The Presidential aka executive branch does not have that kind of direct authority in the United States. At best, the executive can start a criminal investigation, which case must be made before the court branch; the laws that were broken were set by the legislative branch.
Courts in the US are given an extremely high degree of independence, in the goal of limiting corruption.
> Courts in the US are given an extremely high degree of independence, in the goal of limiting corruption.
And exactly the opposite ended up happening in this case, isn't it? Corruption is a world-wide problem, but I don't know how widespread it is in developed countries. And its the same problem, people sitting at the top don't have authority to curb the ground-level corruption. Here in India at least, the government has started implementing something called Lokpal:
It is an agency which works at the ground-level to curb the corruption both in the private and public sectors (and also the ministry). A question arose, however, that what happens if the Lokpal people itself went corrupt? And that's why the concept of decentralization was introduced. The central Indian agency, CBI can check the corruption in Lokpal, and of course, the courts have authority over both CBI and Lokpal. Thus, decentralization is at least, the present way of stopping corruption here.
Right, I remember the controversy over Lokpal, I was following India news more then. Developed countries tend to have less overt corruption and more implicit corruption; the populace simply doesn't stand for open bribes. Chicago is probably the most overt location in the US for corruption; elsewhere it tends to look very much like "rotating door" policies, as well as police looking the other way for important people.
The Supreme Court's job is to issue smackdowns on appeals courts, and they have been doing so rather consistently. EFF is lobbying the lower federal courts at the moment. See this story for details: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/eff-asks-appeals-...
But yeah, the President is actually quite weak. The President can't do shit about this problem.
Well, only Congress can impeach federal judges. So POTUS can't do anything in that regard, but POTUS administers the Patent Office. Obama could write one little letter telling them to mark all new patents and all old patents up for review as invalid. I believe this can be done without the approval of congress. I imagine there would be a lawsuit immediately from various parties. My best guess is that SCOTUS would be forced to uphold this executive order.
In fact, Obama has done this, but not to such an extreme degree.
Obama issued five executive orders on patent reform last summer. Among other things, they require the Patent and Trademark Office to stop issuing overly broad patents, and to force patent applicants to provide more details on what invention they are claiming. One of the orders opens up patent applications for public scrutiny — crowdsourcing — while they are in the approval stage, to help examiners locate prior art and assist with analyzing patent claims.
patents.stackexchange.com is the answer to this. As you mentioned crowdsourcing as a means to scrutinize the patents, this website is exactly doing that. I hope someone on the jury panel at least refers to this website before awarding the patent trolls their victories.
Congress definitely has the power, but so does the federal court system. I think its more beneficial to push the federal courts to attack the East Texas problem.
