democracy is when you let a bunch of unelected elders in robes dictate how society operates
They donāt entirely, though. In fact, much of what the SCOTUS has struck down has been them saying Congress needs to do their job and write laws to do what they want the laws to do, versus having the SCOTUS legislate from the bench. Donāt get me wrong, this SCOTUS is fucking awful, but thereās some slight truth to some of what theyāve said on some of their rulings. For example, Roe v Wade couldāve easily become a national law, but Congress wonāt do it.
Itās bad when even RBG was saying roe shouldnāt have been used as law. The dems have had a ton of times to solidify it into law via the proper channels but wonāt because it gets votes.
Have they, though?
It wasnāt because it gets votes, but because it loses votes. People will strongly object to one thing a hell of a lot faster than theyāll give you credit for doing anything. Look at Bidenās entire administration. We handled post-covid inflation* better than any other developed nation, but he didnāt get credit for the 90% he fixed. He got shit on for the 10% left to go.
* And Iād argue a good chunk of that inflation was the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the bipartisan bill Trump signed into law while rejecting the oversight the Dems wanted. That was the biggest corporate giveaway in our nationās history. Literally just giving public money to private corporations. A step far beyond āprivatize profits, socialize lossesā.
Dems believed, reasonably, that Roe was settled and wasnāt in imminent danger. Holding a vote on that just pushes people away. Of course, in hindsight, they should have done it anyway. But as you can tell from this past election, and all the states that went red while passing womenās rights legislation, having the issue out there is not getting them votes.
This only sounds reasonable until you think about it for 2 seconds. Do you really want the Senate and Congress to have to learn about and try to legislate the details of chemistry, medicine, finance, engineering, etc, rather than delegating figuring out the details of tasks like āmake the food safeā or āmake the water cleanā to scientists and other experts at agencies?
The Supreme Court only has the power it does because the legislature has been dysfunctional. Most of their terrible decisions are not based on the constitution, but rather their interpretation of laws written by Congress. Congress can easily override them by passing a law saying āNo, that Is not what we meantā.
āSeparation of powersā is an incredibly nonsensical concept. If we live in a democracy then the democratically elected legislature should have total power. The idea that unelected judicial branch can dictate policy is indeed anti-democratic, the judicial branch should be wholly subervient to the legislature. The same is true of the executive branch, the executive branch also should be wholly subservient to the legislature. Giving a single guy control over the whole freaking military and making the branch roughly independent is also entirely nonsensical. It has happened historically in the past in several countries that the executive just tells the military to attack the legislature and the country collapses into a dictatorship. This literally almost happened in South Korea literally today, although the president backed down at last moment. Any country with separation of powers is already borderline a totalitarian dictatorship, since it just takes a single crazy executive to decide to pack the courts and disband the legislature solely for their own personal gain and the whole thing falls apart.
