All of this is correct de jure, with the exception that the executive powers that be (i.e. sheriff's dept) can refuse to comply with the court order. Then nobody would be around to enforce the court order.
We prefer not to talk about that kind of total collapse of the rule of law, because it gives people ideas. It is not a necessary or desirable part of the discussion of judicial power. Nevertheless, you can just apply to a higher court and take advantage of their more reliable enforcement apparatus.
True, but there are so many "small" issues that it'll get lost. I contacted an investigate journalist about an issue. They declined to run it because there were much bigger issues.
Well it’s important to talk about, lest we repeat the mistakes of the past. The Little Rock Nine comes to mind as an example where enforcement of the law from the highest court in the land was resisted (in this specific case by a governor).
Those weren't "mistakes of the past". They did it on purpose. There is no pathway from educating regular people about ways to circumvent court orders to strengthening the rule of law. Yes, interesting from historical and legal perspectives and thinking about how to design enforcement mechanisms to resist these things, but we weren't talking about that, and Hacker News is not a law reform commission. I am specifically putting up resistance to talking about it in public. It undermines people's confidence in these systems, which are actually very strong, and the resulting reduced participation in the systems that make up the rule of law (e.g. this guy, who is already losing confidence in his local democracy, choosing not to use the courts thinking that his chances of success are slim, and giving up) frees the stage for people who wish to undermine it. I don't propose that this argument is relevant to very many other things besides the kind of abject disobedience you described.
Judicial review of executive actions like these and its mechanisms of enforcement do not stink, rather they are one of the greatest achievements of human civilisation and arguably function better than literally every other part of society in any democracy you care to name. They do not need reform. If they needed reform beyond small calibrations of penalty units, the correct answer would more likely be a civil war.
I don't agree with your position that regular people shouldn't know about cases where rule of law failed, because it might make them question the rule of law.
A strong and resilient democracy is built on transparency, not on hiding information.
Anything that people put resistance towards public disclosure is always a strong smell; not dissimilar to this township refusing to swear in an independent auditor.
It’s a fine distinction. I didn’t say people shouldn’t know. I said we shouldn’t talk about it so casually in a public forum. The information is available to anyone who wants to know.
I learned most of the things that I know without explicitly looking for them. I am glad that this topic came up in this very thread because I would not have learned about Little Rock Nine otherwise.
I am not an American. Maybe neither are you. But I feel compelled to contend with the fact that many Americans are right on the edge of abandoning their democracy. In these circumstances knowledge is not neutral. My aim here was simply to not permit that tiny chunk of non-neutral knowledge to go without context, and I think I have succeeded.
Edit, to put this slightly better: there is a huge difference between keeping something a secret and saying “before I teach you this, I think you should learn these things first”. If the first thing you learned about American civics was that it’s all an illusion and anyone can do what they want, the lesson has utterly failed. You’ve not learned any civics at all.
That’s elitism and is actually an undemocratic ideal. The freedom of ideas is paramount in a Western democracy. And what I was trying to teach others is that the State’s monopoly on violence is what keeps the whole thing running smoothly. For example, the Magna Carta would have meant nothing if it was not backed by the armies of landowning noblemen.
> We prefer not to talk about that kind of total collapse of the rule of law, because it gives people ideas.
And because you do not talk about that kind of collapse, you get people like Joe Arpaio who (after years!) finally got convicted for contempt of court - which however did not stop Trump from pardoning him of course.
