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US Politics: Corporations are made out of people


davos

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Suttree:



Shall we start with Scalia writing the majority opinion in Employment Divison v. Smith.




You're fucking kidding me, right? The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed as a direct result of the majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith. It's the entire reason that the Hobby Lobby case was decided on the basis of federal law (the RFRA) instead of the First Amendment.


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Tracker:



And so what if that is the case? Shouldn't citizens be worried less about the intricacies of legal reasoning and more about the way the Court's rulings affect their lives?




Well, no, obviously not. We're talking about a system and the rules by which a system functions. Since we're talking about the rules that govern society, we want to make sure that we have rules that can be and are applied with consistent results. Measuring success by outcome dependence alone ignores the fact that a legal system is supposed to govern a complex set of interactions that provide a framework for societal functioning.



Imagine you were injured by the negligence of another person, and you sued, and you lose because the Judge went back into his chambers and flipped a coin. The coin landed on tails, and he decided that the Defendant would win today. Alternatively, imagine that the Judge listened to your case, applied the law to the facts, and found the other party liable for your injuries. From a pure outcome dependence standpoint, except as it applies to the two litigants, society should have zero preference as to how your case was handled. Either you won, or the other guy won. Doesn't make a difference to the rest of us 300 million idiots.



But is that really the case? No, of course not. If our rules for determining when one person is negligent and therefore obligated to compensate another for negligently causes injuries are good rules, then we benefit by those rules operating properly, irrespective of the outcome of any particular case. Whether any one individual wins or loses his case, whether it's a negligence case, a custody case, or a case before the Supreme Court, matters less than the correct functioning of those pesky "intricacies of legal reasoning."


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Suttree:

You're fucking kidding me, right? The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed as a direct result of the majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith. It's the entire reason that the Hobby Lobby case was decided on the basis of federal law (the RFRA) instead of the First Amendment.

You don't say. :rolleyes:

Is it your extensive legal training that the rest of us lack which gave you this unique insight? Now try and keep up and connect the dots as to how Scalia's original opinion and his most recent decision speak to him having a political agenda. Or do you think Justice Ginsberg is "fucking kidding" you as well?

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You don't say. :rolleyes:

Is it your extensive legal training that the rest of us lack which gave you this unique insight? Now try and keep up and connect the dots as to how Scalia's original opinion and his most recent decision speak to him having a political agenda. Or do you think Justice Ginsberg is "fucking kidding" you as well?

Snore. Another non-argument. Please, try to articulate exactly what it is that you're only barely managing to vaguely suggest. Have the courage of your convictions and make your argument.

I'll even help you out by firming up the structure for you:

"Scalia's majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith and concurrence with the majority opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores demonstrate Scalia's political agenda because...."

After the ellipse, you fill in your reasoning.

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Funny that you are telling others to "make an argument" and mention "courage of your convictions" when all you are doing is parroting the reasoning of the majority in this decision and ignoring all of the issues raised by the dissent.

Edit: Seriously? You take the time to edit and that's what you add? Willfully ignorant as others have said doesn't even begin to describe it.

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From Jarl the Climber (on a total aside, I learned the other day that Jarl is a Norwegian name from whence comes the Germanic name of Karl/Carl. Not too surprising, I confess, but there it is, go George with Norwegian wildings):

Well, if you're going to put a total aside about my area of expertise in this thread, I will totally have to correct it even though it's completely irrelevant to USA politics.

Jarl and Karl do not have the same origin. Here are links to Behind the Name's entries on Jarl, Karl, and Charles that explain this:

http://www.behindthename.com/name/jarl

http://www.behindthename.com/name/karl

http://www.behindthename.com/name/charles

We now return this thread to immigration reform and Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby ....

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Fact-checked by Ormond...The Professor. Shit.

Here's where I got the thing I claimed:

Jarl Mohn

The bit I heard on the radio does not appear to have been mentioned in this link, but that's where i heard it: form this guy.

Which just goes to show you that even highly intelligent and successful people often are misinformed about things which are not part of their own area of expertise ----

and that may make the topic relevant to US Politics after all. :)

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Funny that you are telling others to "make an argument" and mention "courage of your convictions" when all you are doing is parroting the reasoning of the majority in this decision and ignoring all of the issues raised by the dissent.

Edit: Seriously? You take the time to edit and that's what you add? Willfully ignorant as others have said doesn't even begin to describe it.

So I take it you're not going to explain the argument you were vaguely alluding to, even after I set up the form for you?

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You know, I went into Hobby Lobby when the case first came up several months ago, and looked at a bunch of different stickers on products. Turns out the majority of the stuff I happened to pick was made in China. I find it deeply ironic and hypocritical that they won't allow their own employees to have access to choosing their family planning on the basis of not supporting birth control and abortions. . . but they apparently have zero qualms about doing business with companies from a country that over the years has not only encouraged families to practice birth control, but whose policies have led its citizens to choose to abort many, many (especially female) fetuses.


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Surely the answer, for people who disagree with the Supreme Court ruling, is to seek the repeal of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

That's probably not the best outcome either though. After all, the original impetus for the RFRA was to prevent the Dept. of the Interior from building roads through sacred Native American land, and I think most people would agree that that's still a good goal. If we're going for a legislative solution (which of course is a complete fantasy as long as the GOP has the House), it should probably be amending the RFRA to place a considerably greater burden on plaintiffs to define why a federal law/regulation is an infringement and to better set out the definition of a compelling federal interest to be able to ignore that infringement in certain instances anyway.

And then get another liberal on the court before it can reach a decision in a future case coming to this same conclusion again on First Amendment grounds rather than just statutory ones.

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If a closely held for-profit corporation's manager/shareholder wants to hurt the corp's bottom line with a long drawn out court fight over issues exranious to the corporation's profitablity using the corporation as an "alter ego" for their personal religious beliefs, more power to them. I think Plaintiff's are going to have a fun time piercing the corporate veil and holding those shareholders directly liable for corporate actions.

It's not a perfect solution but it would mean there is a cost to pushing personal religious views at the corporate level in a for-profit corporation.

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Tracker:

Well, no, obviously not. We're talking about a system and the rules by which a system functions. Since we're talking about the rules that govern society, we want to make sure that we have rules that can be and are applied with consistent results. Measuring success by outcome dependence alone ignores the fact that a legal system is supposed to govern a complex set of interactions that provide a framework for societal functioning.

Imagine you were injured by the negligence of another person, and you sued, and you lose because the Judge went back into his chambers and flipped a coin. The coin landed on tails, and he decided that the Defendant would win today. Alternatively, imagine that the Judge listened to your case, applied the law to the facts, and found the other party liable for your injuries. From a pure outcome dependence standpoint, except as it applies to the two litigants, society should have zero preference as to how your case was handled. Either you won, or the other guy won. Doesn't make a difference to the rest of us 300 million idiots.

But is that really the case? No, of course not. If our rules for determining when one person is negligent and therefore obligated to compensate another for negligently causes injuries are good rules, then we benefit by those rules operating properly, irrespective of the outcome of any particular case. Whether any one individual wins or loses his case, whether it's a negligence case, a custody case, or a case before the Supreme Court, matters less than the correct functioning of those pesky "intricacies of legal reasoning."

Well, the answer is not so obvious to me.

I think one can be unconcerned with the ins and outs of the law without, say, supporting a system in which judges decide cases using non-deterministic methods like coin-tossing. I think most people would agree that society requires rules, but I think they'd also agree that there are many ways to interpret a rule, particularly when you're dealing with vague guidelines. The Constitution is vague on any number of issues, and I don't think it unreasonable to hope that interpretations of that document come from a place of concern for the disadvantaged, and do not reflect a consistent sympathy for white, straight, male, Judeo-Christian privilege. That's what we've seen quite consistently from the Roberts Court, and I don't like it.

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How's about a little sunshine to start our day?





For the first time in its history, the Navy promoted a woman on Tuesday to become a four-star admiral.


Surrounded by friends, family and peers, Adm. Michelle J. Howard was promoted to her new rank at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. She’ll take over as the vice chief of naval operations, the No. 2 officer in the service. She is not only the first woman to hold the job, but the first African-American.




That's nice, right?



Well here's a little piss in your cornflakes, courtesy of the House and their neverending attempt to be as deserving of contempt as possible.





The House Ethics Committee has quietly done away with the requirement that lawmakers disclose their all-expense-paid trips on annual financial forms, National Journal reported on Monday.



Trips paid for by private groups are now no longer required to be noted on annual financial-disclosure forms filed by Congress members, according to the Journal. The move was never announced publicly; the Journal said that it discovered the change in a review of the disclosure filings.






They're just thinking of us, after all. Trying to spare us the indignity of seeing whose hands are stuck directly up their ass.





And finally, reports are surfacing that Obama has found the spine he seems to lose every several months.





President Barack Obama dared Republicans to follow through on their threats to bring a lawsuit against his administration over his use of executive action.



"Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff. So sue me," Obama said Tuesday at an event in Washington. "As long as they’re doing nothing, I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something."



Obama’s defiant attitude comes as House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, plans to propose legislation that could bring a lawsuit against him for implementing executive actions that the GOP contends amounts to a breach of his constitutional power by side-stepping the legislative process.




Whether the spine remains in place for the foreseeable future is still up in the air.


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If a closely held for-profit corporation's manager/shareholder wants to hurt the corp's bottom line with a long drawn out court fight over issues exranious to the corporation's profitablity using the corporation as an "alter ego" for their personal religious beliefs, more power to them. I think Plaintiff's are going to have a fun time piercing the corporate veil and holding those shareholders directly liable for corporate actions.

It's not a perfect solution but it would mean there is a cost to pushing personal religious views at the corporate level in a for-profit corporation.

Will never and should never happen. I don't know if you have ever tried to pierce the corporate veil in any of your vases, Scot, but the standard is very high and most courts are reluctant to ignore the corporate fiction. And why should they in this instance? Piercing the corporate veil is generally done when the corporation is broke and the owners looted corporate assets. Your desire to punish Hobby Lobby's owners does not appear to be based on protecting creditors or tort victims; instead, you want to punish them for not offering contraceptives as part of their health insurance plan. No way, Ser.

ETA: So much has been made about protecting corporation's rights when in reality that is protecting the owners' rights. As the majority states:

As we will show, Congress provided protection for people like the Hahns and Greens by employing a familiar legal fiction: It included corporations within RFRAs definition of persons. But it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. An estab- lished body of law specifies the rights and obligations of the people (including shareholders, officers, and employ- ees) who are associated with a corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people. For example, extending Fourth Amendment protection to corporations protects the privacy interests of employees and others associated with the company. Protecting corporations from government sei- zure of their property without just compensation protects all those who have a stake in the corporations financial well-being. And protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.

If you want to blame someone for the decision, people, start with Bill Clinton and the nearly unanimous Congress that extended these religious rights to corporations.

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That's probably not the best outcome either though. After all, the original impetus for the RFRA was to prevent the Dept. of the Interior from building roads through sacred Native American land, and I think most people would agree that that's still a good goal. If we're going for a legislative solution (which of course is a complete fantasy as long as the GOP has the House), it should probably be amending the RFRA to place a considerably greater burden on plaintiffs to define why a federal law/regulation is an infringement and to better set out the definition of a compelling federal interest to be able to ignore that infringement in certain instances anyway.

And then get another liberal on the court before it can reach a decision in a future case coming to this same conclusion again on First Amendment grounds rather than just statutory ones.

And before now, the RFRA was interpreted in the opposite direction generally. This ruling is out of whack with precedent, like alot of the Robert's court's shit.

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