deeper than rule changes. We have to remove the excuses that let Congress off the hook. That’s what jurisdiction stripping does. It doesn’t kill the courts, it stops Congress from handing them the keys every time something gets hard.

 

[Paine]

I think there’s another, deeper disconnect here. Some of these arguments feel stuck in a political reality from four or eight years ago, when liberals still saw the Court as a battleground over modern rights. But the Roberts Court isn’t fighting the Civil Rights Movement anymore. That fight’s over. Shelby County ended it. Dobbs buried it.

The fights they’re picking now are older. We’re back to the administrative state, labor rights, federal supremacy, state nullification—conflicts we thought were settled in the 1930s or even the 1860s. Except this time, they don’t need bayonets or fire-eaters. They just need five votes.

This Court isn’t tinkering with policy. It’s trying to rewrite the Constitution in the image of pre-New Deal, pre-Reconstruction America. And if we keep treating it like a referee instead of a combatant, we’re going to lose more than just policy. We’re going to lose the idea that democratic government means anything at all.

I keep coming back to this: only one branch of government is even supposed to be democratic, and that’s Congress. The other two are unelected or single-person offices, yet over time we’ve allowed them to become the main drivers of national policy. That’s backwards.

Some folks talk about a “33-33-33” power split between the branches, but if we actually believe in democracy, that can’t be the goal. Courts should have a role but not the power to override elected representatives every time major interests feel threatened. And the presidency? That’s become a personalized monarchy backed by a national PR machine. It’s done more to hollow out democracy than to defend it.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Most other democracies don’t hand lifetime power to nine unelected lawyers with the final say over everything. In Canada, Parliament can override Court rulings. In Germany, justices serve fixed terms and are appointed with cross-party consensus. In the UK and New Zealand, courts can’t strike down legislation at all. Judicial review exists, but it’s constrained; embedded in systems where elected bodies still govern. What we’ve created here is a constitutional monarchy with robes instead of crowns.

 

[lawtig02]

One more thought building on this:

Rodo suggested earlier that Congress “voluntarily” gave away its power. And while there’s truth to that, I think we have to ask why they did. It’s not just spinelessness, it’s structural. The modern American system actually incentivizes Congress to abdicate power.

Why take hard votes when you can hide behind the filibuster? Why pass bold legislation if the courts will strike it down and you can blame them? Why govern at all when it’s safer to let the President take all the heat?

In this setup, Congress gets to posture while the presidency and the courts do the actual work and take the blame. This is the real engine behind what people call the “imperial presidency” or “judicial supremacy.” It’s not just theft of power. It’s a system that rewards lawmakers for letting someone else take the fall.

So when we talk about restoring the balance of power, we have to go deeper than rule changes. We have to remove the excuses that let Congress off the hook. That’s what jurisdiction stripping does. It doesn’t kill the courts, it stops Congress from handing them the keys every time something gets hard.

I'm not sympatico with everything you say here, but this post is 1000% spot on and I couldn't possibly agree with it more.

 

[Paine]

I'm not sympatico with everything you say here, but this post is 1000% spot on and I couldn't possibly agree with it more.

That tells me that a coalition is already there to pass reforms to address this. A left-liberal alliance is more than capable of it. Hell, we almost pulled it off in 2021.

If we agree Congress has structurally given away power, then the next step is to block the escape hatches. That means stripping courts of veto power over key laws, reclaiming war authority from the President, and ending filibuster paralysis. Otherwise, Congress will just keep handing off its job to unelected actors.

 

[rodoheel]

One more thought building on this:

Rodo suggested earlier that Congress “voluntarily” gave away its power. And while there’s truth to that, I think we have to ask why they did. It’s not just spinelessness, it’s structural. The modern American system actually incentivizes Congress to abdicate power.

Why take hard votes when you can hide behind the filibuster? Why pass bold legislation if the courts will strike it down and you can blame them? Why govern at all when it’s safer to let the President take all the heat?

In this setup, Congress gets to posture while the presidency and the courts do the actual work and take the blame. This is the real engine behind what people call the “imperial presidency” or “judicial supremacy.” It’s not just theft of power. It’s a system that rewards lawmakers for letting someone else take the fall.

So when we talk about restoring the balance of power, we have to go deeper than rule changes. We have to remove the excuses that let Congress off the hook. That’s what jurisdiction stripping does. It doesn’t kill the courts, it stops Congress from handing them the keys every time something gets hard.

You and I very much agree about the fact that "the modern American system actually incentivizes Congress to abdicate power." In fact I said it earlier on this thread. But I think the only point of (slight) disagreement I'd have here on this topic are that Congressional rules are the source of much of that political disincentive. You can track very clearly the decline in Congress passing legislation (i.e., doing its job) to the point at which the filibuster was first reformed in the 1970s, and then further reformed in the 1990s, to make it the current version of what is essentially a 60-vote threshold on legislation. The way the filibuster is currently configured, it is not just 9as it previously was) a mechanism to delay debate by public control of the floor; it allows the ability to permanently block a vote on legislation, without even having to stand on the Senate floor and say you're blocking it. So you can block legislation, without any political consequences for doing so. And now, with the rise in executive orders, Congress can just sit back and push everything on to the Presidency. Heavily reform the filibuster so that it doesn't become a silent veto on legislation and de facto 60 vote threshold - and modify other congressional rules such as the ones that aggregate all control over what gets debated to one or two congressional leaders - and you will eliminate a lot of the incentive/disincentive we're talking about.

I'm not convinced, though, that jurisdiction stripping is a direct solution to this problem. I think the Court has largely gained power where Congress has lost it by essentially stepping in to make a decisions where Congress hasn't acted, rather than by overruling things Congress has done. There certainly have been cases of the Court weakening or overruling progressive legislation - the biggest and most impactful example, in my opinion, being Citizens United - but mostly, in recent years, it's been either ruling on executive action (i.e., Biden student loan relief) or its own earlier precedents (i.e., Dobbs). So I'm not convinced that jurisdiction stripping will either solve the central problems with the way the Court has exercised its power or give Congress the incentive to actually do things. I think reforming the Congressional rules is much more important to that. But ultimately, you can't entirely force Congress to act - we also need to elect legislators who actually care about doing their jobs and drafting, debating, and passing critical legislation. That's more on us, the people, than anyone else.

 

[superrific]

But the Roberts Court isn’t fighting the Civil Rights Movement anymore.

Correction: it is fighting the Civil Rights movement tooth and nail.

 

[Paine]

Correction: it is fighting the Civil Rights movement tooth and nail.

It seems to me that they’ve already won the fight and are now moving on to others. Not saying they’re not still attacking civil rights.

 

[superrific]

If we win 50+1 in the Senate, we should strip the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over key reforms: voting rights, reproductive freedom, labor, climate. When the court strikes it down, we ignore them.

Yes, the right will squeal. The institutional centrists will squeal. The elite media will squeal. Let them. Our message would be simple: the American people are done letting unelected politicians in robes veto their future.

A similar but slightly better idea would be to create a new court, technically inferior to the Supreme Court but with final appellate jurisdiction. The Supreme Court's original jurisdiction can't be stripped but it is also of little importance.

The new court could be created with quick rotation in mind. The "justices" would be rotations from well-regarded circuit court judges.

 

[superrific]

It seems to me that they’ve already won the fight and are now moving on to others. Not saying they’re not still attacking civil rights.

I was merely using clever word play to highlight what you and everyone already know: the Supreme Court used to be a key enabler of the civil rights movement, and its current iteration is trying to undo most of that.

 

[superrific]

In this setup, Congress gets to posture while the presidency and the courts do the actual work and take the blame. This is the real engine behind what people call the “imperial presidency” or “judicial supremacy.” It’s not just theft of power. It’s a system that rewards lawmakers for letting someone else take the fall.

If this is true, why didn't it happen 25 years ago, or 100 years ago? Why only now?

Ironically, we've flipped roles. You're saying this is structural and not easily remediable. I'm here saying that really it's a function of voters and how they receive and process information.

I think it's in large measure because of the changing nature of religious practice in America. 100 years ago, there were no "conservative Christians" as such, and they weren't out there trying to prescribe behavior. Not that they weren't prescribing it; it was just more or less taken for granted. Homosexuality was wrong and freakish. Transgenderism was especially degenerate (and not medical at all). Abortion was mostly illegal.

But now the conservative Christians assert themselves as such, and the basis of that assertion is opposition to homosexuality (well, one important basis). And that is a political issue of the day. It's also not amenable to compromise for those religious folks, for whom being gay is a sin and abortion murder and end of story. Meanwhile, who wants to compromise with people who think your entire way of life -- or your friends' or family's way of life -- is degenerate and sinful? Thus negative partisanship arose out of this incommensurability.

 

[Paine]

You and I very much agree about the fact that "the modern American system actually incentivizes Congress to abdicate power." In fact I said it earlier on this thread. But I think the only point of (slight) disagreement I'd have here on this topic are that Congressional rules are the source of much of that political disincentive. You can track very clearly the decline in Congress passing legislation (i.e., doing its job) to the point at which the filibuster was first reformed in the 1970s, and then further reformed in the 1990s, to make it the current version of what is essentially a 60-vote threshold on legislation. The way the filibuster is currently configured, it is not just 9as it previously was) a mechanism to delay debate by public control of the floor; it allows the ability to permanently block a vote on legislation, without even having to stand on the Senate floor and say you're blocking it. So you can block legislation, without any political consequences for doing so. And now, with the rise in executive orders, Congress can just sit back and push everything on to the Presidency. Heavily reform the filibuster so that it doesn't become a silent veto on legislation and de facto 60 vote threshold - and modify other congressional rules such as the ones that aggregate all control over what gets debated to one or two congressional leaders - and you will eliminate a lot of the incentive/disincentive we're talking about.

I'm not convinced, though, that jurisdiction stripping is a direct solution to this problem. I think the Court has largely gained power where Congress has lost it by essentially stepping in to make a decisions where Congress hasn't acted, rather than by overruling things Congress has done. There certainly have been cases of the Court weakening or overruling progressive legislation - the biggest and most impactful example, in my opinion, being Citizens United - but mostly, in recent years, it's been either ruling on executive action (i.e., Biden student loan relief) or its own earlier precedents (i.e., Dobbs). So I'm not convinced that jurisdiction stripping will either solve the central problems with the way the Court has exercised its power or give Congress the incentive to actually do things. I think reforming the Congressional rules is much more important to that. But ultimately, you can't entirely force Congress to act - we also need to elect legislators who actually care about doing their jobs and drafting, debating, and passing critical legislation. That's more on us, the people, than anyone else.

Totally agree that filibuster reform is essential. It’s a core part of the incentive problem; right now Senators get to veto major legislation without even taking public responsibility. That’s anti-democratic and corrosive, no doubt.

I think where we differ is that you still seem to treat filibuster reform as the endgame. To me, it’s just the first step. Say we nuke the filibuster after gaining the majority and pass a sweeping climate bill, labor law reform, or universal childcare. What happens next? This Supreme Court has shown again and again that it’s willing to strike down bold legislation even when Congress does act.

So if we don’t also deal with the Court’s veto power, if we don’t stop letting them treat major legislation like a suggestion, we’ll just be sending good bills to die. That’s why jurisdiction stripping matters. Not as some fringe work-around but as a necessary companion to reforming Congress itself.

Filibuster reform removes the excuse not to pass laws. Jurisdiction stripping removes the excuse that “the Court won’t let us.” Together, they box Congress in to actually govern.

 

[Calheel]

A similar but slightly better idea would be to create a new court, technically inferior to the Supreme Court but with final appellate jurisdiction. The Supreme Court's original jurisdiction can't be stripped but it is also of little importance.

The new court could be created with quick rotation in mind. The "justices" would be rotations from well-regarded circuit court judges.

I thought some of your ideas would face constitutional challenge. But the court basically just blessed the idea that Congress has the power to limit the court’s power. That same idea could be used to defang the Supreme Court.

 

[Paine]

If this is true, why didn't it happen 25 years ago, or 100 years ago? Why only now?

Ironically, we've flipped roles. You're saying this is structural and not easily remediable. I'm here saying that really it's a function of voters and how they receive and process information.

I think it's in large measure because of the changing nature of religious practice in America. 100 years ago, there were no "conservative Christians" as such, and they weren't out there trying to prescribe behavior. Not that they weren't prescribing it; it was just more or less taken for granted. Homosexuality was wrong and freakish. Transgenderism was especially degenerate (and not medical at all). Abortion was mostly illegal.

But now the conservative Christians assert themselves as such, and the basis of that assertion is opposition to homosexuality (well, one important basis). And that is a political issue of the day. It's also not amenable to compromise for those religious folks, for whom being gay is a sin and abortion murder and end of story. Meanwhile, who wants to compromise with people who think your entire way of life -- or your friends' or family's way of life -- is degenerate and sinful? Thus negative partisanship arose out of this incommensurability.

Just to clarify, I’m not saying this is some immovable structural destiny. Quite the opposite. I’m saying the system produces predictable outcomes based on the incentives built into it, and those can be changed if we’re willing to confront them. Filibuster reform, jurisdiction stripping, war powers reform; these are tools to restore democratic accountability and re-center Congress as the core of representative government.

I also wouldn’t say we’ve flipped roles. You’re pointing to cultural and religious polarization: real forces, but ones far harder to shift through direct institutional action. I’m focused on the levers of power Congress itself can still pull. The rot didn’t start in voter psychology; it started when institutions stopped rewarding courage and started rewarding deflection.

That’s why I’ve argued in the past that emotional resonance in politics isn’t in tension with structural critique, it’s how structure gets politicized. People don’t experience the filibuster as a rule; they experience it as abandonment. They don’t experience judicial supremacy as a legal theory; they experience it as loss. A healthy democracy doesn’t treat those feelings as irrational, it channels them toward reform. That’s what populists like FDR, Sanders, and AMLO have done.

As for why this didn’t happen 100 years ago: the conditions weren’t yet ripe. Congress was more dominant. The filibuster hadn’t yet metastasized. The presidency hadn’t absorbed the administrative state. Courts weren’t routinely striking down major policy. It took decades of media consolidation, party hollowing, and procedural drift to create a system where Congress can avoid responsibility while letting the other two branches take all the heat.

So the question isn’t whether this is reversible, it’s whether we’ll act before the damage calcifies. Do we keep treating Congress as a stage for moral posturing while real decisions are made elsewhere? Or do we rewire the system so that legislating is not only possible but expected?

 

[rodoheel]

Totally agree that filibuster reform is essential. It’s a core part of the incentive problem; right now Senators get to veto major legislation without even taking public responsibility. That’s anti-democratic and corrosive, no doubt.

I think where we differ is that you still seem to treat filibuster reform as the endgame. To me, it’s just the first step. Say we nuke the filibuster after gaining the majority and pass a sweeping climate bill, labor law reform, or universal childcare. What happens next? This Supreme Court has shown again and again that it’s willing to strike down bold legislation even when Congress does act.

So if we don’t also deal with the Court’s veto power, if we don’t stop letting them treat major legislation like a suggestion, we’ll just be sending good bills to die. That’s why jurisdiction stripping matters. Not as some fringe work-around but as a necessary companion to reforming Congress itself.

Filibuster reform removes the excuse not to pass laws. Jurisdiction stripping removes the excuse that “the Court won’t let us.” Together, they box Congress in to actually govern.

Well, to be clear, filibuster reform isn't the endgame, it's the means to the endgame, which is the passing of, hopefully, bold progressive legislation. I honestly just don't think it's quite right that the "Supreme Court has shown again and again that it’s willing to strike down bold legislation even when Congress does act." It has done that on occasion, with negative consequences. It has not done it consistently or frequently. And mostly, there just hasn't been bold legislation for it to strike down. So even as much as I hate the way the current Supreme Court acts, and distrust it to act appropriately, I don't necessarily agree that bold legislation that is carefully crafted to be legal and constitutional will inevitably be struck down.

I do think part of the disagreement here is that you think legislators (and probably centrist Dems in particular) have frequently used "the court won't let us" as an excuse for not acting. I honestly don't think that's been a frequent occurrence. The place where I remember that debate between liberals and leftists being most pronounced in that regard was around student debt relief, when Progressives were frustrated that the Biden admin "accepted" the court's ruling on that. but that was struck down specifically because it was done by executive order and not by Congress. I don't think anyone has ever suggested that Congress can't pass student debt relief/reform.

 

[rodoheel]

Just to clarify, I’m not saying this is some immovable structural destiny. Quite the opposite. I’m saying the system produces predictable outcomes based on the incentives built into it, and those can be changed if we’re willing to confront them. Filibuster reform, jurisdiction stripping, war powers reform; these are tools to restore democratic accountability and re-center Congress as the core of representative government.

I also wouldn’t say we’ve flipped roles. You’re pointing to cultural and religious polarization: real forces, but ones far harder to shift through direct institutional action. I’m focused on the levers of power Congress itself can still pull. The rot didn’t start in voter psychology; it started when institutions stopped rewarding courage and started rewarding deflection.

That’s why I’ve argued in the past that emotional resonance in politics isn’t in tension with structural critique, it’s how structure gets politicized. People don’t experience the filibuster as a rule; they experience it as abandonment. They don’t experience judicial supremacy as a legal theory; they experience it as loss. A healthy democracy doesn’t treat those feelings as irrational, it channels them toward reform. That’s what populists like FDR, Sanders, and AMLO have done.

As for why this didn’t happen 100 years ago: the conditions weren’t yet ripe. Congress was more dominant. The filibuster hadn’t yet metastasized. The presidency hadn’t absorbed the administrative state. Courts weren’t routinely striking down major policy. It took decades of media consolidation, party hollowing, and procedural drift to create a system where Congress can avoid responsibility while letting the other two branches take all the heat.

So the question isn’t whether this is reversible, it’s whether we’ll act before the damage calcifies. Do we keep treating Congress as a stage for moral posturing while real decisions are made elsewhere? Or do we rewire the system so that legislating is not only possible but expected?

FWIW I think you're missing one major factor in what is different now vs 100 years ago, and that's modern mass media. The rise of legislators who spend more time on social media and cable news networks generating sound bytes and red meat for the base than doing anything else (like, say, drafting and debating legislation) was not possible until fairly recently.

 

[superrific]

I think the Court has largely gained power where Congress has lost it by essentially stepping in to make a decisions where Congress hasn't acted, rather than by overruling things Congress has done. There certainly have been cases of the Court weakening or overruling progressive legislation - the biggest and most impactful example, in my opinion, being Citizens United - but mostly, in recent years, it's been either ruling on executive action (i.e., Biden student loan relief) or its own earlier precedents (i.e., Dobbs).

I couldn't disagree more. The current conservative legal movement has been a war on Congress going back 40 years.

1. The first assault was textualism. Textualism isn't necessarily good or bad, or if it, it's complex. But when applying textualist principles to legislation crafted before courts were using textualist methods, the court wasn't trying to effectuate Congress' intent. It was trying to kill legislation it didn't like. So many of the obnoxious textualism cases were pathetically cramped readings of statutes that eviscerated what Congress intended.

2. Congress adjusted and started writing legislation for textualist review. That's when the court invented its "get out of text free card" (Kagan, J.) -- the major questions doctrine. Now the court could invalidate legislation not based on its text, but on a weird hybrid of speculation and ostensible (but bogus) separation of powers concerns.

That's merely the most egregious of the clear statement rules. The Planned Parenthood case also involved a clear statement rule imposed on legislation retroactively, with no care as to what Congress actually intended.

3. Most of the court's ad hoc results-oriented ad hoc "reasoning" involves some legislature-defeating fiction. Assumptions like words used in different places in the same statute have the same meaning. A passing familiarity with how legislation is constructed shows that to be false. Congress doesn't pay such close attention to wordsmithing because it doesn't have time. John Manning, a leading textualist, told me that he knows he has unrealistic expectations of Congress but supported textualism because it would "hold Congress' feet to the fire." He had no answer to "To what end?"

Then there's the outright hostility to certain statutes -- in particular the Voting Rights Act and the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act. In the former, the Supreme Court has just rewritten statutes to bear no resemblance to anything Congress passed. See, e.g., Brnovich v DNC (Alito, J.), one of the very worst statutory interpretation cases I've ever read. And the BCRA was gutted systematically, one idiotic argument at a time. Citizens United was merely the culmination of a line of cases starting with Wisconsin Right To Life v. someone I've forgotten.

4. Biden v. Nebraska (student loan case) was nominally about an executive action, but it was a statutory case after they made an exception in standing doctrine for the state litigants. The administration said that the loan forgiveness was authorized by statute. The Court said, "nah. We don't think Congress would have done that" even though it did. Major questions doctrine, and all.

5. The Court's sustained attack on the APA has been a feature of its recent decisions, and that of course is an attack on a Congressional statute.

 

[Paine]

FWIW I think you're missing one major factor in what is different now vs 100 years ago, and that's modern mass media. The rise of legislators who spend more time on social media and cable news networks generating sound bytes and red meat for the base than doing anything else (like, say, drafting and debating legislation) was not possible until fairly recently.

Appreciate the clarification. I’m glad we agree that filibuster reform is a prerequisite. The current setup lets senators veto major legislation without taking public responsibility.

Here’s where I still think we diverge: you see reforming congressional rules as the main fix for Congressional inaction. I see it as a starting point. We both know this Court isn’t a neutral referee.

You say the Court hasn’t struck down that much “because Congress hasn’t passed much.” But that’s not a neutral fact, it’s a symptom of the very chill we’re talking about. The threat of judicial obstruction is already shaping what gets proposed, how bills are drafted, and which fights leaders are willing to pick. That’s a kind of structural veto, whether the Court formally rules or not.

So no, “the Court won’t let us” may not always be said out loud, but it’s baked into the strategic choices being made. That’s why jurisdiction stripping matters. It doesn’t kill the Court; it just prevents five unelected lawyers from tossing out national policy every time entrenched interests feel threatened. It’s the necessary counterpart to filibuster reform: one removes the excuse not to act, the other removes the excuse that action is pointless.

Also, I agree completely on the impact of modern media. This is why part of why this structural issue took a while to manifest as it has now. Cable news and social media have turned Congress into a performance venue. That just makes it even more urgent to restore real governing power to the branch that’s supposed to be closest to the people.

 

[superrific]

but that was struck down specifically because it was done by executive order and not by Congress. I don't think anyone has ever suggested that Congress can't pass student debt relief/reform.

Again, not really. The ruling wasn't that the executive couldn't do it (note: it was not an executive order; it was a determination by the Secretary of Education pursuant to the HEROES Act) but that Congress hadn't authorized it despite the text that clearly did.