America's 10 Biggest Constitutional Myths

[thoughtone]

source: The Atlantic


Constitutional argumentation is a means Americans employ to keep from killing each other. Ridiculous claims about the Constitution, then, may often be a sign of political health rather than sickness.

So it's not surprising that, as we lurch toward summer, the national air is filled with claims about the "plain meaning" and "clear intent" of the Constitution; it's also not surprising that the "plain meaning" asserted isn't usually to be found in the actual text, and the "clear intent" supported often has no foundation in the actual history.

But even so, the last time I remember hearing so many dangerous and bogus claims about the Constitution, I was a boy in the segregated South listening to my elders explain that the Commonwealth of Virginia had the power to pass a statute "nullifying" Brown v. Board of Education. That experience taught me to be suspicious of grand claims about the secret meaning of the Constitution (such as the eerily familiar claim, advanced earlier this month in federal court, that the Commonwealth of Virginia has the power to pass a statute nullifying the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act); it also taught me that at some point, constitutional arguments may lead to, rather than prevent, blood in the streets.

The constitutional bosh propounded by charlatans like James J. Kilpatrick during the Civil Rights era was aimed at convincing the nation that racial equality was unconstitutional--instead of being, as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments make clear, commanded by the amended Constitution. Those arguments live on under the surface of the bilge peddled by figures from Glenn Beck to Tom Coburn.

But the current far-right campaign is aimed at an even broader target: it seeks to convince us that the Constitution somehow forbids the United States from becoming a modern nation-state, with an integrated economy, a rational health-care system, a unified national citizenship, an open electoral process, and a system of bedrock civil and political rights.

This summer, I will be posting a series of short essays on what I consider to be the most dangerous unfounded claims about the Constitution currently floating around the airwaves and legislative halls. Each of us, I suppose, could make his or her own list of constitutional myths. The ones I list below are my top ten. I invite nominations from readers of their own.

Nominators should bear in mind that "you are a liberal and therefore you don't count," "even to suggest that idea is outrageous," "my civics teacher taught me the opposite in 1978," and "you teach creative writing and so you should shut up" don't (how can I put this politely?) qualify, in the strictest sense, as constitutional arguments. Beware, too, of any argument that includes the phrase "no amendment can change," unless you are referring to the rule of equal suffrage in the Senate. And don't try "everybody knows what the founding fathers were really thinking," unless you can find and cite some pretty dog-nab convincing evidence in the text and the actual historical record.

I'll be posting explanations of each of my top ten while listening to yours. In constitutional terms, it seems to me silly to wish everyone a good summer. Make no mistake: We are the midst of a very dangerous political crisis. Gridlock in Washington is pushing the United States toward a first-ever default on payments on the national debt. Conservative judges are champing at the bit to strike down the most important piece of progressive legislation since the 1970s, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, on the invented excuse that it somehow "regulates inactivity," a prohibition mentioned nowhere in the Constitution and never really detected in it by anyone until the day after the passage of the Act. Angry conservative majorities in state capitols are rewriting the social compact, chipping away at federal authority over interstate commerce, reasserting the old Confederate doctrine of state control over American citizenship, and, most alarmingly, creating new and frankly partisan restrictions on the very right to vote.

So if we accomplish nothing else, let's at least have some fun, discussing the Constitution to divert ourselves from disaster, like Boccaccio's characters, who told stories of love and adventure while the plague raged outside the villa's walls.

Here are my top ten:

1. Conservatives believe only in "original intent" and others believe in a "living Constitution," meaning whatever they want.
2. The Founders wrote the Constitution to restrain Congress and limit its powers.
3. The "Unitary Executive" means all unclaimed federal power flows away from Congress and to the President.
4. The Constitution does not provide for separation of church and state.
5. Corporations have precisely the same First Amendment rights as natural persons.
6. The Second Amendment was "intended" to make government "fear the people."
7. The Tenth Amendment and state "sovereignty" allow states to "nullify" federal law.
8. The Fourteenth Amendment was written solely to address the situation of freed slaves, and has no relevance today.
9. Election of Senators is unfair and harmful to the states.
10. International law is a threat to the Constitution and must be kept out of American courts.

 

[QueEx]

Constitutional Myth #1: The Right Is
'Originalist,' Everyone Else Is 'Idiotic'​

The Right Believes in a "Written Constitution,"
Everyone Else Believes in a "Living Constitution"​

The Atlantic
By Garrett Epps
May 25, 2011

Politifact Georgia reports that pizza magnate Herman Cain told the audience at an Atlanta rally to read the Constitution, explaining that "for the benefit for those that are not going to read it because they don't want us to go by the Constitution, there's a little section in there that talks about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ... When you get to the part about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, don't stop right there, keep reading. 'Cause that's when it says that when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. We've got some altering and some abolishing to do."

This quote neatly illustrates two pathologies of 21st-century "constitutionalism."​

First, many of these patriots love the Constitution too much to actually read it (in case you were wondering, the language Cain is quoting is from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution). Second, they love the Constitution so much they want to "alter or abolish" it to make sure it matches the myth in their heads. Those myths are a problem. They get in the way of honest debate. Last week I proposed a parlor game in which we look at some of the more corrosive myths circulating about the Constitution, and I offered by own list. Readers have responded with some suggestions of their own, and I will answer some of their nominations as the summer wears on. For now, though, I want to start working my way through my own list of the Top 10 Myths about the Constitution. I look forward to thoughtful responses, as the game begins.

Myth #1:
The Right Believes in a "Written Constitution,"
Everyone Else Believes in a "Living Constitution"​

​

In a 2006 speech in Puerto Rico, Justice Antonin Scalia explained why conservatives are the only ones who actually believe in the Constitution. Progressives, he said, believe in "the argument of flexibility," which "goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break. But you would have to be an idiot to believe that. The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something, and doesn't say other things."

A year later, George W. Bush told the Federalist Society, "Advocates of a more active role for judges sometimes talk of a 'living constitution.' In practice, a living Constitution means whatever these activists want it to mean."

The idea of a "living constitution" is useful because it lets right-wingers like Scalia pose as principled advocates and ridicule anyone who disagrees with his narrow ideas as an idiot. But if one side of a debate gets to define what the other side supposedly believes, it's no big trick to win the argument.

The argument is a classic bait-and-switch. It begins with the claim that the Constitution has a definite, fixed meaning. We must apply that meaning and only that meaning, or we are "changing" the Constitution. But then it turns out that the words themselves aren't clear. Then we learn that their meaning isn't what's written in the Constitution's text; it is actually somewhere else. The words on the page have to be interpreted, and they are to be interpreted in a secret way that conservatives "know" because they have looked it up in the Big History Book. If we do not accept their claims about what the words "really" mean, we are "changing" what is written on the page, trying to "amend" it on the sly.

(In fact, to hardcore conservative "originalists," not even amendments can change the "original meaning" of the Constitution. Not long ago, I published an essay in which I said that the Constitution "has become more democratic and egalitarian" since 1787. An indignant reader wrote and said that the democratic changes I was writing about had occurred "without amendment" and were thus illegitimate. I replied that the changes I was writing about were in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Third, and Twenty-Fourth Amendments, which had expanded individual rights, augmented the power of Congress to protect those rights while cutting back on state authority to limit them, made the Senate a popularly elected body, and expanded the right to vote to cover racial minorities, women, young people, and those who cannot pay a state "poll tax."

My correspondent indignantly replied that these amendments hadn't really changed anything. The Constitution was the same as when it was written in the 18th century. Except, he then explained, the Framers hadn't known what they really meant when they wrote it. "Our founders were right smack in the middle of the transition from mercantilism to capitalism. They still did not fully grasp that constraints on trade fail." If they were alive today, they would agree with him that the Affordable Care Act--and indeed, all federal economic regulation passed since the New Deal--was unconstitutional.)

I would call this approach to constitutional interpretation "dead constitutionalism"--meaning that the meaning of a constitutional phrase can be ascertained by means of a séance in which we ask the dead what they really think. Justice Scalia himself is a proud practitioner of this dark art. It's on display in his concurrence in the 2009 case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which held that the First Amendment bars any restrictions on independent campaign expenditures by profit-making corporations. Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent, had questioned the majority's radical ruling on "originalist" grounds. Private corporations were relatively new at the time of the framing of the First Amendment, Stevens noted, and many of the Framers were profoundly suspicious of the corporate form. Can we say that they "intended" Chevron to be able to flood the political process with electioneering messages?

Scalia brushed this aside in the same huffy tones my correspondent used to dismiss seven constitutional amendments. The Framers opposed corporations because they were associated with monopoly, Scalia explained. "Modern corporations do not have such privileges, and would probably have been favored by most of our enterprising Founders--excluding, perhaps, Thomas Jefferson and others favoring perpetuation of an agrarian society."

Trust me, the "original meaning" is what I say the Founders would say if they were alive today. I know what that is because I just spoke with them. Anyone who disagrees with the voices I hear is an idiot. Real Americans have to do what the voices tell me they should do.

The "living Constitution" label is about as useful as a Tannu Tuva stamp. All conscientious judges, of whatever philosophy, are trying to apply the words of the Constitution. But almost no serious constitutional question involves precise, unambiguous words. The Constitution says that the president has to be 35 years old, for example; no one I am aware of has ever challenged that rule by arguing that since 50 is the new 30, the president should now have to be at least 55.

Instead, genuine constitutional cases center around general terms used in the document. Take one that has been prominent lately--"natural-born citizen." The Constitution doesn't define the term. So in April 2008, the Senate passed a resolution stating that John McCain, born in the Panama Canal Zone, was a "natural-born citizen" and thus eligible to be president. Remember that in 1787, there were no U.S. military personnel serving abroad; indeed, many of the Framers assumed there never would be a standing army, and that a self-governing republic would eschew foreign conquest and occupation. (No U.S. troops went on occupation duty until the Mexican War.) The evidence that they "intended" the "natural-born citizen" clause to apply to children of troops stationed abroad is nonexistent.

One of the measure's sponsors was Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), one of the Senate's loudest "originalists." Was Coburn being a hypocritical "living constitutionalist" then? Certainly not. He was being a good constitutionalist--not an "originalist," not a "living constitutionalist"--applying an unclear term to a new and perhaps unforeseen circumstance.

Americans of all stripes do exactly this every day with terms like "due process" or "commerce ... among the several states." Like "natural-born citizen," those terms were ambiguous when written, and they are ambiguous today. <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">The job of constitutional interpretation is to apply the [terms] to the changing facts of American government and society</span>. Is health insurance "commerce ... among the several states"?

The Framers wouldn't have said "yes" or "no";
they would have said,
"What is health insurance?"​

If you think that answer means that "commerce" today doesn't extend to health insurance, you aren't supporting a "living Constitution"--you are describing a dead society, whose fundamental law cannot be applied to the facts of our national life.

When they are in favor of warrantless wiretaps or "enemy-combatant" detentions, many conservatives like to explain that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Maybe not. But it's not a killing jar either, designed to freeze society in an eighteenth-century mold. It is a set of general rules which we, the living, must apply, in a fully textual sense, to unforeseen specific cases.

I will cheerfully admit that conscientious conservative judges and scholars may differ with me on the specific application of a given provision. My hat's off to them, The Constitution was written to give us something to argue about, and most of these important issues are also hard ones.

But in reaching their conclusions, conservatives rely on the same tools progressives do--text, structure, history, political philosophy, interpretive theory, and practicality. When Justice Scalia--or anyone else in this context--describes those whose differ with him as idiots, he is not just being rude and vulgar, he is being dishonest.

​

The Atlantic

 

[QueEx]

Constitutional Myth #2:
The 'Purpose' of the Constitution
Is to Limit Congress​

​

What really drives this idea today isn't legal theory;
it's the political fear that the people of the United
States will enact progressive legislation

The Atlantic
Garrett Epps
June 1, 2011

The Delusion​

​

​

"The Constitution was written explicitly for one purpose -- to restrain the federal government," Rep. Ron Paul said in 2008.

Bless his heart. (For those of you who didn't grow up in the South, that expression in context means, "He means well, but sometimes I just want to slap him.") Dr. Paul is a likeable and honest person, but he knows as much about the Constitution as I do about obstetrics--the difference being that I don't try to instruct the nation on how to deliver babies.​

Dr. Paul is far from alone in this bizarre delusion. If there's anything the far right regards as dogma, it's that the "intent" of the Constitution was to restrain, inhibit, intimidate, infantilize, disempower, disembowel, and generally smack Congress and federal bureaucrats around. "Does anyone seriously believe that when the Founders gathered in Philadelphia 220 years ago they were aspiring to control the buying decisions of individual consumers from Washington?" Sen. Tom Coburn asks. "They were arguing for the opposite and implored future Courts to slap down any law from Congress that expanded the Commerce Clause." Sen. Jim DeMint claims that "although the Constitution does give some defined powers to the federal government, it is overwhelmingly a document of limits, and those limits must be respected."

If this is true, it's the kind of truth that comes to us only from divine revelation--because it sure doesn't appear in the text of the Constitution or the history of its framing. Historically, in fact, it's ludicrously anachronistic, like claiming that the telescope was invented in 1608 so that people could watch Apollo 13 land on the moon. There was no federal government to speak of in 1787. "Congress" was a feckless, ludicrous farce. The concern that brought delegates to Philadelphia was that, under the Articles of Confederation, Congress was too weak. Many of the Framers were close to panic because the Confederation Congress was unable to levy taxes, pay the nation's debts, live up to its treaty obligations, regulate commerce, or restrain the greedy, predatory state governments. The Union seemed on the verge of splitting into tiny republics, which would quickly be recolonized by Britain, France, or Spain.


As early as 1780, Alexander Hamilton (one of the authors of The Federalist) wrote to James Duane that "[t]he fundamental defect [in the Articles of Confederation] is a want of power in Congress. It is hardly worth while to show in what this consists, as it seems to be universally acknowledged, or to point out how it has happened, as the only question is how to remedy it."

In April 1787, James Madison, second author of The Federalist, wrote to George Washington his aim for a new Constitution: "The national government should be armed with positive and compleat authority in all cases which require uniformity." (Madison also wanted a rule that no state law could take effect until Congress explicitly approved it.)

Shortly before, Washington had written to John Jay, "I do not conceive we can exist long as a nation, without having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner, as the authority of the different state governments extends over the several States." Jay, third author of The Federalist, made clear to Washington his own view: "What Powers should be granted to the Government so constituted is a Question which deserves much Thought--I think the more the better--the States retaining only so much as may be necessary for domestic Purposes; and all their principal Officers civil and military being commissioned and removeable by the national Governmt." (Note the last part: State executives would be appointed by the federal government.)

As for the Constitution's text, if it was "intended" to limit the federal government, it sure doesn't say so. Article I § 8, a Homeric catalog of Congressional power, is the longest and most detailed in the Constitution. It includes the "Necessary and Proper" Clause, which delegates to Congress the power "to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."

The Framers' main plan for preventing overreach by the federal government lay not in coded restrictions on Congress's powers but in the Constitution's political structure. This is what George Washington meant when he expressed hope that "a liberal, and energetic Constitution, well guarded & closely watched, to prevent incroachments, might restore us to that degree of respectability & consequence, to which we had a fair claim, & the brightest prospect of attaining."

The idea was that a bicameral legislature, an independent executive with the power of veto, and a separation between legislative and judicial power would channel Congress's broad powers into constructive channels. State governments would advocate effectively for their own interests both in Congress and with the people. That's a very different vision than the current right-wing claim that the Constitution contains between-the-lines "thou shalt nots" placing various areas off limits to regulation.

The far-right argument has the seductive power of any half-truth. Of course there are limits on Congress's power--they are located in Article I § 9: Congress, for example, can't pass a "bill of attainder," tax exports, or grant titles of nobility. In addition, the Bill of Rights explicitly prevents Congress from limiting freedom of speech, "the right to bear arms," trial by jury and so forth. But conservatives mean something different: What they mean is that if something isn't written down in the Constitution in so many words, the "intent" of the Framers was to keep Congress from doing it. If Congress wasn't doing it before 1787, it can't do it now.

The worst insult they can level at a governmental measure is that it is "unprecedented." Before the Civil War, conservatives argued that Congress couldn't build roads and canals; it was unprecedented. After the Civil War, Congress "couldn't" regulate child labor; it was unprecedented. When the Depression hit, Congress "couldn't" pass Social Security; it was unprecedented. When the Civil Rights movement arose, Congress "couldn't" outlaw discrimination in public accommodations; it was unprecedented. Medicare was unprecedented; so was the National Environmental Policy Act; so was the School Lunch program. Today, Congress "can't" enact a health-care system. We've never had one, so we can't have one.

In fact, the Constitution itself did the unprecedented. It created a national, republican government with adequate power to maintain and govern a strong Union during the unforeseeable events ahead. "Nothing can therefore be more fallacious, than to infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the National Government, from an estimate of its immediate necessities," Hamilton wrote in Federalist 34. "There ought to be a capacity to provide for future contingencies, as they may happen; and, as these are illimitable in their nature, it is impossible safely to limit that capacity." From the record and the text, that was the "purpose" of the Constitution--to create a government with adequate power, even under new circumstances, to make the United States what George Washington, in his final address as Commander of the Continental Army, called "a respectable nation."

The error about the purpose of the Constitution explains the curiously two-faced nature of far-right "constitutionalism." On the one hand, they insist that they love the Constitution more than life itself; on the other, they keep trying to sneak amendments into it to strip Congress of power over the budget or allow state legislatures to repeal federal laws. The Constitution they claim to revere actually looks a lot like the Articles of Confederation.

The current war on federal power, like the other attacks on its power throughout history, is really motivated by an entirely realistic fear that those idiots, the people, will enact progressive legislation. Only by importing prohibitions on Congress into the Constitution can that terrible outcome be prevented.

But the more tightly we bind Congress with imaginary chains, the less we, the people, can create a "respectable nation."
​

SOURCE

 

[QueEx]

Constitutional Myth #3:
The 'Unitary Executive' is
a Dictator in War and Peace
​

​

The idea that the President's powers aren't limited
by Congress is a radical--and dangerous--trend​

​

​

Few parts of our Constitution generate more mythology than Article Two, which creates the office of the President.

The Constitution grants the president the following exclusive powers:

(1) he is commander in chief of the armed forces;

(2) he can require "heads of departments" to give him their opinions in writing;

(3) he receives ambassadors, and;

(4) he grants pardons for federal offenses.​

In addition, he shares with the Senate the treaty power and the appointment authority ("advise and consent"), and can make "recess appointments" if Congress is not in session. He can veto a bill, subject to override by 2/3 of both Houses. He can convene Congress on "extraordinary occasions," but ordinarily may not force it to adjourn. He is required to send a state of the union message "from time to time," and he shall "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

It's not an overwhelming list. But on this vague framework, executive theorists have constructed a view of the office that is sometimes little short of dictatorship. That constitutional myth affects presidents of both parties and their supporters.

Consider that, in the days after 9/11, Congress authorized President Bush to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." That may be the broadest such resolution ever passed.

Yet immediately after passage, Bush's in-house lawyer, John Yoo, wrote the president an official memo stating that Bush didn't need the authorization. "The historical record demonstrates that the power to initiate military hostilities, particularly in response to the threat of an armed attack, rests exclusively with the President." Yoo argued, "Congress's support for the President's power suggests no limits on the Executive's judgment whether to use military force in response to the national emergency."

Yoo was deploying a theory of executive power best summed up by his phrase: "no limits on the Executive's judgment." George W. Bush was later to rely on that theory to justify warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens' phone calls and emails, despite a statute banning the practice, and to override the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, with its absolute prohibition on "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" " of prisoners.

Executive hubris is not limited by party. Bill Clinton (Kosovo 1998) and Barack Obama (Libya 2011) have also asserted presidential power to use armed force without congressional consent. Boston College professor Kent Greenfield recently laid out the astonishing facts of the Obama administration's decision to ignore the War Powers Resolution.

The authoritarian theory of the presidency draws its justification from the opening words of Article II: "The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." Executive hawks argue that the phrase "the executive power" and "a President of the United States of America" lodge extensive, exclusive power in the president alone.

During America's first major foreign policy crisis, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton argued that the phrase "the executive power" meant that all the power of any chief of state was lodged in the president, "subject only to the exceptions the exceptions and qualifications which are expressed" in the Constitution.

In other words, unless the Constitution says the president can't do something, the president can do it. That argument underwent a fundamental shift after 1980. Reagan and his attorney general, Ed Meese, regarded the Democratic-majority Congress as the enemy. They needed a theory that would let them act at home and abroad without congressional authorization, withhold information from Congress at their pleasure, and resist any attempt by Congress to find out what was going on or limit their freedom of maneuver. To Hamilton's already radical view of the executive power, they added the "unitary executive" idea.

That idea says that because "the" executive power is vested in "a president," any attempt to limit the president's control over the executive branch is unconstitutional. It supposedly follows from the "the" and the "a" that members of the executive branch are solely accountable to the president alone, and the president, in turn, may order anyone who works in the executive branch to exercise his or her discretion in fulfilling any official function however the president personally thinks best.

Peter M. Shane of Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, a former Office of Legal Counsel official, and now a paramount scholar of presidential authority, points to a 1988 dispute with Congress over AIDS as sewing the seeds of the hard-line "unitary executive" theory. Congress passed a statute requiring the Centers for Disease Control to publish a pamphlet setting out the facts about the disease and ways of preventing it. Ronald Reagan really didn't think AIDS was such a big deal and preferred it not be mentioned at all; the Reagan White House refused to clear the pamphlet. In frustration, Congress by statute instructed the head of CDC--chosen, as White House aides are not, for expertise in public health-- to publish the pamphlet without clearance.

The Reagan Justice Department issued an opinion that the law was flatly unconstitutional. "Any attempt by Congress to constrain the president's authority to supervise and direct his subordinates in this respect," OLC's opinion said, "violates the Constitution."

This is hardly an obvious reading. The text of Article II is silent. (Indeed, the Constitution doesn't even explicitly give the President the power to fire federal officials.) And the Constitution does say that Congress has the authority to enact laws "necessary and proper" for executing not just its own authorities, but all powers that the Constitution vests in "any department or officer" of "the government of the United States." This certainly suggests Congress has a share of the power to direct those "departments and officers."

As such, the present administration's conduct puzzles Shane. "The Obama Administration has commendably stayed away from George W. Bush's aggressive claims of executive power, but, perhaps because Congress is itself so dysfunctional these days, the Administration seems to be underplaying the opportunity to reset the terms of presidential authority," Shane said. It's doubly puzzling, he adds, because, as a senator, Joe Biden unsuccessfully introduced "the most thoughtful war powers legislation since 1973. I don't know why the Administration does not resurrect it."

(By the way, in earlier columns I imagined an Obama decision to ignore the debt limit. I wasn't urging Obama to do that; my point was that the scenario fits into "unitary executive" theory. )

There's another way to read Article II. The Framers didn't talk much about a "unitary executive"; to the extend they did, they may have meant simply that the Constitution does not feature an Executive Council of the kind set up in many revolutionary-era state constitutions. And "the executive power" could mean simply those actions that aren't legislative or judicial, to be carried out in harmony with the authority of both other branches over national policy and constitutional interpretation.

The current theory is far more radical, and it is dangerous, no matter which party holds the White House. In any crisis, it allows power to flow to the president; as crisis recedes, future presidents tend not to give it back.​

If you doubt that, look no further than President Obama, who as Senator and candidate was harshly critical of George W. Bush's high-handed ways. As military action in Libya passes the 75-day mark, he now is pushing the executive envelope even further.
​

SOURCE

 

[QueEx]

Constitutional Myth #4:
The Constitution Doesn't Separate Church and State​

​

America's Founding Fathers may not have included the phrase,
but the history is clear--they never wanted a Christian nation

Christine O'Donnell died for the far right's constitutional sins.

In the fall of 2010, the dilettante-witch-turned-Tea-Party-Senate-candidate sneered at her opponent, Democrat Chris Coons, when he pointed out in a debate that the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits "an establishment of religion."

O'Donnell: Let me just clarify: You're telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?

Coons: Government shall make no establishment of religion.

O'Donnell: That's in the First Amendment?​

O'Donnell paid with a thumping repudiation at the polls even in a year of far-right victories. But her mistake was not a random one.

• As Rush Limbaugh explained in defense of O'Donnell, "She was incredulous that somebody was saying that the Constitution said there must be separation between church and state. Those words are not in the Constitution."

• In 2006, Michelle Bachmann warned a Christian group that public schools "are teaching children that there is separation of church and state, and I am here to tell you that is a myth."

• This year's right-wing pinup, amateur historian David Barton, devotes his book Original Intent: The Courts, The Constitution, and Religion to the proposition that separation of church and state is "a relatively recent concept rather than ... a long-standing constitutional principle."

The attack on separation of church and state involves twisting words and reading history backwards, and it involves making an inconvenient part of the Constitution disappear. Most ardently espoused by loud foes of "big government," the attack aims to place government in charge of Americans' spiritual lives.

The idea is that the Framers desired a Christian nation, in which government oversaw the spiritual development of the people by reminding them of their religious duties and subsidizing the churches where they worship. "Establishment of religion," in this reading, simply means that no single Christian denomination could be officially favored. But official prayers, exhortations to faith, religious monuments, and participation by church bodies in government were all part of the "original intent," the argument goes.

Because the words "separation of church and state" do not appear in the Constitution, the argument runs, the document provides for merger of the two.

It's bosh: ahistorical, untextual, illogical.

Patriots like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison were profoundly skeptical about the claims of what they called "revealed religion." As children of the 18th-century Enlightenment, they stressed reason and scientific observation as a means of discovering the nature of "Providence," the power that had created the world. Jefferson, for example, took a pair of scissors to the Christian New Testament and cut out every passage that suggested a divine origin and mission for Jesus. In their long correspondence, Jefferson and John Adams swapped frequent witticisms about the presumption of the clergy. ("Every Species of these Christians would persecute Deists," Adams wrote on June 25, 1813, "as soon as either Sect would persecute another, if it had unchecked and unbalanced power. Nay, the Deists would persecute Christians, and Atheists would persecute Deists, with as unrelenting Cruelty, as any Christians would persecute them or one another. Know thyself, Human Nature!") As president, Adams signed (and the U.S. Senate approved) the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli, which reassured that Muslim nation that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

James Madison, the father of both the Constitution and the First Amendment, consistently warned against any attempt to blend endorsement of Christianity into the law of the new nation. "Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions," he wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments in 1785, "may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?" Unlike the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution conspicuously omits any reference to God.


Article VI

The words "separation of church and state" are not in the text; the idea of separation is. Article VI provides that all state and federal officials "shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." The First Amendment's Establishment Clause (which Christine O'Donnell had apparently not read) provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"--meaning that not only no church but no "religion" could be made the official faith of the United States. Finally the Free Exercise Clause provides that Congress shall not make laws "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. (These prohibitions were extended to state governments by the Fourteenth Amendment, whose framers in 1866 wanted to make sure that the states maintained free, democratic systems instead of the old antebellum slave oligarchies that spawned the Civil War.)

If government can't require its officials to support a church; may not support a church itself; and may not interfere with the worship or belief of any church, is there a serious argument that church and state are not separate?

The attack on separation began as an attack on a letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, dated Jan. 1. 1802. Jefferson assured the Baptists that "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State." In 1985, then-Justice William Rehnquist wrote that "unfortunately the Establishment Clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson's misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years."

But this argument ignores a historical fact. It's not Jefferson's metaphor. Even in 1802, separation was already deeply rooted in American religious history. In 1644, the American theologian Roger Williams, founder of the first Baptist congregation in the British New World, coined the phrase to signify the protection that the church needed in order to prevent misuse and corruption by political leaders: "The church of the Jews under the Old Testament in the type and the church of the Christians under the New Testament in the antitype were both separate from the world; and when they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made his garden a wilderness."

It is this concept--that use by political leaders of religion for their own ends was a danger both to the faithful and to the peace of society--that the Constitution embodies. James Madison wrote that government involvement with the church "implies either that the civil magistrate is a competent judge of religious truth; or that he may employ religion as an engine of civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation."

The current right-wing drive to harness the power of government to bring souls to Christ is dangerous and un-American. As no less conservative a figure than Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in 2005: "Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?"
​

SOURCE

 

[QueEx]

Constitutional Myth #5:
Corporations Have the Same
Free-Speech Rights as Individuals​

​

The problem isn't "corporate personhood";
it's simple-minded interpretation that refuses to
take note of the real function of the First Amendment

​

On June 16, Judge James C. Cacheris of the Eastern District of Virginia ordered charges dismissed against two criminal defendants charged with violating federal election laws. The defendants allegedly allowed corporate employees to attend Hillary Clinton campaign fundraisers, then reimbursed them for the cost out of funds of their corporation, Galen Capital Group. If the allegations (as yet unproved) are true, this was a direct violation of 2 U.S.C. 441(b), which forbids corporations from contributing to federal election campaigns.

Judge Cacheris contemptuously brushed the statute aside as a restriction on the corporation's free speech rights. The Supreme Court has never held the statute unconstitutional, but the judge did it for them, relying on their latest campaign finance ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

The Court in Citizens United went out of its way to say it was not invalidating contribution limits, but Judge Cacheris explained they couldn't be serious:

Taken seriously, Citizens United requires that corporations and individuals be afforded equal rights to political speech, unqualified. . . . Thus, following Citizens United, individuals and corporations must have equal rights to engage in both independent expenditures and direct contributions. They must have the same rights to both the "apple" and the "orange."

Judge Cacheris's opinion is a prime example of right-wing judicial aggressiveness and simple-minded constitutional mythology. Like levees on the Mississippi, the extremely modest restrictions on corporate domination of American politics are being deliberately breached; the result, as in New Orleans in 2005, is a man-made disaster, a flood of corporate money that is distorting, and indeed threatens to destroy, American democracy.

Almost every literate American knows that in 2009, the United States Supreme Court held that corporations must be given the same free-speech rights under the Constitution as ordinary Americans to fund advertising advocating the election or defeat of political candidates. (The Court did explain that its opinion applied only to independent expenditures, not to direct contributions, but Judge Cacheris apparently saw them winking at him when they delivered that part of the opinion.) The Court gutted the McCain-Feingold Act, the first significant (even if timid) attempt at campaign finance reform since the laws passed in the wake of the Watergate scandals. What that means, of course, is that corporations, with their enormous financial resources, could flood the airwaves with ads from deceptively titled "issue groups" with names like "Americans for Prosperity" and "American Future Funds." This is precisely what happened in the 2010 campaign, when these anonymous funds swamped Democratic and progressive candidates with semi-anonymous attack ads in the days before the election. Perhaps coincidentally, those elections produced a radical shift to the right in the membership of both the House and the Senate.

To hear the right discuss it, though, anyone who questions Citizens United is spitting on James Madison's grave. "Any proponent of free speech should applaud this decision. Citizens United is and will be a First Amendment triumph of enduring significance," Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who is to campaign finance laws what Darth Vader was to Alderaan, crowed on the Senate floor after the decision. Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) also explained that "the Court has taken important steps toward restoring to the American people their First Amendment rights. This decision is a victory on behalf of those who cherish the fundamental freedoms protected by the First Amendment." Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told the New York Times that "I can't think of a more fundamental First Amendment issue." He also noted that, by a bizarre coincidence, the decision would "open up resources that have not previously been available" to the Republicans.

There's another way to look at it. In his dissent in Citizens United, Justice John Paul Stevens--a moderate-conservative Republican--spoke for many citizens when he said, "While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

The problem is not that corporations are "persons" under the law. That's been the law for more than a century. And the problem is not the mere idea that corporate "persons" have free speech rights. Of course they do; otherwise the government could prohibit the New York Times Co. or MSNBC from engaging in news coverage.

The problem is the kind of simple-minded interpretation of the Constitution I have discussed elsewhere. The current Court in Citizens United claimed to be choosing between a system in which corporations would have no free-speech rights and one in which corporate "persons" must have precisely the same free-speech rights as natural persons do. There surely is a middle position. In fact, our laws treat many kinds of "persons" differently for various purposes--citizens differently from non-citizens, minors differently from adults, members of professions differently from non-members. Each group's rights--even important rights like free speech--are treated differently for some purposes. High-school students do not have the right to criticize their school administrations; college students do. Minors do not have the right to purchase sexually explicit entertainment; adults do. Non-citizens cannot contribute to federal political campaigns; citizens can.

That a corporation is a "person" does not mean that its participation in politics has to be completely free of regulation. Any sane system of laws would take into account the facts that corporations control vastly more money than individuals; that they never "die," and thus can influence events indefinitely; and that, by law, they must (and do) concern themselves with one thing and one thing only--making profits for their shareholders.

Over the past generation, the conservative majorities on the Court have systematically destroyed any idea that the First Amendment relates to democratic self-government, or civic equality. Earlier this year, when the Court considered Arizona's Clean Elections Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked the lawyer for Arizona this remarkable question:

I checked the Citizens' Clean Elections Commission website this morning, and it says that this act was passed to, quote, "level the playing field" when it comes to running for office. Why isn't that clear evidence that it's unconstitutional?

The First Amendment exists, in the new logic, only to protect the right of those with money to drown out those without. This is such an obtuse reading of the Constitution that anyone can be forgiven for thinking it was a self-interested, overtly partisan decision by a five-Justice majority of conservative Republican appointees deeply disappointed that their party had been roundly defeated in the 2006 and 2008 decisions.

Having said that, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party bear their share of the blame for this sorry mess. By wrecking the public-finance system in the presidential election of 2008, the Democrats did a lot to convince reasonable people that their concern about money in politics was as self-serving as the Republicans' concern for corporate "liberty."

The proper vision of corporate "personhood" would consider the meaning of the First Amendment not as a simple on-off switch but as a provision that protects a key ingredient in democratic self-government--speech to and about politics by ordinary people.

As Judge Cacheris's decision demonstrates, the rot has progressed almost to the terminal stage. But remember the worlds of Miracle Max in The Princess Bride: "It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead."

Equality and self-government, as ideas in the law, are mostly dead--but not all dead. The battle is not over. Sustained popular pressure may force right-wing courts and activist groups to back off from their continuing demands for special political rights for corporations and the rich.​

SOURCE

 

[QueEx]

Constitutional Myth #6:
The Second Amendment Allows
Citizens to Threaten Government​

​

The "right to bear arms" is not a right to nullify any
government measure a "sovereign citizen" finds irksome

​

In 2008, the Supreme Court recognized--for the first time in American history--the "right to bear arms" as a personal, individual right, permitting law-abiding citizens to possess handguns in their home for their personal protection. Two years later, it held that both state and federal governments must observe this newly discovered right.

Curiously enough, the far-right responded to these radical victories as if the sky had fallen. During hearings on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions direly warned that the two gun cases--Heller v. District of Columbia and McDonald v. City of Chicago--were 5-4 decisions. "Our Second Amendment rights are hanging by a thread," he said. The idea that the rights of ordinary gun owners are in danger is a fallacy.

A second, and more pernicious, fallacy is embodied by this quotation from Thomas Jefferson, America's third president:

When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Wait a minute, Epps! Who could argue with Jefferson? Well, not me, to be sure. But there's a problem with this quote, as there is with so much of the rhetoric about the Second Amendment.

It's false.

As far as scholars can tell, Jefferson never said it. Monticello.org[/i], the official website of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, says, "We have not found any evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote, 'When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny,' or any of its listed variations." The quotation (which has also been misattributed to Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and The Federalist), actually was apparently said in 1914 by the eminent person-no-one's-ever-heard-of John Basil Barnhill, during a debate in St. Louis.

As bogus as the quote is the idea that the purpose of the Second Amendment was to create a citizenry able to intimidate the government, and that America would be a better place if government officials were to live in constant fear of gun violence. If good government actually came from a violent, armed population, then Afghanistan and Somalia would be the two best-governed places on earth. As we saw from the 2010 shootings in Tucson, Arizona, the consequences for democracy of guns in private hands, without reasonable regulation, can be dire--a society where a member of Congress cannot meet constituents without suffering traumatic brain injury, and where a federal judge cannot stop by a meeting on his way back from Mass without being shot dead.

But that image of a Mad Max republic lives on in the fringes of the national imagination. It is what authors Joshua Horwitz and Casey Anderson call "the insurrectionist idea," the notion that the Constitution enshrines an individual right to nullify laws an armed citizen objects to. Its most prominent recent expression came from Senate candidate Sharon Angle, who predicted that if she was unable to defeat Democratic Sen. Harry Reid at the ballot box (which she couldn't), citizens would turn to "Second Amendment remedies"--in essence, assassination. Rand Paul also likes to hint that the remedy for rejection of his libertarian policies may be hot lead. Deathandtaxesmag.com quotes him as saying, "Some citizens are holding out hope that the upcoming elections will better things. We'll wait and see. Lots of us believe that maybe that's an unreliable considering that the Fabian progressive socialists have been chipping at our foundations for well over 100 years. Regardless, the founders made sure we had Plan B: the Second Amendment."

The history and meaning of the Second Amendment are a murky subject. A fair reading of the entire text of the Constitution suggests that the most prominent concern of the its framers was protecting states' control of their militias. Under Article I § 8 of the Constitution, the states transferred to Congress the power "to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel Invasions" and "to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia." This was one of the most radical features of the original Constitution; under the Articles of Confederation, states had complete control of their militias. Opponents of ratification suggested that the new federal government might proceed to disarm and dissolve the state militias and create instead a national standing army. The Second Amendment most clearly addresses that concern; and that has led a number of historians to suggest that the Amendment really has no relation to any personal right of individuals to "keep and bear arms."

History is rarely that clear, however, and the notion of personal gun possession as a right is also deeply rooted in American history. UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler, author of the forthcoming Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, notes that since before the Amendment was proposed, many citizens have discussed the right to bear arms as a guarantee against tyranny as well as a feature of a federal system. Indeed, Winkler's reading of the history finds more support for this anti-tyranny idea than for the Supreme Court's current doctrine that the Second Amendment supports a right of personal self-defense. But the protection against tyranny was a long-term structural guarantee, not a privilege of individual nullification, he says. "I don't think there's any support for the idea that government officials should be afraid of being shot."

It would be odd indeed if the Framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had written an amendment designed to give individuals the right to liquidate the government they were setting up. In fact, having been through a revolution, they had few illusions about the virtues of violence. When they gathered in Philadelphia in 1787, the original Framers were very aware that armed bands of farmers in Massachusetts had revolted against the state government only a few months earlier. Washington, in particular, found the news of Daniel Shays's rebellion in that state so disturbing that it contributed to his decision to come out of retirement and help frame a new national charter to prevent such outbreaks.

At Philadelphia, Gouverneur Morrison of Pennsylvania warned the delegates that failure would precipitate new outbreaks of rebellion. "The scenes of horror attending civil commotion can not be described, and the conclusion of them will be worse than the term of their continuance," he said. "The stronger party will then make traitors of the weaker; and the gallows & halter will finish the work of the sword."

After becoming President, Washington himself led a national army into Western Pennsylvania to suppress a rebellion against the new federal tax on whiskey. (This is the only time in American history a President has served as Commander-in-Chief in the field.) In a subsequent message to Congress, he showed precious little sympathy for "Second Amendment remedies":

[T]o yield to the treasonable fury of so small a portion of the United States, would be to violate the fundamental principle of our constitution, which enjoins that the will of the majority shall prevail. . . . ucceeding intelligence has tended to manifest the necessity of what has been done; it being now confessed by those who were not inclined to exaggerate the ill-conduct of the insurgents, that their malevolence was not pointed merely to a particular law; but that a spirit, inimical to all order, has actuated many of the offenders.

In 2011, there is abroad in the land "a spirit, inimical to all order," particularly if that order concerns federally guaranteed environmental protection, economic regulation, or civil rights. Voices from the far-right are trying to plant a parasitic meme in our Bill of Rights: that America is not a self-government republic, but a dark Hobbesian plane where each "sovereign citizen" chooses what laws to obey, and any census taker or federal law-enforcement agent had better beware. The long-term result of such a "right to bear arms" would be an ungovernable state of nature, where life, both civic and individual, would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

The Second Amendment now securely holds a right to personal self-defense against assault, but not against the obligations of citizenship. A right of self-defense, like the right of free speech, or the right to be secure against unreasonable searches, is subject to reasonable regulation. Common-sense concern with the consequences of legal rules, not chest-thumping about squirrel rifles and the Revolutionary War, will produce a system of laws that would recognize the nation's heritage of gun ownership, and allow reasonable regulations to protect us all from Somalia-style chaos.





​

SOURCE

 

[Greed]

Obama to GOP: Health insurance is now a 'right.' Is he right?

Obama to GOP: Health insurance is now a 'right.' Is he right?
Two months away from opening day of Obamacare, President Obama made a forceful defense of what he called the ‘right’ to health insurance. Republicans say they can’t find that right in the Constitution, and some are calling for Americans to 'burn their Obamacare cards' in protest.
By Patrik Jonsson | Christian Science Monitor
19 hrs ago

In a forceful defense of government-supported healthcare, President Obama on Saturday called health insurance a fundamental “right” that Republicans are trying to deny the American family.

The debate about whether health insurance is a right, or even a privilege, has been going on for decades. Mr. Obama, in fact, used the word during the 2008 presidential debates, and has made similar arguments hence.

But Obama’s assertion in his Saturday address ratcheted up the stakes for the coming enrollment opening for Obamacare, a law passed solely by Democrats in 2010, which makes health insurance affordable for millions of poorer Americans, but penalizes Americans who don’t want to buy health insurance.

While Obama used the word “right” as a cudgel against ongoing efforts by Republicans to defund the law, the remark is sure to fuel debate over the extent to which the right to health insurance may diminish other rights actually enumerated in the Constitution, such as the right to personal liberty and property.

“I’m going to keep doing everything in my power to make sure this law works as it’s supposed to,” Obama said in his recorded radio address. “Because in the United States of America, health insurance isn’t a privilege – it is your right. And we’re going to keep it that way.”

Obama and other progressives have long couched the issue of healthcare as a moral one, where the country has an obligation to protect the health of everyone, even the millions of Americans who can’t afford health insurance and are thus relegated to county clinics and emergency rooms for healthcare.

In confirming the Affordable Care Act as constitutional last summer, the Supreme Court didn’t expressly call it an individual right, but ruled that the “federal government has the right to regulate human behavior by taxing it,” as Texas Tech University law professor Arnold Loewy put it in a recent column in the Lubbock, Texas, Avalanche-Journal.

A suggestion by Republican activists that Americans should simply opt out of Obamacare and thus undermine its central algorithm – younger, healthier people must subsidize Americans with more health problems – may be a “rather novel tactic,” writes Matthew Yglesias for the online magazine Slate, but only because it is “blatantly immoral.”

But a communal moral prerogative isn’t the same thing as a “right,” at least not in the United States, many conservatives argue.

“The Founding Fathers stated that we have rights to life, liberty and property, and advocated a government that protects those rights,” columnist Armstrong Williams wrote in an op-ed for The Hill news site late last year. “If we interpreted our Constitution correctly, America was built on the principle that government exists to protect our rights that already exist, not dictate what rights we have, do not have or should have.”

Both sides may be missing the point, however, on whether health insurance is a “right” under the American system, writes Avik Roy on Forbes.com.

“The progressive conception of health care as a positive right misses something important: that we could provide better, and more affordable, coverage for everyone if we understood the degree to which classical liberal principles, like choice and competition and voluntarism, can achieve a superior form of universal health care,” writes Mr. Roy, a former adviser to Mitt Romney and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

“The libertarian conception of health care as a negative right, however, also misses something important: the degree to which it is a worthy thing for us to pool our resources in order to support those who, through no fault of their own, find themselves with disability or disease.”

Obama’s forceful phraseology in his Saturday address underscored the building momentum for the official launch of Obamacare. In two months, state health insurance exchanges will begin enrolling Americans who are eligible for government subsidies to buy insurance.

With that deadline looming, Obama took square aim at critics who say the law infringes on the right of Americans to make their own decisions about healthcare, and who suggest premiums could skyrocket under rules that require insurance companies to reimburse doctors for more services and cover people with so-called preexisting conditions.

“A lot of Republicans seem to believe that if they can gum up the works and make this law fail, they’ll somehow be sticking it to me. But they’d just be sticking it to you,” Obama said. “Your health insurance isn’t something to play politics with…. This isn’t a game. This is about the economic security of millions of families.”

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-gop-health-insurance-now-172732132.html

 

[thoughtone]

Re: Obama to GOP: Health insurance is now a 'right.' Is he right?

Obama to GOP: Health insurance is now a 'right.' Is he right?

Is he?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
​

United States Declaration of Independence - July 4, 1776

 

[Greed]

Re: Obama to GOP: Health insurance is now a 'right.' Is he right?

Is he?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
​

United States Declaration of Independence - July 4, 1776

Obviously he's all fucked up.

Is this why you defend him despite everything he's done?

Rights are what you are born with and defines you as a human. Rights don't exist as a cost to someone else. A Right cannot be invoked if someone else has to provide it for you. The Left has turned every majority-rule desire into a Right. And the right-wing has expanded personhood to everything. Both of you have perverted those ideas so much and now they are meaningless.

That quote that you spit out so casually refers to the positive actions taken by the subject. You have a Right to you own life to run as you see fit as long as you aren't violating other's ability to do so. That logic is the exact opposite of Obama's logic and by default your logic.

Your own life is your ultimate property and your Right to it is inviolate. Your seem to comprehend it when it comes to slavery but think its OK to take 50% of someone else's efforts. For some reason, you feel as long as its below 100% confiscation, it's moral to promote that some people exist for the sake of others. Somehow you came to the conclusion that a Right to life infers a specific quality of it to be provided by others, which basically makes your demands never-ending.

 

[QueEx]

Re: Obama to GOP: Health insurance is now a 'right.' Is he right?

Obviously he's all fucked up.

No, he (Obama or T.O., whichever you were referring to) is not fucked up, at all.

Is this why you defend him despite everything he's done?

When he's right ? ? ? ???

Rights are what you are born with and defines you as a human. Rights don't exist as a cost to someone else. A Right cannot be invoked if someone else has to provide it for you. The Left has turned every majority-rule desire into a Right. And the right-wing has expanded personhood to everything. Both of you have perverted those ideas so much and now they are meaningless.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. You're attempting to shape the law to mirror your political beliefs.

There are several sources of rights, i.e., the Constitution and the Legislature (at both the federal and state level), the common law and the judiciary (state and federal) -- hence, there are constitutional rights, statutory rights, rights under the common law and rights flowing from judicially created law.

What we commonly refer to as First Amendment Rights are derivative of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Congress, as do state legislatures, enact laws every year that contract, expand, rescind or convey rights. The Affordable Care Act, is statutory law enacted by the Congress of the United States conveying certain rights, i.e., upon certain qualifying individuals the right to remain covered under their parents health insurance up to age 26. If a qualifying person under age 26 is refused, that person could enforce that right in a court of competent jurisdiction.

 

[Greed]

Re: Obama to GOP: Health insurance is now a 'right.' Is he right?

No, he (Obama or T.O., whichever you were referring to) is not fucked up, at all.




When he's right ? ? ? ???






WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. You're attempting to shape the law to mirror your political beliefs.

There are several sources of rights, i.e., the Constitution and the Legislature (at both the federal and state level), the common law and the judiciary (state and federal) -- hence, there are constitutional rights, statutory rights, rights under the common law and rights flowing from judicially created law.

What we commonly refer to as First Amendment Rights are derivative of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Congress, as do state legislatures, enact laws every year that contract, expand, rescind or convey rights. The Affordable Care Act, is statutory law enacted by the Congress of the United States conveying certain rights, i.e., upon certain qualifying individuals the right to remain covered under their parents health insurance up to age 26. If a qualifying person under age 26 is refused, that person could enforce that right in a court of competent jurisdiction.

Que, as usual we disagree regarding legality and morality.

 

[thoughtone]

Re: Obama to GOP: Health insurance is now a 'right.' Is he right?

Que, as usual we disagree regarding legality and morality.

Hence your entrenched belief in liberty separate from justice.

 

[Greed]

Re: Obama to GOP: Health insurance is now a 'right.' Is he right?

Hence your entrenched belief in liberty separate from justice.

You can't de-link the two. It's like thoughtone's infantile logic when he screams about Liberty without Justice. One implies the other with Justice being a necessary, not sufficient, condition for Liberty. You can't respect reality then shit on the only way humans have to perceive it.

No wonder you get bored easily, you don't find any value in reality beyond what's in front of your face. That's actually very consistent with your, it doesn't affect me, logic.

Spoken like a true trickle down proponent.

So much for your railing against corporate bailouts.

I'm confused thoughtone.

Can you explain how one leads to the other?

Thanks in advance.

Specifically?

Specifically the part where arguing that you can't separate Justice from Liberty or philosophy from reality is inconsistent with my "railing against corporate bailouts."

Thanks in advance.

...

 

[SPECTRE1]

The Constitution needs to be burned, treated as a historical document similar to the magna carta, and/or thrown in garbage. It was written by slaveholders, looking to setup a government that would allow their continued exploitation of people as slaves unimpeded by anybody. It would be similar to a drug cartel that led a coup against the Canadian or Mexican government. I would imagine that the the drug cartels would put together a similar document, would their Constitution written to extend their nefarious activities be more legitimate?


Our knowledge of the Universe has increased dramatically, that we can rewrite a smarter Constitution.