SR 113-24: Judicial Reform Amendment (Passed)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I will never vote for "democratizing the judiciary". The Judiciary has to be independent of the unruly masses in order to reign in democratic excesses.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Also, I cannot help but note that we run risk of diminution of the judiciary branch as a result of anger manifest against Labor shenanigans and chaos.

Color me shocked!

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Objections noted. To keep us from possibly missing votes, and since we are currently voting on another amendment I will open  these amendment votes when the other amendment vote closes tomorrow, while discission continues.

Voting on another amendment? Is that in this thread, I am not seeing where?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Also, I cannot help but note that we run risk of diminution of the judiciary branch as a result of anger manifest against Labor shenanigans and chaos.

Color me shocked!

Oh come on.
For once that I didn't do anything controversial

This is a multitude of chickens coming home to roost.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Amendment 1 (Blairite): Abstain

Amendment 2 (Weatherboy): Aye

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

     Windjammer is right that these positions are not desirable to active players; when I was Emperor in the IDS for years, I found it very hard to staff our region's judicial office. I would be very interested to know if there are in fact newer players who want to become justices and are finding themselves stonewalled by the lifetime appointments, because that has simply not been the case in Atlasia historically.

That's the downside of a hard limit is that in fact I even thought of your struggles back in the day when I first approached this text. We could end up having to leave positions vacant if there is a hard limit.

I think while not perfect, Weatherboy probably has come to closest to getting this balance right, both here and in terms of avoiding elections in the judicial branch.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

It's pretty amazing how in 2015, I tried to convince the ConCon to adopt a 3-person SCOA (which was what it was prior to the reset) with one-year, staggered terms (i.e. 1 appointment/retention every 4 months): this meant that every President would get to appoint or retain 1 Justice (if not 2, assuming they won two terms as President).

Imagine all of our shock that it was the conservatives (among others!) who shot this idea down, talking about the "integrity of the Court", too much volatility and the need for lifetime appointments. Of course, this was coming out of a years-long period where the conservative/status quo neoliberal dynamic was a constant on the Court.

Also, to echo PiT's sentiments: the Supreme Court is not a place for advancement. It's where old farts end up by design who have ample experience in the game but who don't want to play in the day-to-day minutiae anymore. The arguments that "upward mobility" or whatever some might call it is being stymied is hilarious, because that has literally never been the case with this body nor is the case today. I'm not going to bother running the averages, but 3-5 years on the court for non-flakes is pretty much on par with the entirety of the game's history.

Just be gross, y'all. I never cared to admit doing s[inks]t for political gain. What is truly despicable is when the usual suspects (who've been around far longer than they care to admit, yet call me "old man" or whatever) try to invent some sordid web of excuses when they just wanna be grossly partisan. Ugh, Jesus. Gross.

In 2015  what defined conservatism in this game was completely separate and detached from real life out of necessity. The Bush era GOP was DOA and the only path forward was some kind of libertarian esque coalition that abandoned most of the hot button culture war issues in favor of broader and vaguer concepts, such was necessary to built a competitive right of center coalition. 

By 2015, there was no effective opposition on the right to my philosophical influence and while there were desperate attempts to circumvent that, all of which failed. Either because of the seeds that PiT and I planted in the RPP era that precluded the post party dissolution era from deviating from that line (The Midwest Conservatives were very regionalist for example) and the IDS was always a bastion of regionalism. This meant that even though I had stepped away from leadership on the right for two years, it was still all shackled by the legacy of the RPP, carried forth by the likes of PiT, Zuwo, JCL or whoever you might name in that regards.

There was animus on the right regarding Opebo and a desire to remove him and there were attempts to insert the RL rights preference for term limits into the game. If one were to review the mid 2013 vote on term limits for example, I was the only Federalist who came out against judicial term limits and sided with the Liberal Party aligned Senators against it, amounting to 3 Nay votes and since Polnut abstained it failed.

The in-game situation had shifted. The right still viewed regions as beneficial to them, and the court was clearly pro-region in having opposed the business in June 2013 in the Pacific. Thus by definition, in terms of "in-game" politics, the court was "conservative" on the primary issue that mattered to "most conservatives" in game and RL pressures were irrelevant. There were voices who tried to pull in that direction and pull away from the RPP legacy, but they failed to make headway, moved to the left, left the game, or were forced to accept the in-game reality out of necessity.

By 2015, anything resembling dissent on the right had departed from the Federalists, many of the ex RPPers were still around and many of the new people and faces embraced my message seeing me as the voice of reasons against the nutcases in the radical movement.

Discord, the Trump era, the the continued Labor dominance of the court and lack of an organized alt-left threatening to destroy the game and thus illustrate the benefits of an establishment left court slowly eroded the rights in game opposition to judicial term limits.

The post Bush dynamic is now gone also and the right is far more unified and supportive of RL political battles then was the case back in the late 2000s when so many young conservatives were completely at odds with the RL party on social issues and foreign policy.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

If a Justice would not be reconfirmed or retained that would be because of how they acted in office. I don't want a blatantly partisan system, but the current system, in which a supermajority of current players weren't around or were very new when 80% of the judges were chosen, is not a good system either. I would hope my vote for Sestak shows I am willing to vote for judges whose ideology is different from mine. And indeed, none of my problems with the Court have stemmed from actual full fledged rulings, but instead from refusals of action.

As far as timing goes, we've already substantially amended Reactionary's language and I think more are coming. But 4 of 5 justices will be subject to fairly quick reconfirmation regardless, it's not just you that is getting reevaluated Windjammer.

As far as the refusal on the Louisville case goes, while that refusal is settled precedent that I won't support re-litigating, I still believe that was the wrong decision. And of course, you have more or less said you were looking for a way to drop that case even before the "speedy trial concerns" arose, which I definitely don't think was appropriate.

What do you have against the current supreme court exactly?


As I already said, these seats aren't for active players

And on an another note,
I'm ing tired of this disinformation against my person. What I Said regarding the Louisville trial it is that I believe the offense he was being accused were grave enough not to be judged by a fantasy supreme court but should have been dealt by the moderators.

I didn't withdraw this trial because I didn't want to take it like you are insinuating

My understanding is the moderation team did take a look at the matter at the time. I am not familiar with why they did not employ substantial forum-based sanctions. As for in-game sanctions like stripping voting rights, SCOA would be the only ones with jurisdiction to impose that, short of banning LT from the AFE board as a whole, and I'm not entirely sure if doing that was supported by the forum software at the time.

Wulfric,
We were talking about doxxing accusation which I believed were grave accusation to be dealt by the mods. I don't know what they did or they didn't but this was MY POSITION.

I did take the Louisville case regarding fantasyland and I worked my ass to make the trial as fair as it could, the first being that Louisville being represented by an attorney.

In the end the accusation completely screwed up by not presenting their case and a second attorney emerged like one month later because he was being busy trying to make Lincoln secede.

So tell me Wulfric what did I do wrong that was deserving this removal.from office threat? I did my best to make the trial the fairer possible and it is not my fault the defense screwed up

Well the reality of the doxxing accusation was each part of the "Atlas Government" needed to address what was in its jurisdiction:

The Discord moderators handled discord sanctions - LT was banned from the Atlas Discord for a number of years
The Atlas moderators handled forum sanctions - and for whatever reason didn't do much
Imposing in-game sanctions fell to you guys, and you guys also declined to take action.

What you did wrong was:
- Dropping the case (speedy trial should refer to cases years afterward, not barely 4 months afterward)
- Threatening people who disagreed with you in the case's thread (although I will grant that you later partially retracted this under some pressure)
- Later admitting that you didn't want the case anyway and were glad it was dropped, essentially saying you wanted LT to get away with nothing outside of discord (since, for whatever reason, the forum moderators had more or less dropped the case at that point and your body was the only one that could impose sanctions.)

1. Four months is an entire Presidential term in game, though. Also, as I recall, the second designated prosecutor spent a month lobbying for Lincolnite secession and only once that imploded then decided to come back to the case. There was certainly prosecutorial incompetence in that case by any objective measure.

2. This is partly what I meant when I said chickens coming home to roost the other day. It also incorporates both his longevity, his "reputation" and also whatever this Lincoln business is that I don't really know the first thing about, but its just one more paper cut in some ways. We can debate to the ends of time what is fair and not in this regards. Personally, I don't think personal views of Windjammer should dictate the way we structure a government institution.

This has happened before, when the radicals and TPPers decided to restructure the Senate rules around the basis of working out their anger at how Windjammer operated as Vice President, even though his actions were completely legal and constitutional in his handling of such. I don't want an institution damaged for two years again because Windjammer hurt too many people's feelings.

Instead, it should be on the basis of what is best for the functioning and operation of the institution itself.

3. The court's decisions should not be "variable based on moderator action". That is not impartial justice. First of all because the court has not a bit of relevance to moderator level decision making, nor is it appropriate for the court to change its decisions to assuage the baying mobs of hounds dissatisfied by a mod cave action. Second, because mod cave actions are private and many sanctions are as well unless publicly announced.

Also I don't appreciate us as moderators being lumped in under "atlas government" as if this was some "three branch system" with the Mods, the Atlasian Court and Discord. Just contemplating this combination makes me sick thinking about it.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

If a Justice would not be reconfirmed or retained that would be because of how they acted in office. I don't want a blatantly partisan system, but the current system, in which a supermajority of current players weren't around or were very new when 80% of the judges were chosen, is not a good system either. I would hope my vote for Sestak shows I am willing to vote for judges whose ideology is different from mine. And indeed, none of my problems with the Court have stemmed from actual full fledged rulings, but instead from refusals of action.

As far as timing goes, we've already substantially amended Reactionary's language and I think more are coming. But 4 of 5 justices will be subject to fairly quick reconfirmation regardless, it's not just you that is getting reevaluated Windjammer.

As far as the refusal on the Louisville case goes, while that refusal is settled precedent that I won't support re-litigating, I still believe that was the wrong decision. And of course, you have more or less said you were looking for a way to drop that case even before the "speedy trial concerns" arose, which I definitely don't think was appropriate.

What do you have against the current supreme court exactly?


As I already said, these seats aren't for active players

And on an another note,
I'm ing tired of this disinformation against my person. What I Said regarding the Louisville trial it is that I believe the offense he was being accused were grave enough not to be judged by a fantasy supreme court but should have been dealt by the moderators.

I didn't withdraw this trial because I didn't want to take it like you are insinuating

My understanding is the moderation team did take a look at the matter at the time. I am not familiar with why they did not employ substantial forum-based sanctions. As for in-game sanctions like stripping voting rights, SCOA would be the only ones with jurisdiction to impose that, short of banning LT from the AFE board as a whole, and I'm not entirely sure if doing that was supported by the forum software at the time.

Wulfric,
We were talking about doxxing accusation which I believed were grave accusation to be dealt by the mods. I don't know what they did or they didn't but this was MY POSITION.

I did take the Louisville case regarding fantasyland and I worked my ass to make the trial as fair as it could, the first being that Louisville being represented by an attorney.

In the end the accusation completely screwed up by not presenting their case and a second attorney emerged like one month later because he was being busy trying to make Lincoln secede.

So tell me Wulfric what did I do wrong that was deserving this removal.from office threat? I did my best to make the trial the fairer possible and it is not my fault the defense screwed up

Well the reality of the doxxing accusation was each part of the "Atlas Government" needed to address what was in its jurisdiction:

The Discord moderators handled discord sanctions - LT was banned from the Atlas Discord for a number of years
The Atlas moderators handled forum sanctions - and for whatever reason didn't do much
Imposing in-game sanctions fell to you guys, and you guys also declined to take action.

What you did wrong was:
- Dropping the case (speedy trial should refer to cases years afterward, not barely 4 months afterward)
- Threatening people who disagreed with you in the case's thread (although I will grant that you later partially retracted this under some pressure)
- Later admitting that you didn't want the case anyway and were glad it was dropped, essentially saying you wanted LT to get away with nothing outside of discord (since, for whatever reason, the forum moderators had more or less dropped the case at that point and your body was the only one that could impose sanctions.)

1. Four months is an entire Presidential term in game, though. Also, as I recall, the second designated prosecutor spent a month lobbying for Lincolnite secession and only once that imploded then decided to come back to the case. There was certainly prosecutorial incompetence in that case by any objective measure.

2. This is partly what I meant when I said chickens coming home to roost the other day. It also incorporates both his longevity, his "reputation" and also whatever this Lincoln business is that I don't really know the first thing about, but its just one more paper cut in some ways. We can debate to the ends of time what is fair and not in this regards. Personally, I don't think personal views of Windjammer should dictate the way we structure a government institution.

This has happened before, when the radicals and TPPers decided to restructure the Senate rules around the basis of working out their anger at how Windjammer operated as Vice President, even though his actions were completely legal and constitutional in his handling of such. I don't want an institution damaged for two years again because Windjammer hurt too many people's feelings.

Instead, it should be on the basis of what is best for the functioning and operation of the institution itself.

3. The court's decisions should not be "variable based on moderator action". That is not impartial justice. First of all because the court has not a bit of relevance to moderator level decision making, nor is it appropriate for the court to change its decisions to assuage the baying mobs of hounds dissatisfied by a mod cave action. Second, because mod cave actions are private and many sanctions are as well unless publicly announced.

Also I don't appreciate us as moderators being lumped in under "atlas government" as if this was some "three branch system" with the Mods, the Atlasian Court and Discord. Just contemplating this combination makes me sick thinking about it.

Yankee,
I didn't withdraw the case because I wanted the mods to take over.


What is wrong with what I said seriously? If there are doxxing attempts it has to be dealt by the mods whether this true or not, whether this is on Atlas or an another website

I didn't say you did, I was saying he was implying that certain actions needed to be taken differently by the courts as "the last man standing to act" or whatever his exact wording was. In this case, it would be ignoring the prosecutorial issues to proceed "because the mods didn't act as the mob desired".

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

2. Nothing you've done is objectionable is an obvious falsehood. Yes, everything you did was legal, and had some reasoning behind it, and whether out of genuine agreement or simple adherence to the will of the Chief (I suspect it is more the latter), most of what you did did not have vocalized dissenting opinions. But that doesn't mean that some of your actions don't have arguments against them, or that all of your conduct has been perfectly honorable in every possible light.

You know this reminds me of November 2016 when one of the Blair supporting CR members or whatever they were calling themselves by that point said something to the effect of "their is no way Yankee agrees to split the term" then hours later a deal with Blair splitting the term was announced. Was that you, I cannot remember?

Rather then engage in conjecture about the nature of a dynamic, why not just ask them yourself? PiT posted in this thread earlier. BK might not be available at present but I would reckon most of the others involved can be reached for inquiry.

Either way its better than just presuming the other justices are Windjammer's mind slaves. I have known PiT for fourteen and a half years, doesn't sound like something he would be keen on doing.