91–100 of 157 posts
Is there anything in this article, aside from an overblown metaphor in the title, that hasn't been posted here fifty times in the last couple weeks?
If Snowden has convincing evidence why is he not releasing it? I don't understand all the dancing around.
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> I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your point isn't really about what is or is not constitutional, but rather that interpretation has rendered the constitution meaningless so anything is constitutional now. Except that that's clearly not the case, as plenty of things remain prohibit by the Constitution, as we see the Supreme Court finding as recently as today [1]. Sure, the interstate commerce power is generall…
Presumably that set of opinions is meant to make the point that the Supreme Court is still ruling things unconstitutional and therefore some things are still unconstitutional. This is true, but irrelevant. The point is that if anything can be ruled constitutional, then the ruling something unconstitutional is merely a tool for the federal government to use to regulate the states and lesser courts, not any kind of pro…
The Constituton isn't magic. No matter what it says, courts applying it have always been able to rule anything constitutional (or, conversely, unconstitutional.) Like any set of rules for human behavior, it is not self enforcing.
The Constitution has never, from day one, been a protection against the power of the federal government, it is at most a warning about what the public intends to limit the federal government to, and it has force exactly to the extent that the public is willing to follow up on that warning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably that set of opinions is meant to make the point that the Supreme Court is still ruling things unconstitutional and therefore some things are still unconstitutional. This is true, but irrelevant. The point is that if anything can be ruled constitutional, then the ruling something unconstitutional is merely a tool for the federal government to use to regulate the states and lesser courts, not any kind of pro…
> The point is that if anything can be ruled constitutional The Constituton isn't magic. No matter what it says, courts applying it have always been able to rule anything constitutional (or, conversely, unconstitutional.) Like any set of rules for human behavior, it is not self enforcing. The Constitution has never, from day one, been a protection against the power of the federal government, it is at most a warning a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For all practical purposes the "classical constitution United States" that we were taught in school and media doesn't exist anymore. The Constitution never existed as anything more than an idea, and it has force and meaning to the exact extent to which the people choose to give it force and meaning (the same as any other law.) Laws, including basic laws like the Constitution, aren't magical and self-enforcing; they…
I agree except I must point out that the Constitution was an agreement amongst the states, not an agreement with the people and the government. The rhetoric of "the people" is extremely deceptive. Me, nor my forefathers, had their opinion represented at the constitutional convention. The people in "... a statement of intent about what the people will insist upon" is solely people who were at the convention.
How people now are willing to defend what those people now perceive to be its limitations is all that matters.
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The problem is that references to the Nazis or Soviets are very hard to get right without tripping over the slippery slope argument. Hitler was not only a vegetarian, he was a health fanatic, and there's evidence that it informed his obsession with purifying the race. That's doesn't make any number of locavore glutenfree vegan hipsters a step towards nazism. Hitler "militarized" society, and emphasized such organisat…
Gulags and concentration camps weren't set the same day they set the surveillance. Those came afterwards.
If not, instead of arguing by outrageous and irrelevant historical innuendo, you could express quite reasonable concerns about consequences of excessive security powers that are actually likely to happen.
It would be a much more convincing argument.
(since both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks very openly stated their intent to violently suppress people fitting certain criteria and had militant wings actually targeting them long before they achieved the power that enabled them to set the surveillance, I'm not sure the historical comparison even works...)
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> The point is that if anything can be ruled constitutional The Constituton isn't magic. No matter what it says, courts applying it have always been able to rule anything constitutional (or, conversely, unconstitutional.) Like any set of rules for human behavior, it is not self enforcing. The Constitution has never, from day one, been a protection against the power of the federal government, it is at most a warning a…
Absolutely agreed. And since the public can't follow up, it no longer can limit the federal government.
If the public chooses not to, because its not important relative to other priorities, then, yes, on those points there is no constraint on the federal government.
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That's a really bad example, given the interstate commerce clause. Pelosi was laughing it off because damn near everybody, including the majority-conservative supreme court, agrees that regulating healthcare is regulation of interstate commerce, just like 1000s of other things that the federal government does which don't happen to be hot political footballs at the moment. Conversely, most people that I've talked to a…
It was actually a very close ruling (5-4) that hinged on whether "regulating interstate commerce" gave the power to the government to compel people to participate in commerce. Personally, I disagree with the Wickard v. Filburn ruling that gave the power to the government to control what a farmer grows on his own land to feed to his own cattle under the "interstate commerce" power. The Constitution was distorted beyon…
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Absolutely agreed. And since the public can't follow up, it no longer can limit the federal government.
The public absolutely can follow up. If the public chooses not to , because its not important relative to other priorities, then, yes, on those points there is no constraint on the federal government.
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Gulags and concentration camps weren't set the same day they set the surveillance. Those came afterwards.
Do you believe that Obama (or secretive figures in the NSA) are actually planning gulags and concentration camps? If not, instead of arguing by outrageous and irrelevant historical innuendo, you could express quite reasonable concerns about consequences of excessive security powers that are actually likely to happen. It would be a much more convincing argument. (since both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks very openly sta…
What about a president 10 or 15 years from now?
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This is a good argument for the constitution meaning essentially nothing since if there are no limits on how the government can control how people spend their money, there are no real limits on how much control the government can exert over the individual. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your point isn't really about what is or is not constitutional, but rather that interpretation has rendered the constitution…
> I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your point isn't really about what is or is not constitutional, but rather that interpretation has rendered the constitution meaningless so anything is constitutional now. Except that that's clearly not the case, as plenty of things remain prohibit by the Constitution, as we see the Supreme Court finding as recently as today [1]. Sure, the interstate commerce power is generall…
The language of your statement reveals the problem (sorry for being deconstructionist...)
There is very little that the Constitution prohibits -- that's not how it's constructed. It's not designed to blacklist certain governmental powers.
Rather, it starts from a perspective where all rights belong to the people, and the government may do nothing. It then whitelists certain powers as the people have decided to vest them with the government. That is, the government can do nothing other than the things the people have enumerated for it in the Constitutions (particularly Article 1 Section 8).
That people think of government power in terms of whether it's prohibited by the Constitution rather than whether it's allowed by the Constitution reveals how far away we've gotten from understanding how it was intended to work.