41–50 of 198 posts
Just think about that for a second: Someone had to push the state legislature to abolish slavery in 1995. Just sickening
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> so the supreme court essentially has no choice but to make stuff up. Or the constitution can be amended.
A tiny, tiny shade of sanity would be nice once in a while, is all.
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Letting the states make their own decisions on issues not addressed by the constitution is a perfectly viable solution. Not sure why that would be particularly difficult.
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That is what was supposed to happen. The Federal level has way too much power today.
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…
Power has been moving in a central direction ever since.
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 ...…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Letting the states make their own decisions on issues not addressed by the constitution is a perfectly viable solution. Not sure why that would be particularly difficult.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Letting the states make their own decisions on issues not addressed by the constitution is a perfectly viable solution. Not sure why that would be particularly difficult.
A federal state as a tight union of autonomous non-sovereign states is viable. We have plenty of examples for that. An EU-style loose union of sovereign states also works, if only barely. However, there is no evidence that a loose union of non-sovereign states would work in the present-day world. It might work, but the question is very complex, and we can't hope for a confident answer without actually trying it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is more the expansion of the government beyond what the Constitution allows not the expansion of the rights of people.
The problem is that on an individual, person to person basis, people like me owe people like you a respectful hearing of what you think America is and how you think it should be and understand - this is the important thing - how you got there before telling you that it never was and why it should never be. And just flip that to whichever one of us has the facts on their side. But we don't have those conversations. We…