Liberal View Of the Constitution

WARNING Reading May Cause Blood Pressure To Rise!

Harper's Magazine Forum view of the Constitution:
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/constitution-in-crisis/

This spring, Harper’s Magazine invited five lawmakers and scholars to New York University’s law school to consider the constitutional crisis of the twenty-*first century. The event was moderated by Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon.

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Man, that was an exceptionally wordy way of presenting a foregone conclusion.

I see Americans trapped within a box, unable to transcend the constitutionalist way of thinking. Countries actually don’t need written constitutions. The United Kingdom doesn’t really have a constitution. New Zealand doesn’t have a constitution. In a functioning democracy, you don’t need one.

To be honest, I think America might be better off as a monarchy. In Canada, you have a symbolic king or queen—*a nonpartisan head of state onto whom people can attach their loyalties—alongside elected leaders, who actually do the hard work, and then you can criticize the government and the constitution without appearing to be disloyal or a bad citizen. And we don’t have that. In America, people declare their loyalty to this ancient document instead.

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I don’t think we need the Constitution even in times of change. We need to forget about constitutionalism entirely. Or at least forget about the constitutionalism of rules and detail—*of arguing over what exactly the framers meant in this or that passage.

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I admit. I could get too far in to it.

Donna Edwards is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Maryland and cosponsored a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

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I bailed as soon as I saw this, which is all I needed to see...

This is a straight-up appeal to mob rule, followed by an appeal to strong-man totalitarianism. As long as the trains run on time, right? People shouldn't be allowed to vote until they can pass a very thorough history test.

Ugggh…

interesting article. I wonder if any of the participants realized that it is that "old document" that protects their right to criticize it and this country.

This why there are jokes about common sense. Venezuela rewrote its constitution too.

Yikes, American law school professors teaching against the constitution.

MigraineMan said:

Man, that was an exceptionally wordy way of presenting a foregone conclusion.

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"Those filthy serfs are making noise again!"

I’d rather have loyalty to Country than a King

Can't we all just get along and eat cake????

Progressives and liberals are like little kids, they always want to change the rules, so that they will win.

Article said:

If we think something is evil and a bad idea, then it’s evil and a bad idea without regard to whether or not it is constitutional.

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Reading things like this really get me. The constitution isn't here to regulate morality. That's the demon we've turned it into by way of politics. In essence, it's a document outlining the (inalienable) rights of all Citizens in the US. When you muddle words and use subjective ideas like "bad idea" or "evil" (versus actual evil), you dilute the issues. What is "evil" to one may not be to another. We agree on certain things (mass murder) and disagree on others (abortion). Some of us see them as one and the same. And (obviously) some of us don't. In the first section, one of them likened the constitution to a house that needs upgrades and to a point, that's legit. But when you're upgrading your 60s kitchen to a modern one, you don't raze the entire house if you have "good bones". And the constitution is good bones.

Article said:

When you have a legislature that isn’t doing its job, and the president is acting beyond his authority, and you have no check on that—*you may be in a crisis.

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There are a number of references to different branches not doing their job but isn't their job gridlock? Think about it. Everyone forgets that if congress (house and senate) passed a bill (let's say abortion) and Trump vetoed it, all it takes is 2/3rds of the states to override his veto! That's how checks and balances work! The real question is why are minority groups (not race, ideals) pushing so hard to change things that they can't get the majority on board with? Because a true majority CAN run things they way they want here. Yes, there are checks and the legislative branch should be able to say what the majority wants is illegal (gun confiscation anyone?) and that check exists too! It's VERY well designed and these people are professors who teach law? I'm an idiot and I can see why you'd want these checks in place.

Article said:

It always makes me think of my upbringing as a Southern Baptist. In church we were told, “Here is how we know that homosexuality is wrong, because of this passage in the Bible.” And that was the only part of the Bible that we seemed to be taking seriously that day. It’s that same sense of fervor to say, “I took this one passage, and I’m telling you it’s the most important passage, and here is the only way that you can read it, and anyone else who disagrees with me isn’t just wrong but spiritually wrong, and spiritually broken, and doesn’t understand the underlying text.”
That’s the kind of pathology I think we’ve developed around the Constitution, and that is why it is toxic and unhelpful for so many of our important political discussions today.

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Agree 100% with this. The bible does look down on a lot of things but the overall message is love. If you miss that theme (which is woven from beginning to end), then you miss the real purpose of the words (The Word). The overall goal is to protect the inalienable rights of citizens, always.

Article said:

I think the problem with the Constitution is not its status as a national symbol that unites us; it’s when people try to use it to settle arguments and when they get into the nitty-*gritty of the Constitution that it doesn’t sound like poetry at all. Things like the fact that you have to be a natural-*born citizen to be president of the United States, or that every state gets two senators.
That’s where we get into trouble, and that’s where constitutional obedience is really problematic. But as a national symbol, as poetry, I’m all for it.

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Easily the dumbest thing I'll read all week.

Article said:

The American people have to be persuaded that Trump is bad for the country, that he doesn’t represent the kind of country that we want to live in.

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I didn't vote for trump (I'm a third party dreamer... you know when everyone wakes up and realizes freedom is #1 and Reps and Dems are the same people lol), but this statement here? Your BIAS is showing.

Article said:

If everyone understands, for example, you have to have elections for parliament every four or five years or so, that doesn’t need to be written down or enforced by the courts. It just happens.

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Some of these thoughts... are incredibly vapid.

Article said:

Abraham Lincoln said repeatedly that the Constitution did not permit the federal government to free the slaves.

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Context. You can write a constitution for your states and apply it go a group of states that removed themselves from your purview...

Article said:

As a moral matter, as a legal matter, as a constitutional matter, I think the only principle that’s actually universally defensible is the principle of reciprocity. The only thing that keeps us from immorality, the only thing that keeps us from illegality is the concept that whatever it is that we choose for ourselves, constitutionally or otherwise, we have to choose for everyone.
We don’t get to say, “I get a First Amendment right, but you do not.” We don’t get to say, “I get Second Amendment rights, but Philando Castile does not.”2 We can’t do that.

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That lady mary showing a bit of logical thinking.

Article said:

I’m a little leery about opening up the whole show in a constitutional convention, but I think it’s worth thinking through how something like that might be done in a way that doesn’t allow for monkey business, especially from conservatives.

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All that bias.


Overall an interesting read but the problem with only getting the thoughts of a handful of obviously bias people is you get a biased representation. Simple statistics and numbers can't lie.

Shameful

Does anyone else feel like it is just a matte of time before everything falls apart?

Boxtop said:

Does anyone else feel like it is just a matte of time before everything falls apart?

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Not quite, but I do think we are at a crisis similar to what happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I expect the 2020 election to be very much like 1972, a one-sided thrashing of the Left. Which has gone completely over the cliff.

OUR CONSTITUTION WAS MADE ONLY FOR A MORAL AND RELIGIOUS PEOPLE.
-President John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 1798.1

In context, this means Christians or Deists as many of the founders were.

If you research the authors of this article, you'll find they're not. And they've infiltrated the highest levels of academia. Which turns out to have been a hell of an effective method of subversion.

Inigoes said:

Progressives and liberals are like little kids, they always want to change the rules, so that they will win.

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Thats what happens when you give 6 year old soccer players a trophy for second place. They never learn to lose.

Pure Marxist theory: all societies will devolve into benign peaceful mob rule. Everyone will share their candy and live happily ever after.