There's no citation, no elaboration, no intellectual discussion, no value added, no evidence that their claim is true. It's pure flamewar tangent, and like your comment, is unsuitable for HN.
It also says to not feed egregious comments by replying. So, in a way, complaining about someone not following the guidelines is itself against the guidelines. So if you were truly interested in the application of the guidelines you wouldn't mention someone wasn't following the guidelines.
The proper thing to do is to ignore the comment and let dang (or the voting system) handle it.
> It also says to not feed egregious comments by replying.
"Feeding" is overwhelmingly interpreted as "engaging with". I'm not engaging with the parent comment, I'm pointing out that they're blatantly violating the guidelines while avoiding engaging with their (non-)point.
This makes your point
> So, in a way, complaining about someone not following the guidelines is itself against the guidelines.
shaky at best, and invalid (at least according to the letter of the law) at worst.
I agree that the discourse would also be degraded if comment threads were filled with commentators constantly pointing out every little violation of the guidelines, which is why I try to avoid that, and downvote/flag/contact dang, but in egregious cases I believe that occasionally pointing out the trespass is valuable as a complement to those, because it explicitly reinforces the point that this kind of behavior is unwelcome and against the rules - a mere down voted/flagged submission may lead people (especially those from Reddit) to think that they're just being disagreed with.
(and, the difference between "people don't agree with my opinion" and "this behavior isn't appropriate" is that in the latter case people change their behavior or leave, while in the former case they keep their bad behavior but only let it out when they think they'll be agreed with, which further degrades discourse)
Is there any binding law that prevents any organization from bribing the Supreme Court into making favorable rulings? Shouldn’t the default assumption be that recommended judges are friendly to their influence?
The plain fact that the Supreme Court has record low level trust as an institution makes any important ruling that reaches their court something of an exercise in anxiety. I think that’s worthy of discussion and I don’t think the original comment was inflammatory. Just my own opinion.
> Is there any binding law that prevents any organization from bribing the Supreme Court into making favorable rulings?
There is not. SCOTUS justices can, and do, openly and privately accept bribes. The Supreme Court could make its own rules against bribery and enforce them, but it explicitly chose not to[1].
There is currently an effort to pass a law to require SCOTUS to have an ethics policy[2]. However, the party proposing it does not have enough power to enact it. It's up to voters now.
[1] Notice all of the rules in their recently released Code of Conduct use "should," not "must." There is also no enforcement mechanism. This "Code of Conduct" is functionally functionally equivalent to having no Code. https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/Code-of-Conduct-for-Justi...
[2] "Binding Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court: Congress should pass binding, enforceable conduct and ethics rules that require Justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. Supreme Court Justices should not be exempt from the enforceable code of conduct that applies to every other federal judge." https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
It's better to start an important discussion with a substantive comment than a quippy name-drop.
There's definitely an interesting discussion to be had about the lack of Supreme Court ethics guidelines and enforcement, bad faith judges, lobbyist influences on judges, etc.
But building that discussion on a flamebait parent post isn't the strongest foundation.
