131–140 of 198 posts
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Judges fill out the details of law that aren't in the statutes, but they're not meant to create substitute statutes from whole cloth.
Sure they are. Michigan still has no murder statute. (There's a penalty statute, but the actual definition is common law).
There have been only two amendments to the U.S. Constitution over the past 50+ years (one of which is the subject of this story). Why? Partly because the Supreme Court has been very willing to discover hidden rights within the existing amendments, decreasing the need for states to go through the very arduous process of getting a new amendment over the finish line. That might seem like a fine way to handle things ...…
> There have been only two amendments to the U.S. Constitution over the past 50+ years Did you know the US Constitution and Bill of Rights was massively altered in 2008 without a two-thirds majority of Congress nor any majority of the States legislatures?[1] In fact, this is so, and it was done pretty much by one man ironically abandoning his own career-long ideology of strict constitutional interpretations with an a…
In general, as with every other Supreme Court case, I would recommend going to the primary source and reading the majority opinion and dissents [2], since they go over the various arguments in meticulous detail, and judge for yourself.
[1] https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
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Why do you think the federal government is going to make smarter decisions than the average state government? I don't want to roll the dice on the feds making the right call every time. When the government makes a bad call I want the option of leaving and going somewhere less dumb. That's not an option if the dumbassery comes from Washington. It was federal overreach that made DOMA possible in the first place, as wel…
>When the government makes a bad call I want the option of leaving and going somewhere less dumb. This is only an option for the most privileged among us. What are the options for someone who is gay and doesn't have the means to move to a less bigoted state?
The right of people to govern themselves is important even if we disagree with how they do it. Note the EU Human Rights Court came to the exact opposite conclusion a year after Obergefell, finding no right to marriage for same sexual couples under the EU convention on human rights.
If you look at constitutional law in western Europe, no country has a court that intrudes as much into social issues as the US Supreme Court.
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Power centralization is rarely predicated on reasons that include the benefit of common man. The US doesn't appear much different in that regard, either.
There were two major events in US history that caused significant Federal power consolidation. Technically three, if you count the collapse of the government that was structured under the Articles of the Confederacy prior to the Constitution because it's lack of tax authority meant that it couldn't deal with the war debts that have been accrued from 1776 onward. The first was the civil war, and federal power consolid…
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The gay marriage issue is a great example of exactly the opposite of your point. States one by one recognizing gay marriage and proving that it wasn't going to cause the collapse of society is the only reason it was recognized on a national level. The same process is currently happening with marijuana prohibition.
the first amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" the federal govt should have zero benefits tied to marriage. By having benefits tied to marriage they have essentially established religions that have male-female marriage as the default religion of the country. if taxes, inheritance etc were not tied to marriage and instead were do…
Regardless, that clause is about the federal government not interfering with official state churches (“establishments of religion”) which existed until the 1830s.
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If interpreted strictly, the constitution is really not suitable for operating a modern government (e.g. if you interpret the list of powers given to the federal government narrowly) so the supreme court essentially has no choice but to make stuff up. Obviously once they start doing that there's no real way to control what they are able to modify, but the only real way to fix it would be to completely scrap the curre…
The slaver bits (including electoral college, disproportionate Senate) need a total rewrite. Amending against bad faith pol exploits should be as frequent as Patch Tuesday. While we’re at it, promote the non-slaver founders symbolically and strike the slavers from the currency. Rebrand as Free States of America.
Don’t mix up the parts of the constitution compromising with slavery with the parts liberals just don’t like for unrelated reasons.
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The civil war was all about membership flexibility. Is it any surprise that the losers wanted their 'divetsity' to be accommodated. Frankly we're heading down the path of membership flexibility if the next few years don't bring about significant change.
the civil war was about slavery If anything the federal government was too accommodating and it still wasn't enough for the slave masters who dominated southern politics
It's not like the confederacy was fighting for slavery and to be part of the union. Both Kentucky and Delaware were happy with the status quo. The confederacy wanted both slavery and to leave the union, which they perceived to be their right.
The federal government at the time was much smaller than the current one and much less empowered.
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> If interpreted strictly, the constitution is really not suitable for operating a modern government (e.g. if you interpret the list of powers given to the federal government narrowly) so the supreme court essentially has no choice but to make stuff up. One, that’s not quite true. Sometimes the Constitution uses broad language. For example, the Commerce Clause is worded expansively. It’s probably been pushed a bit be…
I would be interested in reading some detail of the "wall of separation" of church and state being something that the Supreme Court made up. It seems quite self evident from the text of the First Amendment. And the quote seems to come directly from Jefferson?
Jefferson was a Francophile that had a radically different view of the first amendment than the other founding fathers. The constitution meant to create a society of religious pluralism, not French style secularism. See: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
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But we're not like the EU We are a single nation
Speaking as a foreigner who immigrated to the US, I don't see Americans as a single nation. Maybe that was the case at some point in the past, but there are too many cultural divisions by now that transcend compatriotism.
Catch-22: After he got the amendment ratified, there's a strong argument that the paper probably should have been given a higher grade. But had he been given that higher grade in the first place, he probably wouldn't have gone through the effort to ratify the amendment. You could argue that the paper did deserve the initial C grade, because that's what it took to get him angry enough to go and get the amendment ratif…
Poor grades are supposed to be for poor work. What you're talking about is intentionally giving good students bad grades for good work just to piss them off, hoping that something good comes out of pissing them off. That's not what grades are for.
I.e. capriciously, arbitrarily, and often based on a random person's mood at some random time?