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Originally posted by RichardC:

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Originally posted by jhe888:

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Originally posted by two-two-niner-romeo:
BumbleBee Tuna?

What does Jessica Simpson say?

What does the fish say?

What strikes me is that the California legislature could easily amend the law to include bumble bees and the Governor could sign it.

What the court did was create new law based on what a judge thought was a better policy, not based on what the law said. Perhaps bumble bees should be protected, but it isn't the place of the court to do it.

The fact so many people ignore the process is disturbing but not surprising. Government by "the ends justify the means" should horrify people regardless of the value of a particular issue.

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Originally posted by Fly-Sig:
What strikes me is that the California legislature could easily amend the law to include bumble bees and the Governor could sign it.

What the court did was create new law based on what a judge thought was a better policy, not based on what the law said. Perhaps bumble bees should be protected, but it isn't the place of the court to do it.

The fact so many people ignore the process is disturbing but not surprising. Government by "the ends justify the means" should horrify people regardless of the value of a particular issue.

They're legislating from the bench, something Democrats have been doing forever.

George Orwell was right.

I guess this is fitting since the leftist executive administrations have been making public determinations of guilt or innocence.

The left apparently doesn’t see a need for 3 branches. Apparently one is sufficient. Like a dictatorship.

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Originally posted by Flashlightboy:
If you read the decision the court did not say that bumble bees are fish. Not at all, not close, and not even an inference.

What the court said is that the legislature had provided the agency with the authority to determine what constitutes a fish and the agency, within the parameters set by the legislature, had the authority to make the determination.

The court was not being activist. To the contrary it was being very conservative by ruling that the agency was empowered to make such determinations and the legislature could address that authority if it wanted.

The court did not say bumble bees were fish. I know it's fun to think that's what happened but it didn't.

Spoilsport.

The court may also be reminding the lege that they need to provide some better definitions.

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California court rules bees are fish

Why not? Nobody there knows the difference in a man and a woman so no surprise there.

I’m guessing a wacky rig for catching those fish.

Just like the courts allowed the EPA to redefine CO2 as a pollutant even though it is nothing of the sort by all prior definitions of pollutants.

That one decision opened the door to a shit ton of socialism we are seeing unfold. Controlling CO2 means controlling combustion, which means controlling energy usage.

The things CA is doing now - banning weedwackers and gas stoves, will turn into a system of carbon credits that will determine if you are allowed to drive the car or truck you want, if you are allowed to have the house you want, and if you are allowed to fly where you want. They will use CO2 to control everything you do. And they will force you to buy uncompetitive products and technologies from government endorsed companies that essentially bribe the politicians.

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Originally posted by bigwagon:
This is another bald-faced example of courts legislating. Rather than force them to go back to legislature to lobby for the inclusion of insect/bees in the endangered species act, the courts have taken it upon themselves to do it.

I look at it the other way around: This is another example of legislators saddling courts with policy issues because they don't want to do their jobs. It would take about 15 minutes to draft a bill that adds bees to the act in question, but because they lack the courage to do so they let the courts deal with it and then lambast them when they do. The courts are complicit in this, of course, but it starts with the other branches.

Sorry but this is no different than letting ATF define bump stocks or forced reset triggers as machine guns.

Just because the regulatory law allowed too much freedom to decide what is a "fish", does not mean the court should like an agency define a bee as a fish. Now, defining a crab, or a crayfish, or a snail, or even a frog as a "fish", or ANY aquatic animal for that matter is about as far as any court should go.

I thought judges were supposed to look in dictionaries to get definitions of words used in laws and apply the common meaning of the words. A bee is not a fish, period.

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Originally posted by Lefty Sig:
Sorry but this is no different than letting ATF define bump stocks or forced reset triggers as machine guns.

Just because the regulatory law allowed too much freedom to decide what is a "fish", does not mean the court should like an agency define a bee as a fish. Now, defining a crab, or a crayfish, or a snail, or even a frog as a "fish", or ANY aquatic animal for that matter is about as far as any court should go.

I thought judges were supposed to look in dictionaries to get definitions of words used in laws and apply the common meaning of the words. A bee is not a fish, period.

Crabs, crawfish, snails, and frogs are not fish, either. You’re suggesting exactly the same arbitrary expansion of definitions, you’re just drawing the line in a different place.

You’re also actually drawing the line much closer to the same place than you think.

Crawfish and bees are both arthropods. The split in the evolutionary tree between the branch that eventually included arthropods (crawfish and bees) and the branch that eventually included vertebrates (fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals) happened hundreds of millions of years ago.

In an evolutionary and biology sense, YOU are tremendously closer to being a fish than a crawfish is.

I’m mostly a letter-of-the-law person and think this should be fixed by the legislature, despite the original intent of the law being clear. This whole argument is because an idiot legislator meant “any plant or animal” but wanted his bill to sound fancy and wrote out a list that left a bunch of shit out instead.

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Originally posted by Gustofer:

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Originally posted by gpbst3:
In an only-in-California decision,

Bees are considered livestock in Montana.

There are a lot of beekeepers there, or used to be. But they are taken care of just like calves, and all the other farm animals.

I thought these headlines sounded a little absurd, so I decided to go look for some more details about what the law in question actually said and what the argument was. Here is the short version: The law included 'invertebrates' as one of the categories that could be protected, but it didn't say the invertebrates had to be fully or partially aquatic. So, since it didn't specify, the court decided that any invertebrates would meet the qualifications for species that could be protected. The case wasn't about whether bees were fish. It was about whether there were any implied restrictions to the types of invertebrates that the law could cover.

So, the core stupidity is that the law creates its own definition for the word 'fish', and lumps pretty much anything without an internal skeleton into that definition. This is an issue that I personally have with laws: they are allowed to make up their own definitions of common words that are only valid in the context of that law. This creates needless confusion to anyone actually trying to follow the law. They could have just as easily come up with their own phrase like 'target species', or 'protected animals', or something like that, but they decided to call their list of animals 'fish' instead, which just made things confusing. It's like the whole issue where the ACA was ruled to both be a tax and also not a tax, depending on which set of regulations you were applying to it. Different sets of laws had different definitions for what a 'tax' was, and they didn't have to agree with each other.

And now for my rant: It would cause its own problems, but I think I would prefer if words were required to have the same meaning across all laws, at least at the same level of government. So, the word 'tax' has to have the same meaning for all federal laws. Now, the nuances of that definition can be spread out over multiple laws as changes or clarifications are needed, but if you make a change to what the word means, it should also apply to any current uses of that word in the law as well. If that would screw up previous laws, then pick a different word! I'm OK if States and the Federal government don't agree on definitions, but they should at least be internally consistent in their own arenas. The law is confusing enough even when we all agree what a word means!

- Bret

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Originally posted by sadlerbw:

So, the core stupidity is that the law creates its own definition for the word 'fish', and lumps pretty much anything without an internal skeleton into that definition.
- Bret

Why would the law lump fish in with invertebrates? Fish are vertebrates and have been for a really long time.

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Originally posted by RichardC:

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Originally posted by jhe888:

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Originally posted by two-two-niner-romeo:
BumbleBee Tuna?

What does Jessica Simpson say?

What does the fish say?

The fish is silent.....

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Originally posted by trapper189:

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Originally posted by sadlerbw:

So, the core stupidity is that the law creates its own definition for the word 'fish', and lumps pretty much anything without an internal skeleton into that definition.
- Bret

Why would the law lump fish in with invertebrates? Fish are vertebrates and have been for a really long time.

You know how dumb most politicians are about guns?

Biology is a lot harder than guns.