State legislatures have long been willing to let somebody else (i.e. the federal government) make all the major decisions.

I wonder if that’s true of Congress as well now, of if it’s just that in a 50-50 country there isn’t much that Congress can do.

I was wondering about options when there’s an out-of-control President and a House that is unable to unite enough to bring the lawsuit as an institution. It just strikes me as bad policy that Congress is faced with the choice of having a majority agree to sue for a separation of powers issue–and even suing may require a change in governing law to confer standing on the complaining congress critters.

IANAL, but I don’t see the same issue here: social media platforms’ removing content created by others is not the same thing as social media platforms’ users’ coercing the platforms to produce content with which they disagree. If I went over to BoingBoing and tried to force Cory Doctorow (he’s the one who runs that site, isn’t he?) to write an anti-abortion post, then he could refuse.

I know that’s a blog, not a “platform.” I used it as an example because blogs actually do produce content, that’s pretty much the primary thing they do, whereas “platforms” wanted to be treated like common carriers (even though I know Facebook, for instance, must have a content-producing team), which properly made them have to publish pretty much all comers. They wanted that because they didn’t want to be liable for the consequences of anything one of their users posted – a user doxxing someone leading to someone’s harming that person – but along with the benefit of being released from that risk comes the requirement that they not engage in viewpoint censorship.

Do I have that right?

Of course, any and all actions by the legislative and judicial branches would be vulnerable to the executive branch just ignoring them. “How many divisions does the Pope have?” Etc.

But current standing rules limit the ability of the Congress to sue. This strikes me as wrong–if the executive can do whatever it wants without statutory authority (or with imagined statutory authority as in the student loan case), we’re on the road to tyranny.

But if Congress has standing to sue, how is that asserted? Would it require a majority vote? If so, whenever the president has a majority in Congress willing to go along with his theft of power, the Congress couldn’t sue. This would enable Congress to avoid having to vote for giving away free stuff (I suspect that student loan forgiveness is very popular with the people getting the free money, but very unpopular with “Joe the Plumber”). I suspect that the vast majority of Democrat congress members are in favor of giving away money to their base, but they would hate to have to vote to do so. Of course, this doesn’t explain why the House didn’t vote to challenge the giveaway and force the Court to re-address standing on separation of power issues.

And of course, if any individual congress member had standing to sue, the floodgates would open and any Sheila Jackson Lee or Maxine Waters or Hank Johnson could sue for anything at any time. This probably doesn’t make sense.

Perhaps a “majority of the out of control party” rule would enable the party not controlling the executive branch to challenge separation of powers violations by the executive. This would be a safety valve to enable the judicial branch to referee disputes about the executive stealing power from the legislature. I suspect that quite a few Republicans had no desire to fight over the student loan giveaway–maybe that’s why Congress didn’t intervene–a few Republicans not showing up for the vote would have resulted in a lack of support for challenging the student loan giveaway.

This is all very complicated, but if Biden’s campaign gift to his base had been allowed to stand, we would have accelerated our already fast pace to banana republic status.

All in all, we have a very sorry political class. While the Republicans are obviously better than the Democrats, they cut and run from important issues at the drop of a hat.