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So, in short anything which goes up to the supreme court would get stasised into an eternal limbo state because everyone can't meet? Or would it essentially be a referendum? That sounds pretty sensible, actually. If the courts can't decide something, it gets tossed to the public to decide?

To give an actually serious answer to this (as the failure to reach a decision does emerge in other scenarios as well), then you'd be left with the lower court ruling remaining intact. It would effectively nullify the Supreme Court as an entity, which would mean that there would be no more legal opinions binding the entire United States. (Sort of; court decisions relating to national agency actions would still have national ramifications.) Whether this is a good or bad outcome depends on one's philosophy, or just one's opinion regarding the trend of lower court opinions on a particular topic across jurisdictions.

One odd part of this is that it wouldn't be boiling down to different states, but a mix of federal appellate court jurisdictions - each of which are multi-state, and don't always make sense. E.g. Idaho would be stuck in the notably-liberal 9th circuit.

Edit: Wrote too quickly and forgot a few other implications. First, legal conflicts between states would no longer have an arbiter. So water rights disputes (often what leads to this) or border disputes wouldn't have formal resolution. Second, if I'm remembering right the federal court system would no longer have a way to override state supreme court decisions regarding federal matters - this is most relevant for situations where the federal constitution would override the outcome. For example, if [X state]'s supreme court holds that a racist law is fine, then normally the federal S. Ct. would step in and say 'nope, the federal constitution doesn't allow that'.

FURTHER EDIT: See a few posts down.

(I'm probably forgetting a few other situations.)

The other question that would get raised: if everyone was a justice of the supreme court, who would argue the case?

Quote from: Dostoevsky on September 20, 2020, 12:12:08 pm

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Changing https to http on your image link makes most hosts work.

Easiest host would be postimages.org. You can upload stuff even without an account (though you won't be able to delete it later if you don't.)

Thanks.

Not forgetting invertebrates, or more simple creatures like bacteria. Though I won't claim to know 100% sure, and would be interested to see scientific claims otherwise. (Honestly; not being cheeky.)

As to the CA aspect, CA has its own ESA-equivalent I'm not terribly familiar with so can't comment there. Like a lot of CA environmental laws it's rather more stringent than the federal one, though.

The problem is that they are literally correct. The argument doesn't hold a lot of weight in court only because people don't care about endangered species that much.

Er, perhaps we're misunderstanding each other here, but no? Any given species does not have the entire world as its habitat. It requires certain temperature ranges, sometimes specific other prey/plant species present, etc. etc.

When it comes to the Endangered Species Act there's a fiddly definition (of course) of what "critical habitat" means, which comes down to factors like historical range (for a certain definition of historical).

[Either way I'm getting a little off course here.]

For what it's worth, there's a lot of extra baggage in the Bundy situation. As the article notes, the fellow's been illegally grazing cattle on public lands for quite a while without paying. On land that's habitat for an endangered species. There's also the longstanding 'sovereign citizen' stuff going on. Circumstances surrounding the 'why' of Bundy's actions over the decades and the CHAZ/CHOP are quite a bit different, though I'm not going to claim the latter was a purely right/wonderful thing.

Interesting to compare the federal response in the Bundy standoff to that in the CHAZ, though I suspect that's as much due to the different president as it is due to race / other factors.

As to this rumored new zone, I'd need to see more evidence.

Thanks. Probably safe to wait for a solid sale, then.

Actual examples!

Hey now, you know the U.S. can't make any policies based on what *shudder* Europe does.

Edit: Now that I think about it further, gas stations here in the D.C. area already list their price as XX.XX+9/10, i.e. with an extra 0.9 cents. And that hasn't really caused many problems for them.