The Five Horsemen of the Court Apocalypse—Guardians of The Dues Process; you must pay your dues to the lawyer monopoly-mob with its stupid, incompetent, lazy judges (not all but a large majority and quite possibly the overwhelming majority, though the "1st Circuit" federal appeals court, in Boston, seems to have seen through the 1983 Feldman abomination and gotten the Feldman "rule" right).
(This is a modified/shortened version of one section of my app. This isn't about whether the Massachusetts Covid emergency tax rule was right or wrong. This is about the "discretion" "exercised" and grossly-abused by judges, generally and nearly all the time. The Sup Ct "declined exercise its discretion" to get to the meat ("merits") of the NHvMA case. The Sup Ct's "discretion" is different from discretion in the lower courts. The Sup Ct can't "abuse its discretion" (its power) under the law. Congress would determine (if it had any gumption) what abuses of power (or any other reason) justify removing a Sup Ct judge or any federal judge. But "discretion" for lower-court judges is the one-trick pony for abusing power because discretion has some specific requirements (contrary to what the Minneapolis moronic courts and many others believe), and judges' inability to understand this (a symptom of the "royalty psychosis," I call it) was the root cause of George Floyd's death and was and is the root cause of the ruination and termination of a great many other lives.)
"Discretion" is the 1st Horseman and the goto guardian of the Dues Process. "Discretion" was the 3rd and final nail I saw in the Constitution's coffin in Minneapolis, before I wrote to Minnesota's top court: that there was a "military regime" operating in Hennepin Co, as "affirmed" by the MN appeals court; and then six weeks later Mr. Floyd was gone; and this project began.
The Sup Ct rejected (dismissed) New Hampshire's lawsuit against Massachusetts (NHvMA) last year under the Sup Ct's "discretion" on whether to go ahead with the meat of the suit — the tax question — or decline to. The Sup Ct didn't decide the tax question. They wrote only two sentences: "Motion for leave to file a bill of complaint denied. Justice Thomas and Justice Alito would grant the motion." Again, that Sup Ct "discretion" is not the same as "discretion" for the lower federal courts; that lower-court discretion is a critical defect that has caused system failure of the courts. But "systems analysis" obviously means that we don't limit our analysis to individual "devices." We also look at how devices interact and make the system function well or have bugs. And you can fairly-easily trace the bugs' symptoms through the case law and down to the root cause. What's rather ironic about NHvMA is that the Sup Ct's "discretion" and the lower-courts' "discretion" are related ("interact") in an interesting way that points to the gross inefficiency at the core of the court-system failure (the royalty psychosis is part of the gross inefficiency).
NH had a "draft" complaint/lawsuit (that wasn't hidden and "un-filed"), but NH had to ask formal permission (in the overstuffed, excessively-formal Dear Alphonse court system with its Cephalo-in-Gluteo, Latin Cerebrum-in-Asinus lingo) from the Sup Ct to "file" it. That "filing" would have begun the formal consideration of every argument about the tax question, though there had been plenty of arguments (maybe all of the really important ones) before the decision to "deny the motion to file." Because the Sup Ct (and virtually all judges do this at some point) DENIED the petition (or motion or application or request; they're all just a request) without giving a reason — no one knows what the supposed reasons were behind the denial. I have quoted Anthony Kennedy dozens of times now, that: "An independent judiciary is held to account through its open proceedings and its reasoned judgments." (Imagine that: judges held accountable!) By that standard — and the standard makes a lot of sense — the court system (with precious little justice, so "judiciary" is a misnomer) long ago should have lost whatever "independence" it supposedly had. But Article III gives Congress FULL CONTROL over the lower federal courts, and it's high time that control be used. Will a Congress stuffed with lawyers ever do this? Three guesses.
Art. III is six short paragraphs. Everyone should read them. They're not stuffed with 18th century lingo, and they're easy to understand. The 3rd paragraph gives the Sup Ct "original" jurisdiction (authority) over certain things, including a dispute when a state is involved; and NHvMA doubly qualifies. That means a state (here two states) files "originally" — directly — in the Sup Ct and doesn't start at the bottom and work its way up. Not that regular people actually get to the Sup Ct in this perfect, "justice for all" hoax-system. But this engineering project of Debugging the Constitution projects at least a 1000x increase in court efficiency. This will in fact open the Sup Ct doors to regular people, but it shouldn't be necessary much at all, because lower courts will be forced to do a little high-school math and simply plug the facts into the Rule of Law function machine and get the instantaneous result. No inflated bilge. Just the deterministic, objective answer. You think I'm deluded, of course. The lawyers do, which is an old story with any royal class waking up one day to checkmate.
The 3rd paragraph of Art. III also says that Congress "regulates" the Sup Ct's review power over lower courts (its "appellate jurisdiction). This is critical, and Congress must develop some gumption — which it will never have with lawyers — to regulate the lower courts 100% in order to end the abuses and corruption. So, there is no "independence" of the lower courts and the explicit words of Art III control over any federalist-schmederalist stuff, which is why the lawyers in Congress (and most of the non-lawyers are lackeys to the lawyers) have lots of 'splaining to do to Ricky (Mr. Ricky Peebles, formerly known as We the People, is the master of Congress, the Big Magilla. But Lucy, who had the 'splaining to do was just the zany redhead and hardly corrupt, I should be clear.)
NH said that its tax system is central to its sovereignty and core-structure of its government and therefore its identity as a state and its attractiveness to people and businesses; and that MA's tax rule "invaded" that sovereignty; and that this was a highest-order conflict between states, which deserved prime consideration by the Sup Ct. with its "original jurisdiction" in the 3rd paragraph of Art III. MA said that "administrative and judicial remedies [in MA] available to aggrieved taxpayers [in NH] provide an appropriate forum;" in other words, NH citizens individually should file with MA tax administrators and in MA courts. NH responded with (among other things): "The Tax Rule injures New Hampshire—not just its individual residents—and this Court [Sup Ct] is the only forum in which the State can bring its claims." MA also said that "Massachusetts has not invaded New Hampshire’s sovereign or quasisovereign interests;" and that, "At bottom, New Hampshire is 'merely litigating as a volunteer the personal claims of its citizens' who are employed in Massachusetts" (which, I say, is not true if there are a whole bunch of NH citizens affected, and NH claims there are a tons of them). I'm not taking a definite side (because I haven't read everything), but for MA to say that a ton of NH citizens should take their tax cases to MA — and that MA will give that ton a "full and fair" hearing and decision — is inviting a deluge of claims that would overwhelm MA tax administrators, assuming they just didn't rubberstamp them as DENIED. The administrators would be inclined to rubberstamp because the NH citizens are all disputing the same law, without much, if any, individual circumstances. Then NH citizens would have to file in MA courts, and the cases would probably be bunched into one case, like a class action, so it's a lot of time and money (and the Dues Process takes its cut) just to get DENIED repeatedly. (Again, I haven't read everything in detail, but if you read the section headings in the filings, you can get used to cutting through the verbiage to the important arguments.) It's clear to me that the Sup Ct should have gotten to the meat on this, and certainly if NH was accurate with its statement that the MA "tax is extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from over one hundred thousand New Hampshire residents—more than 15 percent of the state’s workforce."). I'm focusing here on the Sup Ct's "discretion," which it used to avoid the meat of the case.
If you dig down, you'll find this from the Sup Ct in 1976: "We incline to a sparing use of our original jurisdiction so that our increasing duties with the appellate docket will not suffer."
And because the Sup Ct deals with its "appellate docket" so efficiently and DENIES (flushes) 99%+ of cases, we have lower federal courts doing whatever they want (and I have chapter and verse on this, and I will show you), which includes letting state courts (like those in Minneapolis) do whatever they want, and then bad cops get the "anything goes" signal to do whatever they want with a knee on the neck or an itchy trigger finger...or flat-out lie even though the bodycam squarely contradicts their lies, as was the case in my false arrest, which I will also show you.
My engineering point is on efficiency — which is what engineering is all about (not that my personal life is any model of efficiency, except perhaps my efficiency in finding piles of crap to step into). So vhat to do, vhat to do, asks Guido. What to do is simple: get rid of the inflated verbiage with its Cephalo-in-Gluteo, which, among other things, helps know-nothing, corrupt judges — like Hennepin County's chief judge Kevin Burke — throw around lingo they don't understand and make up whatever they want to get their extortionist lawyer-pals off the hook.
Reduce legal principles down to their (very simple) Boolean expressions. This will essentially guarantee the end of the many objectively-wrong decisions that come out of courts. Engineers and real scientists simplify to go after nature's truth and make working things. Lawyers pump-up and obscure with verbius inflatio and Cephalo-in-Gluteo for job security and have rendered extinct the "rule of law." Okay, "essentially guarantee" might be a bit of an overstatement. But compared with the cesspool that courts are today (by and large), compelling judges — on penalty of eeejection — to simply plug-in the (assumed or demonstrated) facts, will clean up a huge percentage of courts. (You can read elsewhere in my blogs of the third nail in the Constitution's coffin in Minneapolis, when the MN appeals court said that a judge's "discretion" applies to the law. There is no discretion in a legal conclusion; there cannot be if the "rule of law" means anything at all; and in many courts and especially Minneapolis and Montgomery County, MD, it does not.)
This Boolean expression, by the way, is also called a jury instruction. It's a questionnaire that jurors fill in with the facts, and then the required legal conclusion is written out for them. You can bet there's no inflated lingo in jury instructions. They are written to be simple and legally correct, of course, and I doubt any "model" instructions have any serious defects. They would be caught very quickly and changed. And there are tons of objectively wrong decisions from courts. The 5th horseman (see below) reflects that 80% of judges and lawyers could not pass three randomly-selected 10th grade math quizzes. They think that everything is a "disagreement." Not when the law is written as a Boolean.
Court Failure: The federal courts have failed, and they were bound to fail because they were basically obsolete from their creation. The court system could not scale from 1789. It was a rattletrap jalopy by even the horse and buggy standards of the early 1800s. The huge inefficiencies would doom the courts, together with full reliance on the "integrity" (ha!) of judges—or anyone with power. It's an old story.
With the exception of a small minority of courts, judges want to get rid of cases as quickly as possible, so they can go to conferences or play golf or both. They want to validate the JD degree by seeing that lawyers win. They want to protect lawyers — members of the same royal class as are judges — who are obvious extortionists and embezzlers. They want to find good jobs for their clerks, and the big law firms have the most jobs, so those win over small firms, and those who have not paid their dues to the Dues Process (the "unrepresented") get the bone. Judges want to feather their post-retirement nests with fat arbitration gigs and such, and the big firms have many more of those than the rest do. The Dues Process is the "rule of law."
Here are the five horsemen:
#1) "'Discretion' means we can do anything we want" (No, a federal trial court cannot do whatever it wants, and those judges must be eeeejected if they do so flagrantly or often enough, and it's two strikes and out for them; and same for the appeals judges who let the trial judges get away with anything;
#2) "Petition DENIED" (this is a subset) of #1; no reason given; this is a violation of Anthony Kennedy's second criterion: "reasoned judgments."
#3) "Scarce judicial resources" wouldn't be an issue if judges could pass a 10th grade math quiz and distill the legal principle down to a Boolean expression; Congress must force the issue and do it for them, and it is very simple;
#4) "You need to get a lawyer" (this is a catchall to reinforce the Dues Process);
#5) "Disagreement with a judge's decision does not necessarily mean you did not get a 'full and fair opportunity' to litigate your case." This one is an automatic eeeejection if the judge doesn't reference the Boolean expression for the legal principle under consideration. The Boolean is the key to a 1000x+ increase in court efficiency and a dramatic increase in accuracy, i.e. justice. Note to judges: nobody cares about your inflated verbiage (that's deliberately redundant, doubly-inflated). When your verbiage results in a contradiction of physical reality (and requires a time machine, as in Minneapolis, where 9 minutes is a mere 9 seconds on the neck; or in my case where facts are "adjudicated" by a case five years before the facts existed), it's wrong. "If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it." Richard Feynman
The "systems analysis" interaction of components here is that the Sup Ct's discretionary "sparing use of our original jurisdiction so that our increasing duties with the appellate docket will not suffer" is that the Sup Ct emphasizes not spending its time on a big-time dispute between states (when in NHvMA it clearly should have; or it certainly should have stated why not), so it (the Sup Ct) can focus on cases on appeal from the lower courts that corruptly abuse their discretion all the time, and about which the Sup Ct does NOTHING.