It is only six pages long and is not too complex for anyone to digest.
Unfortunately, politicians, being who and what they are, have done a masterful job of convincing many that it is too complex to be understood by the “average” American, whoever that is.
Now it may be true that those who study “government” in today’s government schools never really get the chance to read their Constitution. In most cases, they are only asked to read what others have said about it, and to read only those who have written about it with a certain tilt and/or agenda.
In fact, students in high school are virtually discouraged from reading the actual document, as it is said to be too pedantic and boring.
Yet those same students are asked to vote for people who have sworn to “uphold and defend” the Constitution.
One might be tempted to ask, “If one has never read the document itself, how is one to know whether or not the person they vote for is upholding and defending it?”
Exactly.
That is by design.
If too many of the electorate actually knew what is in their Constitution, more politicians might be held accountable for their usurping of it.
As author, Lisa Fabrizio has written:
“One of the ways that lawyers and college professors have convinced the nation that the Constitution is way over their heads and way out of touch, is to claim that, as originally written, it is far too fragile to encompass the ways and means of modern D.C. mudslinging; as if politics weren't written into the document itself. The Founders did not live in some ivory tower where the stench of politics never befouled the sacred air. On the contrary, the system of checks and balances was established to create an electoral friction with this very thing in mind.”
James Madison, in Federalist 58 wrote:
“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.”
Ms Fabrizio continued:
“…the framers never intended the Supreme Court to be the final word in the day-to-day governance of America; that is the purview of the people through the two elected branches of government. But should the Executive and Legislative arms overreach the boundaries so carefully laid out for them by the Framers, it is precisely the job of the Court to chastise them for it.”
She quotes Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78:
“No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.”
I know that my liberal readers feel cheated for never having been required to actually read the Constitution, but take hope! All is not lost!
Being members of the Information Age (read: Internet Age), even liberals have access to the actual words of the document.
One really good site is: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/
And if you want to know more, The Heritage Foundation has some very good learning resources.
I especially would encourage liberals to read the document and study its history, its use in legal decisions over the years and its application to the American way of life.
Go ahead! It won’t hurt!
It will, however, open your eyes to the light of our most important founding document.
(If you happen to know President BO (the child president), ask him to read it, too. Based on his recent comments, I’m not really sure he ever has.)
34 comments:
Anonymous and Angry: Goodbye.
Screw President Obama (the Child President) and all the other stupid politicians that spend our money like the fools they are, like Nancy Pelosi the fraud.
I just can't wait until November to end this horrific nightmare
“No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid."
------------
Immediately begs the question.
That's the whole issue. The statement is virtually useless.
".....The Founders did not live in some ivory tower where the stench of politics never befouled the sacred air...."
Yes they did!
Prior to the Declaration of Independence the Librul was under the suzerainty of the benevolent Crown of Great Britain.
Then the Librul became revolting and the foetid air of entitlement and politics befouled the once pristine colonies.
RR: I hope and pray that it does end in November.
Ducky: "The statement is virtually useless."
Only if you aren't intelligent enough to understand its principle
ALTC: For the benifit of those who might not know the word, "suzerain" is a noun that means:
1.A sovereign or state having some control over another state that is internally autonomous.
2.A feudal overlord.
"...benevolent Crown of Great Britain."
"Benevolent" would not properly describe the rule of Great Britain over the colonies.
I personally don't have any doubts that Obama will lose in November. And November can’t come soon enough for me so that we can get rid of the worst US President ever. But unfortunately the damage that he has already done will take a long time to repair.
And on another note, I am absolutely sick of hearing the whiny excuses that the left make whenever this horrific president screws up.
TDDW: I absolutely agree. The left is so ideologically blind that they cannot see themselves and the stupidity of their responses to The One's mistakes.
George W. Bush: This concept of a “living Constitution” gives unelected judges wide latitude in creating new laws and policies without accountability to the people.
G.W.B.: "For the judiciary, resisting this temptation is particularly important, because it's the only branch that is unelected and whose officers serve for life. Unfortunately, some judges give in to temptation and make law instead of interpreting. Such judicial lawlessness is a threat to our democracy -- and it needs to stop."
Mitt Romney: Today, unelected judges cast aside the will of the people of California who voted to protect traditional marriage.
Rick Santorum: I don't believe in that. I believe on the great moral issues of our time, the people have a right to speak and say what their collective morality is, the kind of country that they want to live in, and a few unelected, in some cases, or even elected, judges should not impose that. He would go along with the unelected judges.
Sen. Chuck Grassley: We need to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. We need to preserve, protect, and defend the rights of American citizens. Justice Ginsburg and others who have a judicial longing for other constitutions that protect different rights and give unelected judges power that, under our Constitution, self-governing people exercise themselves
Newt Gingrich: Court of Appeals overturning CA’s Prop 8 another example of an out of control judiciary. Let’s end judicial supremacy. That sounds like a real threat.
Speaker John Boehner: This latest FISA proposal from House Majority leaders is dead on arrival. It would outsource critical national security decisions to unelected judges and trial lawyers.
Sen. Jeff Sessions: This ‘Washington-knows-best’ mentality is evident in all branches of government, but is especially troublesome in the judiciary, where unelected judges have twisted the words of our Constitution to advance their own political, economic, and social agendas.
Thomas Sowell: Unelected judges can cut the voters out of the loop and decree liberal dogma as the law of the land.
Gov. Rick Perry: [The American people are] fed up with unelected judgestelling them when and where they can pray or observe the Ten Commandments.
Robert Bork: We are increasingly governed not by law or elected representatives but by an unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable committee of lawyers (judges) applying no will but their own.
Joe, I have an almost endless supply of these quotes. You can disagree with Obama but to suggest he's ignorant of the Constitution or Judicial Review with his comments is the height of hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty.
Maybe you, being a Constitutional scholar, can show me where Judicial Review is enumerated in "elegant but simple American English". I'm not saying it isn't implied but so is Judicial Restraint and the principle of Stare Decisis.
The quote that gave y'all the vapors was preceded by "And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is". He was paraphrasing what Conservatives say. A couple more quotes from some of the founders show the issue wasn't so cut and dry, even back in the day.
"The question whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law has been heretofore a subject of consideration with me in the exercise of official duties. Certainly there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches." --Thomas Jefferson to W. H. Torrance, 1815. ME 14:303
"In denying the right [the Supreme Court usurps] of exclusively explaining the Constitution, I go further than [others] do, if I understand rightly [this] quotation from the Federalist of an opinion that 'the judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the government, but not in relation to the rights of the parties to the compact under which the judiciary is derived.' If this opinion be sound, then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de se [act of suicide]. For intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation. For experience has already shown that the impeachment it has provided is not even a scare-crow... The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please." --Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1819. ME 15:212
James Madison in a private letter in 1788: “In the state constitutions and indeed in the federal one also, no provision is made for the case of a disagreement in expounding them; and as the courts are generally the last in making the decision, it results to them by refusing or not refusing to execute a law, to stamp it with the final character. This makes the Judiciary Department paramount in fact to the legislature, which was never intended and can never be proper.”
Charles Pinckney in 1799: “On no subject am I more convinced, than that it is an unsafe and dangerous doctrine in a republic, ever to suppose that a judge ought to possess the right of questioning or deciding upon the constitutionality of treaties, laws, or any act of the legislature. It is placing the opinion of an individual, or of two or three, above that of both branches of Congress, a doctrine which is not warranted by the Constitution, and will not, I hope, long have many advocates in this country.”
Craig: With your list of quotes, what do you think you are proving?
I said that we (the people) ALREADY KNOW (or should know) that SCOTUS is unelected.
The Constitution REQUIRES that they be unelected.
The idea, though, the President BO (the child president) would use that as a no so veiled threat that he would ignore and/or override their decision is typical of his tendency to think of himself as the emperor.
Mark my words, Craig. He is a despot in the making.
The SCOTUS has no Constitutional authority to make law or to find laws where they don't exist, just because they think a law should be on the books or not.
Roe v Wade was just such activism, and is a total travesty.
There is NO federal right to abortion.
Just as Jim Crow was wrong, so is Roe v Wade, and someday it must be reversed.
Judicial activism by SCOTUS is wrong and dangerous, no matter whether one is conservative or liberal.
If President BO (the child president) were merely making that observation, he and I would be in complete agreement. But the context of his statement was a threat to bypass the power of the Third Estate.
What if Roe v Wade had been treated in the same way? Who would be jumping up and down and screaming then?
Sarah Palin is a genius compared to Barack Hussein Obama. And just imagine if Sarah Palin, who was running for Vice President, not President as liberals like to keep suggesting, was the President of the United States of America, we wouldn't have radical activist judges Elena Kagen and Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court for life. We wouldn't have 15 trillion in debt and double digit unemployment numbers. We would have lower gas prices and more domestic energy production. We wouldn't be funding worldwide abortions and letting HIV positive travelers into America. We wouldn't of bailed out auto companies, unions and banks. We would have border enforcement and we wouldn't have the horrible 'Obamacare' bill. DADT would still be in place and the defense of marriage act would be defended. The list goes on, but that alone is enough for most Americans to wish that Sarah Palin was the President over Barack Obama, a man who given $100 and a thousands lemons would bankrupt a lemonade stand by the end of the day. Obama is an 'economic retard' and a con artist who has lied so many times, we lost count.
Liberal Hypocrisy, Liberal Idiots, Liberal Lies
So Joe, where do you stand on this? Do you feel that SCOTUS is charged with ruling on the mandate or do you disagree with Obama that invalidating the entire bill would be activism?
The Congress has just passed a bill which makes it a felony do demonstrate outside a building when an event of "national importance" (pretty vague, huh) is being held.
If the ACLU challenges this denial of free speech and assembly will you support repeal or feel grateful that #Occupy has been dealt with?
I don't mean to imply that you're a pedantic fraud but give this some thought before you gunsling the pithy aphorisms.
"....."Benevolent" would not properly describe the rule of Great Britain over the colonies....."
Sheesh!
It doesn't even describe how it rules over it's own insular domains, let alone the 'Colonies'.
But I got to create the double entendre on the word 'revolt(ing), yes?
The idea, though, the President BO (the child president) would use that as a no so veiled threat that he would ignore and/or override their decision is typical of his tendency to think of himself as the emperor.
How do you get a threat to ignore or override their decision out of what he said? How is it any different from the quotes I cited?
There is NO federal right to abortion.
Is there a right to privacy? Should Griswald be overturned as well? How about the 9th Amendment or the 14th?
Mark my words, Craig. He is a despot in the making.
I'm not worried, Joe. 6 months in the Obama re-education camp and you'll forget you ever typed that.
Craig: "Is there a right to privacy?"
Of COURSE there's a right to privacy!!!!! Abortion has absolutely, positively NOTHING to do with privacy. It has only to do with what is convenient for the tramp (78% of the time) who gets herself pregnant because she's afraid to tell her boyfriend "No!"
Or is too ignorant to be able to anticipate the consequences of intercourse.
Go ahead...bring up the "rape" red herring. (Ooh! OOh! I never THOUGHT of THAT!)
You think like a liberal and can't help it.
Craig: Oh, and Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) had absolutely nothing to do with abortion, either.
Once you allow "penumbras" and "emanations" to make law, there are no limits.
penumbra:
1a.a space of partial illumination (as in an eclipse) between the perfect shadow on all sides and the full light
b : a shaded region surrounding the dark central portion of a sunspot
2: a surrounding or adjoining region in which something exists in a lesser degree : fringe
3: a body of rights held to be guaranteed by implication in a civil constitution.
By the way, do you know when the 3rd meaning of penumbra was added to the dictionary? In 1967.
Up until then the legal use of the word was: "outer bounds of authority emanating from a law." (Justice stephen j. field in the 1871 decision of Montgomery v. Bevans.)
Coincidence?
The tramp who gets herself pregnant.
My, my.
Joe, no word on what you think about Griswold. Was it an activist decision?
Ducky: Griswold was an activist decision, but philosophically different from Roe v Wade.
Craig, Obama was talking about Justices, not judges. A big difference. The Supreme Court exists to overturn the activist and unconstitutional rulings of judges.
Democrats never change. They used the Supreme Court to justify slavery. Then, they used it to justify segregation. Now, they are using it to justify the slaughter of 53 million (and counting) unborn babies.
Obama didn't appoint Kagen and Sotomayor because of their vast knowledge of the law and devotion to the Constitution, but because he knew they would vote to support his un-American, un-constitutional health care law. That's exactly what FDR did when he appointed former KKK lawyer Hugo Black to the Court to push through his un-American and un-Constitutional New Deal policies. Unfortunately, Obama's poisonous effect on this country will last for decades after he is booted from office.
former KKK lawyer Hugo Black
You make it sound like he represented the Klan, he didn't. He joined, for 2 years, to get elected to the Senate. On the Court he was a staunch supporter of civil rights and a strict literalist, one of Scalia's influential heroes. He dissented in Griswold. Joe's ideological brother.
Joe, you linked to Heritage as a source for Constitutional study. I just thought it interesting that the individual mandate, what has precipitated all this phoney outrage, was hatched at Heritage.
The plan was introduced in a 1989 book, “A National Health System for America” by Stuart Butler and Edmund Haislmaier.
Stuart Butler’s lecture describes what the Heritage’s mandate would look like:
We would include a mandate in our proposal–not a mandate on employers, but a mandate on heads of households–to obtain at least a basic package of health insurance for themselves and their families. That would have to include, by federal law, a catastrophic provision in the form of a stop loss for a family’s total health outlays. It would have to include all members of the family, and it might also include certain very specific services, such as preventive care, well baby visits, and other items.
I guess they were for it before they were against it.
Enjoy your Easter Sunday, everyone. Joe, pork or fowl today?
(sigh) In 1921, black successfully defended KKK member Edwin R. Stephenson, who murdered Catholic priest James Coyle in Alabama.
Did you think you could bluff me?
And, as far as I'm concerned, anyone who would join the Klan -- even for five minutes -- for political purposes, isn't worth defending. So, why are you standing up for him?
Could it be because the Klan was an invention of the democrats and until the death of Robert Byrd, this country had always had a present or former Klan member in the judicial or legislative branches of the federal government -- democrats all?
Craig: "Joe, pork or fowl today?"
Lamb.
I always thought it interesting that we would celebrate the resurrection of a Jew with pork.
Try that with a Muslim and see what it gets you.
LR: Craig will not be deterred with facts. He will go on spewing his lies that conservatives are spewing lies.
Turns out (as usual) that he can only see with liberal eyes, therefore, no matter what, conservatives are wrong.
If a conservative says Ford builds cars and trucks, he will say that Ford does not really "build" them they only "assemble" them. Then he will tell us how dumb we are.
He likes doing that.
Craig: "He joined, for 2 years, to get elected to the Senate."
What a man of GREAT principle! You probably think he WAS because you really don't understand principles.
No, Tonto's catcher, the Klan was the invention of southern crackers like Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and others who form the basis of today's Republican Party.
The all left the Democratic Party when the voting rights act and other laws passed.
Ducky: Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond invented the KKK?
Actually, predating those two:
1) The first iteration of KKK was in 1865 as a local social club that morphed into an anti-reconstructionist movement after the Civil War. Nathan Bedford Forrest – Democrat – anti-Republican – First Grand Wizard of KKK. It was attacked by and eventually destroyed by Republican president, Ulysses S. Grant;
2) Between 1915 and 1920, a second KKK arose. It grew out of a group called the Knights of Mary Phagan, who had been killed by Leo Max Frank. The Knights lynched Frank and then continued their “cleansing” efforts to rid the country of Jews, Catholics and immigrants. These Klansmen specialized in promoting “progressive” measures. David Bibb Graves (Democrat) and Hugo Black (Democrat) were members of this KKK group.
Quit bluffing and start learning.
Joe, Jesse and Strom are just contemporary examples of the fine history of southern "states rights" bigots who have corrupted the political system and stood firm for Jim Crow and Bull Connor.
they were the foundation of the Dixiecrats and later the contemporary Republican party.
You own the heritage.
OK, Lone, Black did defend a Klansman. My point was, he wasn't a lawyer for the Klan, but maybe that's splitting hairs. I concede your point. You're right, I'm wrong. BTW, Black got Stephenson off by claiming self defense. Apparently, Coyle was wearing a hoody.
And, as far as I'm concerned, anyone who would join the Klan -- even for five minutes -- for political purposes, isn't worth defending. So, why are you standing up for him?
If he'd joined for philosophical reasons, that would be OK? You want to judge him solely on his brief association with the Klan. He didn't conduct himself in the Senate and the Court like a Klansman. Quite the opposite. You don't like him because he supported the New Deal. Fine, but that had nothing to do with the Klan.
Given the context of the time, 1920's, and his location, Alabama, it's not all that surprising he'd join the Klan for political expediency. Just like, considering the context, I don't discount everything the Founders did because they owned slaves.
There's no doubt about it, the Dem. Party has an ugly past with southern racists. They've owned it, repudiated it and moved on. You can keep digging up Dem. racists from 100 or 50 years ago and you are right but how is that relevant to today? When will conservatives and Reupubs own the racists among you now and do something about it? Why is it whenever some virulently racist crap floats to the surface, it's a conservative?
Just the latest being this best selling bumper sticker, this Freudian slip, or this Klassy advice column from John Derbyshire.
Isn't there something about splinters and logs and eyes in the Good Book?
Oops, messed up the link to The Derb. Here it is.
Gee, I'd never seen the L'il Ricky clip. Man, he almost let it fly.
Joe, can we have your reaction to the bill that has flown through Congress making it a felony to demonstrate outside a building if there is a secret service presence or if an event of "national significance" is occurring. It's clearly meant to control #Occupy, G8 demonstrations or demonstrations at conventions so I wonder if you support this restriction on popular democracy.
I'm not saying that the constant drone about the Constitution coming from the right is inconsistent but you clearly don't care about certain rights that don't involve concealed carry.
Hey Tonto's Catcher, I checked out your post, If Obama Had A Son, Would He Look Like Tyrone? over at your blog.
Pretty disgusting.
Oh, why aren't I surprised to find out you like cats.
Ducky: "...can we have your reaction to the bill that has flown through Congress making it a felony to demonstrate outside a building if there is a secret service presence or if an event of "national significance"
No.
Ducky: "Would He Look Like Tyrone? over at your blog. Pretty disgusting."
What was disgusting was President BO (the child president)'s statement to begin with.
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