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Antonin Scalia, a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, has died:
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia - one of most conservative members of the high court - has died. Justice Scalia's death could shift the balance of power on the US high court, allowing President Barack Obama to add a fifth liberal justice to the court. The court's conservative majority has recently stalled major efforts by the Obama administration on climate change and immigration.
Justice Scalia, 79, was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. He died in his sleep early on Saturday while in West Texas for [a] hunting trip, the US Marshall service said. Justice Scalia was one of the most prominent proponents of "originalism" - a conservative legal philosophy that believes the US Constitution has a fixed meaning and does not change with the times.
Justice Scalia's death is, unsurprisingly, now being widely reported.
From the San Antonio Express News:
According to a report, Scalia arrived at the ranch on Friday and attended a private party with about 40 people. When he did not appear for breakfast, a person associated with the ranch went to his room and found a body.
[...] The U.S. Marshal Service, the Presidio County sheriff and the FBI were involved in the investigation. Officials with the law enforcement agencies declined to comment.
A federal official who asked not to be named said there was no evidence of foul play and it appeared that Scalia died of natural causes.
A gray Cadillac hearse pulled into the ranch last Saturday afternoon. The hearse came from Alpine Memorial Funeral Home.
Most major news outlets are covering this story, including CNN [video autoplays], The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NBC.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday February 14 2016, @02:37AM
Your wrong of course.
The founding fathers intentionally wrote a framework rather than prescription.
But that doesn't mean the framework was intended to be rewritten by every fad blowing in the wind. The amendment process is intentionally difficult. The role of government is not to rewrite the constitution with every new administration. There is noting but tyranny down that road.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Reziac on Sunday February 14 2016, @02:57AM
The people who want to change the Constitution assume that they'll also be the ones enforcing it, and that it will always be enforced according to their vision and within their perception of consequences. Never, ever do they consider the result of a changed Constitution being enforced by parties hostile to their beliefs, let alone consider any unintentional consequences.
"You should not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."
-- Lyndon Johnson, 36th President of the U.S.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Francis on Sunday February 14 2016, @03:26AM
Well, no, I'm not wrong and your post is bullshit.
You're confusing changes to the constitution with changes in the interpretation of the constitution and those are completely different things. The problem with Citizen's united is that they changed the definition of person to include things which are definitely not people and that could be fixed in the near future if the court gets competent jurists rather than right wing ideologues appointed to it.
The founding father's intended for the Supreme Court to be the final say on the interpretation of the laws and the constitution which is exactly what you're decrying here. They aren't rewriting the constitution, they're adjusting the interpretation to match the current climate. Trying to guess what exactly the founding father's meant with the verbiage they used isn't always easy. You have people that still insist that the 2nd amendment grants individual gun ownership rights when that's almost certainly not what they had in mind and doesn't even make sense from a historical point of view.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @06:18AM
**sigh**
Words develop new meaning with time, and old meanings go out of style. The militia is every male from roughly age 12 to 60. It doesn't mean the national guard. The word "regulated" means accurate, capable, and similar. It doesn't mean restricted by law. Even if this were not so however...
You need to be good with English grammar. The sentence construction works like this: "Because we think X is important, the right to Y is allowed." Note that the first part is merely a justification. It has no bearing on the law. It's no different from the first part of "Because blind people suffer, they get a tax credit of $XXXX per year." (which is NOT a law requiring blind people to suffer or making the discount only available to those who do)
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday February 14 2016, @02:09PM
Bullshit. Then why can't I own a rocket launcher? It's because the second amendment was never intended to be an individual right to keep and bear arms.
Also that's a restrictive clause. It's not a matter of explanationtion, it's a restriction. What's more it definitely did have a bearing before the right rewrote it in order to suit their agenda. It is a group right so that the states could have armed police and guard troops.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @05:41PM
By our constitution, it looks like you can in fact own at least a hand-held rocket launcher if not more. (do you "bear" a truck-mounted one or even a silo?) We probably should have put a stop to rocket launchers via a constitutional amendment, but instead we let judges get away with reinterpreting our constitution to deal with the issue.
It's wishful thinking, or a failure to understand English, that leads some to think that the 2nd amendment starts with a restrictive clause. That just isn't how English works.
Where our constitution reserves rights to the states, it actually says so. This isn't the case with the 2nd amendment. You might as well say that the 1st amendment is a collective right so that states can, via their senators, speak their mind.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 14 2016, @12:52PM
You have people that still insist that the 2nd amendment grants individual gun ownership rights when that's almost certainly not what they had in mind and doesn't even make sense from a historical point of view.
Which is a silly claim to make. After all, individual gun ownership was universal to all the states and came with the colonies. It was used to help enforce the individual right to self defense. And the Second Amendment clearly states that there is a right to keep and bear arms. Everywhere else such a right is stated in the Bill of Rights, it is always an individual right not a collective right.
Second, what's a collective right and how can we have collective rights without individual rights? For example, what does it mean to you to have a collective right to keep and bear arms? What does that collective right mean for the individual?
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:53PM
You have people that still insist that the 2nd amendment grants individual gun ownership rights when that's almost certainly not what they had in mind and doesn't even make sense from a historical point of view.
Sorry, virtually every constitutional scholar disagrees with you.
The pre-existing right to gun ownership by citizens was PRECISELY what the 2nd amendment had in mind. And having just overthrown one dictatorship, and not wanting another, it made perfect sense historically to preserve the right to bear arms. (In fact there is a well reasoned school of thought that the 2nd Amendment preserves the right of people to keep and bear ANY similar weapons that an individual soldier might carry into battle.)
Further, you betray a very broken understanding of the constitution by your phrase "the 2nd amendment grants individual gun ownership rights". The second amendment, like all amendments, restricts the government from abridging a right. It does not grant a right. The rights precede the government. This is probably at the root of your misunderstanding of the Constitution. The Constitution limits and controls Government. Not People. You've managed to fundamentally miss the point all these years,
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @09:45AM
> But that doesn't mean the framework was intended to be rewritten by every fad blowing in the wind.
Do you understand what you are doing by framing it as an extreme?
You say "framework" but then, without a single example, you talk as if any modernization is a "fad blowing in the wind" and "whims of the moment" - you base your argument on the extreme case of some non-existent hypothetical. You make it a choice between black and white when the entire world lives in the greys. Your position is based on something that doesn't exist. In that way you invalidate your argument from the very start.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 14 2016, @02:00PM
You say "framework" but then, without a single example, you talk as if any modernization is a "fad blowing in the wind" and "whims of the moment" - you base your argument on the extreme case of some non-existent hypothetical.
Well, let's look at an example [soylentnews.org] then.
The problem with Citizen's united is that they changed the definition of person to include things which are definitely not people and that could be fixed in the near future if the court gets competent jurists rather than right wing ideologues appointed to it.
150 years of law on corporate personhood are ignored here.
You have people that still insist that the 2nd amendment grants individual gun ownership rights when that's almost certainly not what they had in mind and doesn't even make sense from a historical point of view.
Except of course, there was widespread individual firearm ownership, historically to the origins of the pre-US colonies. That's a huge support for individual gun ownership and use rights. It's also worth noting that there are a number of other times when "the people" are granted rights by the Bill of Rights. Each of these times, the right was an individual one not a collective one. This incidentally is an argument [soylentnews.org] that Scalia made!
Next, Scalia turns to the language of the Second Amendment, once again arguing along the same lines as the libertarian individualists. He begins his analysis by dividing the amendment into two clauses: the prefatory clause (“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”), and the operative clause (“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”). Scalia believes the prefatory clause simply announces the purpose of the Amendment and does not limit the operative clause (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 3). He writes that while “this structure…is unique in our Constitution, other legal documents of the founding era, particularly individual-rights provisions of state constitutions, commonly included a prefatory statement of purpose” (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 3). For Scalia, the prefatory clause may offer clarification regarding the operative clause, but it in no way restricts its meaning. After defining several key phrases found in both clauses, Scalia offers a conclusion regarding the meaning of the structure of the amendment.
Scalia begins his analysis of the operative clause with an examination of the phrase “the right of the people.” The Bill of Rights uses the phrase three times: in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause, in the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause, and in an analogous phrase in the Ninth Amendment (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 5). According to Scalia, each of these examples refers to the protection of an individual right, not a collective right. The use of the words “the people” by themselves is found three additional times in the Constitution, each regarding the reservation of power, not rights (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 6). The phrase “right of the people,” when used in its entirety, always refers to an individual right. “The people” used in these six examples has been read to describe the entire political community. Therefore, according to Scalia, the amendment does not just protect a subset of people, in this case the militia consisting of adult white males. Instead, it protects the rights of all Americans.
Not only does Francis in this post, reinterpret the Constitution to fit his whims twice, he reinterprets history as well in order to reach the desired conclusion. Unfortunately, we don't agree on what should be the law, not everyone is virtuous, and our interests are not identical. So extending this sort of subjective, fleeting reinterpretation of law and history to current law is sure to be disaster.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday February 14 2016, @07:38PM
It's also worth noting that there are a number of other times when "the people" are granted rights by the Bill of Rights.
That too is a fundamental mistake of understanding the US Constitution.
The bill or rights, or rather the entire constitution does not GRANT rights to the people.
The people are assumed to have these rights, and the constitution restricts the government from taking them away.
It was precisely because this was misunderstood that Amendment 10 was added:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Many states (5 or 38%) ratified with conditions (demands, really) that amendments be added to make perfectly clear that specific things left unsaid in the original constitution be added to the Constitution, (not changing any of the original text, simply adding the bill of rights). Even at that early date, people understood the likelihood of a federal power grab and over reach.
To that end, almost the first order of business was the construction by congress from those demands, the first 12 amendments to the constitution and the submission of those to the states.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 14 2016, @10:04PM
The bill or rights, or rather the entire constitution does not GRANT rights to the people.
The people are assumed to have these rights, and the constitution restricts the government from taking them away.
It was precisely because this was misunderstood that Amendment 10 was added:
That's pretense. We've seen that Amendment 10 is toothless and that the presence of the Bill of Rights has turned out to be necessary to preserve those rights which we supposedly have automatically.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday February 15 2016, @01:51AM
Well you are exactly correct.
There was argument at the time (Federalist Papers) that the bill of rights was unnecessary, because the body of the constitution would itself prevent government from usurping all rights and powers.
Turns out what little freedoms we have today are almost wholly dependent on and hang by a thread from those first ten amendments, each of which is watered down daily. What should have been a mere redundancy turned out to be an absolute necessity.
One wonders if we would not be better off has the Original First amendment had also passed. The Original Second Amendment did pass. In 1992, as the 27th.
The First amendment [teachinghistory.org] would have limited the size of a US Representative's constituency to about 40,000 people. Had it passed the house would be composed of 8074 representatives.
Of course that's too big to get anything done. Oh, wait......
It might also be too big to bribe.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.