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Merged Scalia is dead

TubbaBlubba said:
Also, I seriously doubt anything resembling a constitution could be valid under any reasonable take on contract theory.
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For example, there are the issues of duress, and a constitution being binding for an unlimited amount of time.
 
sunmaster14 said:
The gay marriage decision was unadulterated politics. It was completely dishonest and had no justification in anything remotely approximating logic or law. And this is the opinion of somebody (me) who supports gay marriage. The only reason that the decision came to fruition was that the majority opinion in the country was quickly moving in favor of gay marriage. But that's what the legislative process is for, to reflect public opinion within the constraints of the Constitution.
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How does the constitution deny gay marriage then?
 
sunmaster14 said:
There are actually some pretty damn racist tweets in there. One tweet imagines Clarence Thomas's reaction to Scalia's death as being similar to the scene from Django Unchained where the house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) mourns the death of his master Calvin Candie (Leonard DiCaprio).

For the record, Clarence Thomas has been quite independent of Scalia. He has been far more intellectually consistent and honest. Scalia was more entertaining with his ascerbic wit, but Thomas is, in my opinion, the best justice by far. I doubt that virtually any of Thomas's detractors have even read any of his opinions, let alone understood them.
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Clarence is a race traitor. By which I mean he has betrayed the human race.
 
sunmaster14 said:
The gay marriage decision was unadulterated politics. It was completely dishonest and had no justification in anything remotely approximating logic or law. And this is the opinion of somebody (me) who supports gay marriage. The only reason that the decision came to fruition was that the majority opinion in the country was quickly moving in favor of gay marriage. But that's what the legislative process is for, to reflect public opinion within the constraints of the Constitution.
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Nonsense. Laws banning gay marriage clearly violate the 14th Amendment. Just the same as laws banning interracial marriage did. Or do you think that was a bad decision too? Were the justices that unanimously struck down those laws lawless activist judges?

Public opinion coming around to the fact that equal protection applies to gay people too may have been why the Court decided to hear it but it was still clearly the correct decision. Equally clear is that the four Republicans dissenters were bigots. Just like most Republicans in the general population.

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BobTheCoward said:
You are talking about unforseen. I'm discussing an unambiguous issue at the time of ratification.
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If the founders were strongly against interracial marriage (as they may have been- although remember that at least a few had children with their Black slaves) and wished to include that as a government-imposed policy it is "unfortunate" that they failed to explicitly include that in the Constitution. You are arguing that because some, maybe even many, people now guess that this must have been the founders' thinking at the time they drafted the Constitution that this guess should now be the basis of the current law. However, there are a lot of guesses/opinions on these types of issues. Gee, there should be some way of having a formal group of appointed legal scholars who are considered experts in the correct interpretation of the Constitution and who are expected to judge these issues as they arise. Oh wait, we have that: the judges on the Supreme Court. But you argue that they are wrong in their published interpretation of the Constitution. Why? Because you see it differently.
 
Sherman Bay said:
If you begin with the unalterable assumption that the Constitution should be changed only by the legislature, never by the courts, that is the inevitable, logical outcome. That was Scalia's basic premise, and he rarely wavered from it.
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Then can you show me where it says that corporations are people and their rights trump individual rights?
 
Tony Stark said:
Re: McConnell saying that the appointment should wait until after the election.

Well, Reagan filled an empty seat his last year in office (Kennedy). The Senate (I believe it was controlled by Democrats at the time) confirmed 97-0. Mitch McConnell himself was a Senator at the time.

Could he possibly be more of a hypocritical piece of crap?
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The competition is fierce, but he is certainly among the top 5.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Originalist is not bigotry. My originalism serves as a guide for what we should amend.
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I didn't say it is bigotry but rather a cover for bigotry. At least in most cases. I don't believe that you're a bigot, but you're an exception.

Do you think that Scalia would have been in favor of amending the Constitution to recognize the rights of gay people. No, of course not. He would have been ardently opposed. So would most Republicans. Because they are bigots.
 
tsig said:
Then can you show me where it says that corporations are people and their rights trump individual rights?
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Corporations are not people. The rights w.r.t. Citizens' United were based on those of the individuals making up the corporations. Congress may not create groups of people and then require you to give up your fundamental right of free speech in order to join it.

The "corp" AKA body in "corporation" just meant bringing them under the laws as an entity that could violate them.
 
BobTheCoward said:
You say, "what I think it means." If I did that, it would be wrong. I would say the notion that the ratifiers did not intend to support interracial marriage is generally accepted. I have seen "originalists have a loving v Virginia problem" as a common liberal argument.

These marriage and love cases became bedrocks of liberal argument for not adhering to original interpretation because the perception the original interpretation is so clear.
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Sorry, I talked to TJ last night he told me I'm right.
 
Tony Stark said:
Nonsense. Laws banning gay marriage clearly violate the 14th Amendment. Just the same as laws banning interracial marriage did. Or do you think that was a bad decision too? Were the justices that unanimously struck down those laws lawless activist judges?
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Clarence Thomas said he would have dissented against Loving v. Virginia. He is interracially married. These things don't have to make sense.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Originalist is not bigotry. My originalism serves as a guide for what we should amend.
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Odd, because one seems so often to be the justification for the other.

Harriet Tubman once stated something like, "Yes it is true that I freed thousands of slaves, but I could have freed thousands more if they only knew that they were slaves." I would argue that there are certainly bigots who know that they are bigots, but ten-fold more people who are bigots who would never consciously see themselves as bigots. Many of the latter prefer to see themselves as strict constructionists (present company exempted of course).
 
Elind said:
How does the constitution deny gay marriage then?
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They claim that states can ban gay marriage because the Constitution doesn't explicitly make it unconstitutional. The try to get around the 14th Amendment which requires equal protection by claiming we are bound by what the people who wrote it would have thought about the issue.
 
uke2se said:
It's possible that the GOP base is so disconnected from reality that it doesn't matter. I mean, look at certain posters in this thread. The only thing that matters to them is "sticking it to Obama". The future governance of the country is secondary to a visceral hatred towards anything perceived as 'liberal'. These people cannot be reasoned with or expected to hold rational positions. Thus, the GOP congress critters acting irrationally is seen as the right thing to do in Crazy Conservative Land.
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They still haven't figured out that you don't win elections with 25% of the vote.
 
Tony Stark said:
Many Republicans have this delusion that the GOP Congress have failed to achieve goals like repealing Obamacare because they haven't fought hard enough. Apparently the simple fact that the Republicans lack the votes is too hard for them to understand.
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Innumeracy is one of the consequences of scientific denialism.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Not silly at all. I gave an analysis of this some time ago from the point of view of contract law. If you can draw a continuous line of citizens who have relied on the Constitution as a contract, from the time it was drafted until now, and it is possible to do exactly that, then it is essentially a breach of contract to interpret it differently at any point in time. If a super-majority of the citizenry thinks the Constitution should be changed, then there is a built-in amendment procedure to do just that.

Remember that the government is voted in by the majority, and since the Constitution was designed to protect the citizenry from the government, it is effectively a contract meant to protect the minority, on certain fundamental issues, from the majority. Of course, it was also meant not to protect the minority from the majority on other issues, and these were left to the legislative branch and the President to decide (or the states). Such an important contract should not be altered by 5 unelected appointees for life.
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No, it is not that, it is a framework for government.
 
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