Well Written Article on Amy Barrett, "Textualism" and the Second Amendment

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Lifer
May 30, 2008
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Europe has seen and felt what can happen if there aren't tough enough underpinnings of governments, i.e. the world wars. Words on paper could be detrimental to development, but could also help insure against deteriorating into chaos, oligarchy, monarchy, dictatorships.

I'm not defending the US constitution here, I think it's very flawed and weak in many ways. The 2nd Amendment is a major example, the electoral college, another. The president has far too much power, as we've seen the last 4 years, in particular if the office is held by a person with no respect for precedent, law, fairness, equity, morality and sanity. We're really up against the wall, and that wall may crumble and the integrity of the USA fall headlong into a funk we won't recover from. The unprecedented polarization is the canary in the coal mine. Politicians are afraid to deviate from the party line because individual responsibility is no longer valued. If we don't get over that soon, the USA won't recover.


I'm wary of bashing the US system, I am always tempted, but so far have resisted it, because it's not my system so not my place to have a go at it, and of course anyone can come right back and point out how absurd the UK system is (I'd argue the difference is we _know_ it's absurd, and that it's just an accident bought about by multiple historical vested interests - whereas Americans seem to venerate their Constitution, which is also designed to be very hard to change). But I have to come back at your first point.

One of the last times that a European country tried to come up with a rational, brilliantly progressive, comprehensive written constitution it was the Weimar Republic. Which failed completely at insuring against deterioration. That constitution was intended to be progressive and democratic in the extreme. It was trivially subverted when conditions went bad.

The USSR had an extremely democratic and progressive constitution - on paper. I think constitutions are just over-rated in general. What matters, it seems to me, is what is in the minds of the population, and that is determined by the day-to-day social and material conditions of life.

Edit - I wonder if it's related to some philosophy of logic, that any formal written constitution will always have weaknesses that can allow it to be subverted? Though it seems to me the US one was specifically created to try and ensure the ongoing dominance of the class of people who wrote it, that the undemocratic aspect was deliberately in there from the start.
 
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Starbuck1975

Lifer
Jan 6, 2005
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In Barrett’s “originalist“ America, she could not be a judge or vote on any of these matters.
In Barrett’s originalist America, the Founding Fathers provided a mechanism to update the text via Amendments, and through that process, she is able to serve as a judge and vote. The judiciary does not exist to rewrite law. They can interpret intent but the role of the judiciary is almost by default conservative in its mandate.
 

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Lifer
May 30, 2008
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In Barrett’s originalist America, the Founding Fathers provided a mechanism to update the text via Amendments, and through that process, she is able to serve as a judge and vote. The judiciary does not exist to rewrite law. They can interpret intent but the role of the judiciary is almost by default conservative in its mandate.

They did, but they also made that process extremely hard to achieve.

I mean, not only do you have the electoral college (that erases the votes of minorities within states - I'm pretty sure the existence of that system has a lot to do with the issue of race in the US) you also have a Senate where a minority of the population (the whiter minority) elects a majority of the seats, and that Senate in turn controls who gets appointed to the Court that gets to put a block any any changes to the system. You also have a weird system whereby electoral districts _and_ the mechanism of elections, are controlled by partisan political figures, and which vary wildly from one place to the next, because the Constitution says very little about the right to vote (and what little it says is open to being intepretation by that highly partisan court) thus ensuring endless attempts at gerrymandering and voter-supression. The whole system is a mechanism full of interlocking parts all mutually-reinforcing and designed to prevent any part of it changing.

I mean, the one-and-only attempt to get rid of the electoral college failed because of the Senate, which itself is as demographically-skewed in the same way as the electoral college.

The only thing that could break the logjam, is demographic change (caused largely by immigration). So its not surprising that conservatives are particularly enraged - sometimes murderously so - by immigration - it's the only factor that might turn the US into a democracy.
 

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
38,202
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In Barrett’s originalist America, the Founding Fathers provided a mechanism to update the text via Amendments, and through that process, she is able to serve as a judge and vote. The judiciary does not exist to rewrite law. They can interpret intent but the role of the judiciary is almost by default conservative in its mandate.

Quite progressive of them.
 

HomerJS

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
36,735
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There are recorded tapes


There are also recorded tapes of many of his personal and campaign advisors being openly racist. His campaign advisors has a famous rant where he basically advises Republicans to stop using the n word openly and stop being openly racist because it was turning off voters and instead code it with language about fiscal conservativism and protecting suburbs and etc.
I guess because CNN released this this it didn't happen, right?!?
 
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