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Originally Posted by alphamale
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Originally Posted by D. Scarlatti
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Originally Posted by alphamale
You think the rule of democratically-established law (not by judges) is a big joke?
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Did I not already mention that the conservatives on the Rehnquist Court invalidated far more democratically enacted federal statutes than the liberals? This is the problem with the unrelenting politicization of the judiciary. When a law that you like is invalidated by liberals, you scream bloody murder. But when a law that you don't like is invalidated by conservatives, you fire up the high school football chants. |
I'm not so much concerned with law invalidation as I am with the creation of new rights, constitutional interpretations that go way off from the initial intention, or even contradict it, and the apparent invalidation of parts of the Bill of Rights. And the bypassing of the amending procedure for the last 30 years - why go thru all that stuff when you can get it from a judge a LOT easier? There are a number of things like this - e.g. since the Korean War, we've gone to war with out declarations of war. It makes it seem to me like the constitution is viewed as a quaint historical document that has nothing to do with the real world. |
Some of the phenomena you mention are worth serious concern. But it looks like you're reinventing your position in light of Scarlatti's demolition of the first version.
The big problem is the circumvention of democratically-passed laws; oops, I mean, it isn't.
In any case, on what grounds do you refer to the
creation of "new rights" rather than the
discovery of rights implicit in those already recognized, singly or in aggregate? In law as much as in math or science, it can be a long and surprising process, teasing out just what a set of complex propositions commits one to. Wiles didn't
create Fermat's Theorem; he just showed that accepting some basic logico-arithmetic axioms ultimately commits us to it. Constitutional principles are no less conceptually and inferentially fecund.