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A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

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Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#151

Post by watwut »

iammisc wrote: post #137
rat87 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure it was about slavery as the wedge issue over which to decide whether you can leave the union. This sort of reactionary rhetoric just skirts over the surface. 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 go…

The union was good for them as long as union was supporting the slavery. They were perfectly ok with forcing free states to return escaped slaves. They were perfectly ok with the system in which north blacks could be kidnaped to slavery and had little legal recours.

The union stopped being good enough for them, when it stopped being perfect.

Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#152

Post by renonce »

jszymborski wrote: post #102
ohazi wrote: post #4

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…

I mean, it could have just as easily discouraged the student and lead them to think that there's nothing there. I hardly doubt being given an A+ and being encouraged and told that he had quite an idea there would have led him to abandon the enterprise. Too often exceptional students perform despite poor teaching practices, and then we look to the poor teaching practices as the root of the success.

What constitutes the root of success is up to the reader and I don't think the article mentioned that. The student happened to put his paper into action, sent letters to legislators and got responses and caught one of the chances to change the history. I think that's just life.

Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#153

Post by Redoubts »

int_19h wrote: post #118
webnrrd2k wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The U.S. history with slavery and Jim Crow laws tell me that it's not always perfectly viable, and is sometimes very difficult.

By the same token, the fact that Fugitive Slave Acts were passed back in the day would indicate that centralization isn't any more viable.

Centralization isn't viable when you give literal slavers undue influence in government, yes.

Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#154

Post by kown7 »

rat87 wrote: post #111
iammisc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we have no problem with such diverse policy in other federations like the eu.

But we're not like the EU We are a single nation

As others have noted, here's good argument why USA isn't a nation: https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-...

Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#155

Post by shadowgovt »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #90
shadowgovt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of the US has been a history of power centralization for good reason, unfortunately. The experiment of decentralized state level authority has been found wanting to the tune of a civil war and a Great depression, both of which were addressed by centralizing federal power.

How did a lack of federal power cause the Great Depression? I can see how it took a strong Federal government to do that the states could not to end the Depression, but not how that lack of power was a cause of getting into that specific mess.

Lack of federal power didn't cause the Great Depression, it showed that there were peacetime problems that states operating economically independently could not address.

Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#156

Post by Maursault »

quantumBerry wrote: post #117
Maursault wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Prior to 2008 most Americans did not believe the 2nd included an implicit right of self-defense Only gun nutters believe in the right to self defense? Who has the right to keep and bear arms? Does the constitution say that the "right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed?" If you bear arms are you no longer entitled to self defense? Do you know who the militia is in the United States? Are you aware every…

> Only gun nutters believe in the right to self defense?

No. Only gun nutters believe the source of their right to self-defense comes from the 2nd, while the rest of us have that right whether there is a 2nd Amendment or not.

> Do you know who the militia is in the United States? Are you aware every able bodied male citizen between 17 and 45 are considered militia?

Are you aware that the purpose of a militia is not self-defense? It is common defense. Big difference. The 2nd has been gutted, and the assault on the Constitution continues.

> Who has the right to keep and bear arms? Does the constitution say that the "right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed?" If you bear arms are you no longer entitled to self defense?

The right of self-defense is ancient, predating the rise of civilization and even the evolution of the human species, but if you'd like to point to a written source, how about the Magna Carta? Also, the 2nd does not say that at all unless you ignore the first three words, placed there, one could say, to underscore the importance of them. The 2nd certainly does not say, "the right of a person...." It is the right of The People. How it could be interpreted as an individual right is a bastardization and entirely against the clear intention of The Founders (and, again, we know this from the minutes of the Constitutional Congress... we know what they intended... because they debated whether to include self-defense and intentionally left it out, so we know they did not intend the 2nd to be any individual right).

Maybe the First Amendment means that all printed media should be free as in beer? Or that printing presses should be free as in beer? Or that religion and assembly should never cost anything? These interpretations would be the same kind of bastardization of The Founders' intent, grotesquely twisted from something noble and grand to something petty and cheap.

Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#157

Post by jessaustin »

shadowgovt wrote: post #46
voidfunc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, unfortunately "states rights" has become a rallying cry for racism and hatred, but the original framing of this country is that the state's are basically supposed to be much stronger than the Federal government. I don't really know whether we can unwind the federal governments grasp on things without basically destabilizing the whole thing though at this point (and admittedly, I'm not sure the majority would wan…

It's worth noting that the original plan was for even less Federal power, and that one fell apart almost immediately. Power has been moving in a central direction ever since.

Not so much "fell apart" as "intentionally overthrown by capitalists when they didn't agree with policies determined through democracy". Madison and his co-conspirators didn't approve of the deliberate currency depreciation and other measures voted in by farmers who fought, unpaid, for years in a war that benefited rich elites and came home to find their farms repossessed by debtors and tax collectors. So long as the various states operated as competing democracies, they were subject to the wishes of their citizens. The constitution, written in secret by a cabal of rich white men, put an end to all of that, as it was intended to do.

Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#158

Post by Maursault »

int_19h wrote: post #132
Maursault wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That is a drastic oversimplification of the case. What happened in 2008 was a culmination of a long process that started long before then. I would argue that the starting point was the 1989 essay "The embarrassing 2nd Amendment" [1] by Sanford Levinson, who is not exactly known for his conservative views otherwise. In general, as with every other Supreme Court case, I would recommend going to the primary source and r…

Your comment is a Straw Man. My intention was not to summarize the case. Changing the Founders intended meaning of the 2nd to include self-defense was really outrageously skew to the case itself, and entirely unnecessary and irrelevant to the case and the 2nd. It is brazenly false NRA propaganda from the early 20th Century come to fruition and provably not the Founders' intention. The case is incidental, because its effect on the 2nd that is relevant --because the subject was the "difficulty" in changing the US Constitution: it does not take 2/3rds majority of both houses of Congress and a majority of the States legislatures. All it takes is a senile gunnutter on the bench to go beyond the mandate of the highest court and the judicial branch of government: Judges do not legislate. Yet Scalia did, and that part of the decision came out of left field (the idiom would have worked better if it was right field, but that isn't the idiom). The 2nd had a purpose, the purpose was militias, whom the Founders were devoted to, to make a standing army unnecessary, to prevent the consolidation of executive power. But now as an individual right to be armed for the purposes of self-defense it leaves the nation with less and no protection against tyranny. But at least pride has been elevated from an indulgence to a virtue. The last proper exercise of the 2nd will be the Black Panthers at the Alameda County courthouse. That was how the Founders intended the 2nd to work, not as a way to say "don't touch my stuff," not as a source of paranoid mass-delusion.

Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#159

Post by jawns »

rcollyer wrote: post #19
jawns wrote: post #2

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 ...…

You're ignoring the 9th amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Essentially, the bill of rights was not intended to be exhaustive, nor could it be.

I'm quite aware of that amendment, but here's the problem.

Some of the founders were concerned that by listing out some rights in the Bill of Rights, they would be treated as an exhaustive list and used to deny other rights that were not explicitly listed. So Madison proposed the Ninth Amendment as a way of indicating that it's not an exhaustive list. We see this approach in a lot of modern legal contracts, where the phrase "including but not limited to" is used.

But the practical implication of this amendment is that it gives the judicial branch nearly carte blanche power to say what additional, unenumerated rights the Constitution does or doesn't protect. And once the court makes a pronouncement that an unenumerated right exists, the only way to overrule it is to ... you guessed it ... ratify an amendment!

But that creates a very strange setup. SCOTUS "discovers" these unenumerated rights because it's too difficult to get an amendment ratified -- but the sole check on their authority is ratifying an amendment to veto their ruling.

Re: A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

#160

Post by shadowgovt »

jessaustin wrote: post #157
shadowgovt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that the original plan was for even less Federal power, and that one fell apart almost immediately. Power has been moving in a central direction ever since.

Not so much "fell apart" as "intentionally overthrown by capitalists when they didn't agree with policies determined through democracy". Madison and his co-conspirators didn't approve of the deliberate currency depreciation and other measures voted in by farmers who fought, unpaid, for years in a war that benefited rich elites and came home to find their farms repossessed by debtors and tax collectors. So long as the…

So long as the various states operated as competing democracies, they couldn't pull together into one country.
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