Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has set his sights on eliminating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday announced which cases it would consider next and which it wouldn’t. Among those the court rejected was a case that challenged the authority of OSHA, which sets and enforces standards for health and safety in the workplace.

And Thomas, widely considered to be the most conservative justice on the already mostly conservative court, wasn’t happy.

In a dissent, he explained why he believed the high court should’ve taken the case: OSHA’s power, he argues, is unconstitutional.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    is unconstitutional

    At this point I’m seeing a pattern. Any time someone good has to be removed so that pure evil shit can take it’s place, the argument almost always includes at least “is unconstitutional”

    Guys, GUYS! Your constitution… Sucks. Same as your founding fathers. The US constitution is a document that was cool a few hundred years ago, but it is heavily outdated and at this point an actual new one really wouldn’t be a bad idea. Yeah yeah, the original document doesn’t suck, at least not in historic context, and definitely should be kept in a museum but stop effin quoting the damn thing as it it were Gods personao commandments. Get a new constitution for the 21st century.

    Your founding fathers were okay, of course, but stop treating them as if they were infallible gods. They weren’t. Im sure that for their time they were super smart and their ideas revolutionary, but that was centuries ago and a lot of their ideas no longer fly.

    The right to bear arms (insert joke about bear arms) was written when an arm was a musket, that would take (a) minute(s) to load a single bullet that then could barely hit a target and had the penetration power of my penis. Now we have AR15’s for children who can murder double digits other children through multiple walls within double digit seconds and basically half the country thinks this is perfectly fine and quotes that two hundred year old line as the infallible reason why.

    It’s okay. Your constitution WAS great hundreds of years ago and yeah, your founding fathers WERE awesome. They both live two hundred years away from the situation we face today. The world changed. The US changed. Science changed. Everything changed and got updated. Your constitution got a few updates but at this point could use a rewrite. You know, something healthy to start over fresh.

    • DudeImMacGyver
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      5 months ago

      Rewriting the constitution is part of their plan but I very much doubt the changes they want to make are good for anyone but them.

      • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        For sure, you want a constitution that protects all, not a select few, you want a constitution that gives as much freedom as practically possible to all and not a select few, you want to be very clear that religion has not a goddamn thing to do with a country or again the select few will try to fuck over everyone else…

    • TurtleJoe@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I mean, the big philosophical divide between liberal and conservative judges is usually whether or not the constitution is a “living” document. That is, whether it can be interpreted through a modern lens, or if laws must be strictly limited by what is exactly written in the document.

      I would argue that it’s easily the former, since, one, they explicitly allow amendments to the Constitution, and, two, there is a session of the Bill of Rights where they basically say, “we can’t possibly list all the rights that people are entitled to. This list is by no means comprehensive, and just because something isn’t in here, it doesn’t mean we’ve left it out on purpose.”

      I agree that the constitution is very flawed, and that we would probably be better off without it, but one thing they were very clear on: no kings. The Trump immunity ruling was not only legal nonsense, it was clearly not an originalist interpretation (what the conservatives claim to be.)

      When you take into account all of the rulings that this current court has made, it’s quite clear that they just start with the conclusion that they want, and reason backwards to get the justification. Once you’re at that point, I’m not sure that it really matters what your legal system is based on; they’re just doing make-em-ups anyway.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Ok your rant over? Good. If it was rewritten today it would be civilization ending levels of disaster. And you know what? OSHA is constitutional.

      • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        it would be … Disaster

        Why? Are we no longer capable of being smart? Did the leaded gasoline do its job too good?

        Your current constitution sucks as a legal document, it should be in a museum. It was written well over 200 years ago, and I’m site there are some good basic ideas in there but most of the time its abused to death to remove rights.

        Make something new based off our current knowledge. Make it make sense.

        Prohibit guns for most people as by now its goddamn clear that people can’t be responsible enough to handle them freely

        Everyone is the same, outlaw any and all discrimination on gender, skin color, culture, etc.

        Make it very clear that religion and state are absolute separate and are not allowed to touch eachother. If it were up to me (and unfortunately it isn’t), religion as a whole would be banned because this “i failed to understand santa Claus isn’t real when I was 5 years old but my beliefs must be protected and my god wants to kill all the Jews” bullshit has given the world nothing but wars and hatred. Grow up.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Fine you convinced me. Call a state constitutional thing. Watch how fast the new document outlaws abortion, makes the US an officially Christian nation, and shores up the electoral system such that no Democrat could ever win.

          What you aren’t looking at is that we can amend the document right now. Look at the very last purposed changes. End of birth naturalization and ban on gay marriage. You want that?

          • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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            4 months ago

            Oh no, I agree with you on that, don’t do it NOW. I’m not sure when, though, but it has to be rewritten from scratch to clearly defined I’ll defined issues, to update with current technology, social standards, human rights, etc.

            I know that a very select few people would hate that but IDGAF

    • obviouspornalt@lemmynsfw.com
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      5 months ago

      The conservatives agree with you and want to call for a new constitutional convention so that they have an opportunity to work in the project 2025 agenda directly into a new draft of the Constitution.

      An important part of controlling state legislatures is to be able to get enough states to first call for the constitutional convention and then to control it. That’s the most effective route to ensuring that the white, Christian, business first agenda is permanently enforced

    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Tons of the reasons given for why congress can do things don’t really make sense, like civil rights amendments were defended with the reasoning that congress can regulate interstate commerce, and segregation affects interstate commerce. IMO that doesn’t make sense, but everyone goes along with it because these regulations are obviously good. If we had a good constitution, we wouldn’t need to make these weird excuses to do things that are clearly necessary for the public wellbeing, but unfortunately we don’t, so we have to make do and have any decision we make be randomly struck down by the courts when they decide they don’t like it anymore.