The most important aspect of Obergefell may be how it establishes judges’ rights to find new rights
From an article by Howard Slugh in the National Review:
In Obergefell, Justice Kennedy made it clear to lower courts that, after he eliminated [the precedent of] Glucksberg, the only remaining limit on new judge-made rights is a judge’s imagination. He noted that “when new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim for liberty must be addressed.” In other words, he believes that since the Founders “did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions,” they gave courts unlimited power to “protect . . . the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.” The “we” in that sentence refers to judges. It is impossible to know what sort of unenumerated rights newly freed judges may impose. Present-day European constitutions contain rights to adequate housing, a healthy environment, the enjoyment of nature and culture, a fair wage, limited working hours, and “cultural and social self-fulfillment.” Now that Justice Kennedy has opened the floodgates, there is no concrete legal reason to rule out the possibility that judges may find these rights hidden in our Constitution as well.
My guess is that many things that were once thought to require amendments to the Constitution now can dispense with them. Rights can be found whenever needed. You might think Roe v. Wade already accomplished that by finding an implied constitutional right to privacy where none had existed before, but you would be wrong. Roe may have found a right to privacy, but (unless I’m forgetting something; haven’t read it in a long time) it didn’t establish a broader right for judges to find new rights when they felt like it. But according to Slugh, that’s pretty much what Obergefell does:
Liberals have spent decades trying to pass an Equal Rights Amendment, but now a judge can hand them victory on a silver platter. Allowing D.C. to have voting representatives in Congress is a liberal dream, and now a judge can make it happen with the stroke of a pen. Felons nationwide can have their voting rights restored tomorrow. The possibilities are endless, and questions that may have formerly been decided through the democratic process are now more likely to be decided by unelected judges.
…Justice Kennedy did not even engage in the fiction of claiming that this case was the high-water mark of substantive due process; he openly invited judges to create new fundamental rights, and there is no reason to think they will be anything other than happy to oblige. If judges are granted unchecked power, at least some of them will eventually exercise it.
Power. We already have an executive branch that overlooks Congress and makes sweeping changes through executive fiat and agencies. But at least the executive is still elected—so far, anyway—although intent on assuring a permanent Democratic majority by executive orders that expand illegal immigration combined with judicial rulings that overrule stricter voter ID laws. Now, with a judiciary that is becoming more and more of an unelected legislature that stretches the Constitution as it sees fit, and legislators who focus mainly on where their next contributions are coming from, and who fight and dither and don’t seem to see any way they can limit the other branches’ runaway power, the republic is in a heap of trouble.
It used to be that there were enough patriots in both parties to have recognized the dangers of that sort of thing. No more.
Progs love the result. They don’t care how King Tony got there.
Witness the Left’s advance on all fronts, except Gamersgate and independent authors vs big publishers.
When the most effective people in your society are a bunch of internet gamer nerds+ trolls and writers that make their living by the pen… not sure what that says about the anti traitor factions.
The military isn’t allowed to get rid of domestic enemies, unless those are domestic terrorists (tea Party) in “emergencies”.
Somebody else has to do the job, and it won’t be your gun packing soldiers or LEOs.
“Roe v. Wade” discovered a right to kill for causes other than self-defense. They are hiding their complicity behind a thinly veiled lie.
As for the rest, pro-choice doctrine (i.e. selective principles) has consequences. A large minority of Americans sold their humanity to the highest bidder (e.g. entitlements, career, pleasure, leisure, power, dissociation of risk).
http://neoneocon.com/2015/04/01/the-libertarian-approach-to-indianas-religious-freedom-law/
Neo wrote that just a few months ago, and in there I wrote this:
The Issue is never about the issue, of marriage, for Leftists. The issue is always power and control. Those that cannot understand this, will be kicked in the head by the Left as many times as the Leftists wish.
Do people understand yet or do they need more re-education?
”Roe may have found a right to privacy, but (unless I’m forgetting something; haven’t read it in a long time) it didn’t establish a broader right for judges to find new rights when they felt like it.”
The legalistic argument is it hadn’t established broader rights for judges…. The post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument is that it had established a new method of abrogating the legal argument. Benighted ancients availed themselves of haruspicies reading entrails. We intelligent post-modernes have judges divining emanations from penumbrae. However one parses it, one is dealing with apples and apples.
By the by, post-modern America’s dissipation is now indistinguishable from that of Rome’s at the nadir of its depravity.
Ymarsakar:
Most liberals I know appear to have no understanding whatsoever of the left that they unwittingly serve. Or, if they understand the left in some of its manifestations (the best example being Soviets), they think it is very very different from the left in this country.
Or no limit on a judge not finding the right. One can clearly see where this is going- you have all the rights the government deigns to give you, and no voice to complain about it.
The only solution is a full bore impeachment of the justices for violating their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. From supremecourt.gov
“I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as _________ under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”
It’s a Federal Constitution of limited powers with all unennumerated powers devolving to the States or the people via the ninth and tenth amendments. They are clearly in violation of these amemdments by creating unlisted new rights.
Whether they realize it or not they are putting the country on a path to civil war. Because once they gut the Constitution then there’s no reason to be loyal to the social compact any more. Plenty of people who no longer have reason to be won’t be. How far down that path we’ll go in my lifetime I don’t know, but that’s the path they have irresponsibly and selfishly chosen to push the country along.
Paul:
Impeachment not happening. 75% of the Senate like the SSM ruling from Tony and the Libs.
Kcom:
That’s not a solution unless you have the votes to convict. The votes are not there, however.
Cornhead:
“Great minds” and all that.
Yancy Ward is correct, this sort of legal usurpation by the Supreme Court or any other court leads to a government of men and not laws. Whoever has the whip hand at the moment can decide what is a right, who benefits from it, and who will be harmed. It’s very dangerous.
The most amazing part of homosexual marriage is that 2% of the population has been somehow able to push this through. The only way it can be done is by using the courts which act as bottlenecks in the legal system. Capture them and you capture the law. Every time there has been a popular vote it’s been voted down. It would have been voted down here in Massachusetts, the first in the nation to legalize hm via the courts, if the legislature hadn’t finagaled a way to avoid a special election. The homosexuals must have a lot of money in the political system.
n.n Says:
July 6th, 2015 at 2:28 pm
“Roe v. Wade” discovered a right to kill for causes other than self-defense: Cough, cough…
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae–in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion….
The short version: Once a government has decided its power is limitless, there are -literally- NO LIMITS on what it may decide to do.
The corollary: Where Rule-of Law is dead, anarchy must follow.
No, it doesn’t happen immediately; there will be attempts to poke the carcass to see if the beast might still react and snap at them. When it’s obvious that “It’s dead, Jim” — THEN the jackals and hyenas WILL come out to play.
Prepare yourselves. Gather your families close. Discuss “eventualities”. What if the Eurozone falls apart? What if banking collapses? What if the FDIC hasn’t got enough money to “make whole” EVERY SINGLE DEPOSITOR in the nation? (Hint- it doesn’t.) What if Bernie Sanders wins the Presidency? What if 5 million illegals storm the southern border next month and are distributed throughout the country? What if, what if, what if… ? Most of the “what if”s will never happen, thank heaven. But BE AWARE that our way of life is fragile. BE AWARE that there are several kinds of “unexpectedly!!” that could impact you. From fire/ flood/ drought/ to a dockworker strike to antibiotic-resistant diseases to localized “civil unrest”. It wouldn’t hurt to have a couple extra week’s worth of dry food on hand. Ditto for water. Think like a Boy Scout: Be Prepared.
Paul in Boston:
Yes, surely it is the case that the gays–a percentage of the population not significantly different from the percentage that is Jewish–are manipulating our political system with our nefarious rainbow dollars. It couldn’t possibly be that straight liberals like to use gay marriage as a wedge issue to portray themselves as moral paragons and their opponents as bigots, because we all know that liberals don’t use any other minority group like that.
Good grief.
By the way, 2%?! The WSJ found in March that 59% of Americans are in favor of allowing same-sex marriages. 40% of *Republicans* even support it. It’s not accurate to say that same-sex marriage was pushed by 2% of the population.
Corhpnhead and Neo,
If you’re President you make the votes by speaking to the public and explaining what is at stake and you make it the first priority of your administration. Ask people to come to Wahington to demonstrate. Remember the huge anti-ObamaCare demonstration? That was an entirely spontaneous Tea Party affair. Think about how large the demonstrations would be if the President named a date. Come to Washington and if you can’t, march on the home office of your Congessman or Senator.
It would also be very important to mau-mau the press and call them the mouth pieces of the totalitarian left that has taken over the leadership of the Democratic Party, and do this over and over and over until their credibility is ruined.
Cornhead! Oops.
There would be a lot of moving parts requiring careful planning, but it could be done if a big enough issue came up the created the opportunity. Gay marriage won’t be the right issue for the next President.
G6loq:
I am aware. They are amoral and opportunistic. You have to give them credit for redistributing some really good secular opiates.
Bryan:
They equated a couple and couplet, and are now adamant that they can selectively excludes other relationships. The “equal” campaign was a thinly veiled campaign to deny equal rights not limited to marriage. Apparently, a majority do not see the moral hazards created when ruling with a pro-choice or perhaps progressive doctrine.
Progressives have used the language of rights for a long time. They simply proclaim a right. People have a right to health care. People have a right to education. People have a right to housing. Where is the evidence for such assertions? They usually involve someone else providing the funding for such rights.
The Leftist alliance is not 2% of the country. That’s underestimating the power of the Left to a very far extent.
Most liberals I know appear to have no understanding whatsoever of the left that they unwittingly serve. Or, if they understand the left in some of its manifestations (the best example being Soviets), they think it is very very different from the left in this country.
That’s like Muslims coming to America, stoning women and killing people on the streets, then saying that this was all laws passed down by Mohammed, that they didn’t know it was against US laws to do such.
When many “suicide bombers” were discovered in Iraq, it was found that they were retarded or slow people who AQ told to move a truck, and then remote detonated the bomb in the truck while the driver was still going. That’s the level of deceit and self deceit going on here.
kcom Says @4:26 pm
“Whether they realize it or not they are putting the country on a path to civil war.”
Agreed. It may take awhile but a civil war is on the way.
cough, cough:
… Speaking about such modest restrictions on abortion as have been enacted over the past several years, Justice Ginsburg lamented that “the impact of all these restrictions is on poor women.” Then she added: “It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people….”
Die Fahne hoch! ♫♫♪ Die Reihen dicht geschlossen!
SA marschiert mit ruhig festem ♫ Schritt ♪….
Ymarsakar:
I disagree with your analogy.
As I said, the liberals I know are familiar with things like the Soviet Union, oppression and tyranny that has been well-published and is part of history. The leftists in this country are deceptive for the most part, and what they’re about is hidden unless you dig very deeply. Their public face is one of just wanting justice and fairness (including economic “fairness”), lack of discrimination of minorities, save the whales, peacelove etc. (i.e. Obama).
It takes some digging and effort and motivation to find out more of the hidden things, and most people have neither the time or the inclination.
G6loq:
So, Ginsburg believes that procreation has been a regressive activity. She just wants to make it progressive a la revenue schemes, deficits, dysfunction, corruption, etc. She’s also on record for praising class discrimination, notably in the progressive constitution of South Africa.
When did monotonic change (i.e. progress) acquire a positive connotation? Or liberal, for that matter, which is ultimately a degenerative ideology.
On the other hand, it does create an opening for incestuous marriage that defies the “equal” effort to deny equal rights to other relationships. They cannot have a substantive opinion about genetic weakness or mutations if they promote indiscriminate killing of wholly innocent human lives as a right.
I never thought that such a seemingly benign concept, pro-choice, could have such literally grave consequences. Did the German socialists have an equally compelling marketing strategy?
It takes some digging and effort and motivation to find out more of the hidden things
Would it not take some digging and motivation for a foreign born Muslim that doesn’t even speak the language, to find out stuff he should know? They aren’t hidden, it just needs an effort to figure out.
Whether they have a duty to know plus whether they should know it, is separate from how easy it is.
Ymarsakar:
But that’s what I mean—laws and regulations are not hidden, they are public and open. They may take effort to discover, but the effort is not the point about the left. The salient point about the left (a point I already made) is that it is deceptive (not just hidden—they are misrepresenting what they are). The left presents itself as something it’s not, and hides what it is.
I never thought that such a seemingly benign concept, pro-choice, could have such literally grave consequences. Did the German socialists have an equally compelling marketing strategy?
Them Krauts were amateurs. They should have thought of the salami slicing approach.
Easy does it!
Herr Goebbels und Hitler should have read Bernays more carefully …
The 9th and 10th Amendment cover that, our rights never were enumerated. Rather, it was the government’s incursion on our rights which were enumerated (enumerated – lit. “numbered”, which means “explicit and limited”).
All rights not restricted by the Constitution are reserved to the states and to the people.
The problem with this ruling is that such a sweeping change was made by one swing vote in a panel of nine unelected judges. Although I support the end result of the decision, the sweeping away of state’s rights and democratic process are troubling.
“Lex, Rex” has now become “Rex, Lex.”
Keep your powdah dry.
Beverly Says:
July 7th, 2015 at 3:31 am
“Lex, Rex” has now become “Rex, Lex.”
I bow…
Congress has pretty much removed themselves from responsibilities of laws by handing power over to the President and SCOTUS.
The power struggle now seems to reside between the President and SCOTUS. Odds on the winner of who will be our Emperor?
The left presents itself as something it’s not, and hides what it is.
Then are the victims of cons, those who lost their bank going for get rich schemes, guilty of nothing? If only of stupidity and greed, they were still guilty of.
A citizen has the duty to protect their civilization, and that means not falling for domestic or foreign ruses.
If a person continues to fall for the same con their entire adult life, to what extent then are they upholding their responsibilities as a citizen or soldier?
Yeah, you would think so, and that more people would also think so. In the sense that is, that they would conclude it to be an actual fact, and not just a principled conclusion.
I certainly did think so, and quite recently.
But “society” has a seemingly magical appeal to the mind of a progressive. “It” as master, is liberating, if what you wish to be liberated from is mind and moral anxiety.
And I don’t think the average conservative has really put the pieces together – though if he carefully polled his progressive friends on the details of their “values”, and concerning what they think is good and what is bad and how they claim to know, he would get a rather discontenting picture of just who and what it is that is placidly staring him in the face.
The progressive, in his newly re-structured and conceptualized humanity, does in fact inhabit a very different mental universe. It is a world wherein the individual has been reduced, and happily so, to a congeries of appetites. It simplifies matters so much.
The progressive, to repeat, sees this as the true liberation. There is only one moral commandment, and one loyalty: do as you feel and feel as they do.
In navigating, (or “coping” to use Rorty’s term) its way through the environment, “society” is the nearest thing to the big Mommy/Daddy/God/orgasm provider, that the anti-metaphysical “appetite thing”, (i.e., the progressive in his final reduction) intent on the details of the lives of others (their appetites) and on ending cruelty and humiliation, can conceive of.
“Society” (as reified or hypostasized by the progressive) is the light of men, their existence. It is their warmth, their satisfaction and their meaning.
As long as there is no personal judgement to face, then all is permissible and in fact acceptable. Bearable too, when all things being equal it is just as good to be dead as alive and it’s officially good to be either.
Life is a “sperss yourself” game. Feeling is all. Reason is just the way we satisfy our feelings whatever they are and wherever they come from, and manage the satisfactions of others in the name of Government Love, or as it is otherwise known: marginal and social utility. And you can check out of the game, no foul no harm, when you want to; or maybe when your utility runs out.
But so what … it’s painless.
It’s all a dream, a beautiful dream, a vision of close-up selfies, batting and admiring eyes, expressions sometimes appreciative and sometimes coy … a world of eyes, noses and mouths … twittering. Life is good, Master!
Are they human, these progressives? Well, technically, or taxonomic-ally, I suppose. That is if you can be a progressive nominalist and still somehow believe in real categories.
But if mind counts for anything, especially when assessing those whose moral masters deny mind and objective meaning exist, then the answer might look rather different.
But then, what is logical consistency in the face of feelings, beautiful feelings?
Paul in Boston said:
> They are clearly in violation of these amemdments by creating unlisted new rights.
I disagree, Paul. It’s not that they found new rights. The 9th Amendment allows for new rights to be enumerated.
The problem is that they invented a new privilege. Same-sex unions have now been elevated to the same level as marriages, and given the same privileges.
More importantly, this was done by arbitrarily and capriciously redefining the word “marriage”. Now, this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Marriage as a concept had already been rendered meaningless by the concept of no-fault divorce and other nonsense established in recent decades. All the justices did was hammer the last nail in the coffin to decree that marriage means whatever the people who wish to engage in it want it to mean.
My liberal friends who are (laughably) trying to shame me into accepting gay “marriage” have completely failed to understand why I am so angry about all this. I told them that while I would disagree with it, I would not be angry if the Supreme Court had upheld a law that had redefined marriage to mean what they want it to mean. Sure, it’s a bad outcome, but it would have been arrived at in a democratic way. Similarly, if a Constitutional amendment had been passed, it would not have made me angry because that’s how the system is supposed to work.
But I reached the same conclusions as was described above about a week ago… and suggested that the Constitution will never need to be amended again (unless the states and the people attempt to do so via Article V, which I fully support). I asked, in the light of Kennedy’s senile ramblings, why the ERA was ever needed in the first place. I also asked that if the courts are free to redefine the word “marriage” in a way that is completely orthogonal to law in question (i.e., the 14th Amendment), what other words are they free to completely divorce (irony not intended) from their traditional meanings? “Man”, “woman”, “adult”, “child”, “ownership”? No one attempt to answer that question either.
The genie is out of the bottle now. I challenge anyone to deny the right of polyamorous marriage today; I’m sure the suits are being filed as we speak… because unlike the same-sex kind, there actually is precedent in history and culture for polyamory.
I would be amazed to see anyone who says, “I agree with this outcome, but don’t like how it was accomplished”. It seems that every single person celebrating this outcome (which completely justifies the means, as is always the case for leftists) will absolutely refuse to see anything wrong with the situation until the power of judges to literally redefine the language to suit their politics completely destroys something they hold dear, and perhaps not even then.
Conceptjunkie:
No, they didn’t create a new privilege. Marriage is a privilege, an old one. They merely expanded the category of the combination of parties who could avail themselves of it.
This is different from the miscegenation cases, by the way. Allowing miscegenation did not require changing the basic definition of marriage. Marriage was still between a man and a woman as always (most states, by the way, didn’t have anti-misegenation laws, so they were far from universal and some were of relatively recent vintage). The Court disallowed discrimination on the basis of the race of the parties to the marriage.
With Obergefell, however, in order to overturn and make unconstitutional the traditional definition of marriage since time immemorial, they had to do something more drastic, they had to create a new right, the right to dignity, that they found inherent in marriage. This was very similar to the right to privacy that they found in order to justify Roe.
ConceptJunkie:
I have read plenty of pieces written by people who celebrate the results but deplore the methods. Unfortunately, since I’ve been reading them gradually since the ruling was handed down, I don’t have a list. But Jonathan Turley is a prominent and eloquent one. There are many others. They are a small minority, of course, of those celebrating the ruling. But they exist, and there are quite a few.
Ymarsakar:
The victim of a con that preys on greed is guilty of greed, but not a crime, and certainly nothing like the degree of guilt of the con artist him/herself.
The victim of a con that preys on something else—lets say loneliness, which is very very common, where the victim actually gives the con artist money because of love—is guilty of nothing except gullibility and poor judgment, as well as not being able to spot a liar.
I think most liberals are closer to that latter position.
The comedy of a class who discover a “right to dignity” while violating dignity on principle and as a strategy to promote their own welfare. The tragedy of a class who discover “human rights” while violating inalienable rights on principle and as a strategy to secure their own welfare. The progressive corruption that follows from this dysfunction would be humorous if viewed from a distance place isolated from the consequences of this degenerative order.
Neo:
Turley, whose place on an altar of law and wisdom I do not understand, remarks in his piece that homosexuals are a “historically oppressed people”.
So is he not saying that behavior, in this case homosexual, is a liberty? To which said historically oppressed have been denied entitlement?
Homosexual behavior and social conduct are liberties which have been “historically oppressed.” Aberrant, anti-biological, anti-human history, anti-religious behavior is a liberty.
Where do behavioral liberties start and stop?
Why is copulation in public, homo or hetero, not allowed, for example?
A great new door is opening.
Frog:
I think he is just referencing what he sees as historical discrimination against gay people (criminalization of their customary voluntary sexual behavior, for example).
Turley is pretty easy to place, as he is basically a libertarian.
But, but, Neo: Turley uses “historical oppression” as a basis from which to justify homo. marriage.He’s not merely referencing. “Historical oppression” was more along the lines of social disapproval. The existence of anti-sodomy laws back then is not relevant. We’re talking marriage, and lesbians do not as a safe general rule resort to anal copulation, so those laws never applied to that side of the homosexual equation..
Frog:
Turley believes that the proper way to have done it was under the 14th amendment equal protection clause. I don’t agree with him; as I’ve said several times, I think the proper route was through state legislatures and state referendums. But whether I agree with his approved way of doing it or not, the question I was answering, and the point I was making, was simply that although Turley agrees with the end result of same-sex marriage, he disapproves of the method in Obergefell and warns that it sets a dangerous precedent. In this I was responding to ConceptJunkie, who had written the following in a comment:
That is the only reason I referenced Turley. I don’t happen to agree with Turley’s reasoning, but he is an example of exactly what ConceptJunkie would be amazed at.
Turley is pretty easy to place, as he is basically a libertarian.
Many libertarians are tools of Leftists. Turley’s own vote condemns him as one even.
It’s fine if the Leftists and libertarians and traitors want to sell their soul for some ephemeral quality of pleasure right now. That’s the inheritance they acquired as a result of the work of their ancestors.
What they won’t be forgiven for, what wasn’t their right, was to sell off the self determination of the future generations of America.
That alone, they will be destroyed in retaliation for, if nothing else.
Ymarsakar:
Many libertarians are tools of leftists. Turley has been, by voting for Obama—in 2008, not in 2012.
I think he’s become alarmed by Obama. He’s certainly spoken out against his overreach many, many times.
Turley’s preferred process of arriving at same-sex “marriage” would have been almost as dangerous, or perhaps as dangerous as what the Supreme Court actually did, and I don’t see how it is fundamentally different. Again, he’s suggesting that 14th Amendments allows (in fact, requires) that we arbitrarily redefine a concept that has existed throughout all of human history. Nor would it have been something I would have considered any less undemocratic than what was actually done. But at least he acknowledges that the end doesn’t justify the means.
The redefinition of marriage should, in my opinion, need to be accomplished by law, not by judicial fiat, because again, if marriage can be redefined in this way, anything else can be, and no doubt will be to suit a particular agenda.
I don’t imagine this “right to dignity” would ever include the idea that you shouldn’t be economically destroyed for keeping with your religious convictions. Violating political correctness means that your dignity will be the first thing thrown out.
I don’t imagine this “right to dignity” will prevent anyone from being forcefully starved to death if they are in a position where they cannot defend themselves. Of course, I guess Mr. Schiavo has the right to dignity of being married to a woman who isn’t a vegetable. I guess that would be the legal argument.
We have two fundamental problems here:
First, the United States Constitution is being reinterpreted in a way that soon will make it, if it hasn’t happened already (which I think is now arguable), incompatible with Christianity.
Second, our freedom of religion, a concept which I support, is also going to be subverted to allow for activities, behaviors and even laws which are fundamentally incompatible with our way of life. In other words, the U.S. is eventually going to start sliding down the slippery slope of acknowledging sharia law just as parts of Europe are doing. And before even the militant Muslims* start bullying us
* It’s important to include a qualifier such as “militant” or “extreme” because there are millions of Muslims living in the U.S. now who are able and willing to live in a way that is compatible with the U.S. way of life, which can be (over) simplified to “Live and let live.” I still have an appreciation for this in an era where many Western countries are facing regular civil unrest and other upheavals… however, since there is a tacit alliance between the Left and the Muslim Extremists, the issue is going to be relentlessly pushed and agitated and massaged as yet another front on the attack on the American way of life, something in which I imagine the vast majority of American Muslims have no interest.
It appears that we, as a society, are still going to keep picking and poking and dismantling things until the whole system crashes before enough people will start to realize what we’ve been doing.
Of course, we don’t need to be victims to anything the Supreme Court declares. They only have jurisdiction on any case at the pleasure of Congress, but of course Congress has become the doormat of the U.S. government. I guess they don’t believe in the Constitution any more either because they have been unwilling to exercise so many of their rightful powers as well.
ConceptJunkie:
As I wrote here:
I will add that I also agree with you that finding the right under the equal protection clause would have been a dangerous expansion of the Constitution as well, but that I don’t consider it as global or dangerous as finding the right under due process, which is what the Court actually did and what Turley is criticizing.
Turley has been, by voting for Obama–in 2008, not in 2012.
I’m well aware of his admission of guilt for 2008 and I didn’t refer to him voting for Hussein twice.
Of course, we don’t need to be victims to anything the Supreme Court declares. They only have jurisdiction on any case at the pleasure of Congress, but of course Congress has become the doormat of the U.S. government.
The SC isn’t the enforcement mechanism. The federal gov is the enforcement mechanism.