You want to know what is aggravating? I'll tell you what is aggravating.
Through umpteen posts on the thread you ignored the point I made about the 1789 Judiciary Act and jurisdiction of cases brought by ambassadors, or pretended not to understand the significance of it. And the point is not hard to grasp.
That is intellectual dishonesty.
THAT is what is aggravating.
The points you made about Hamilton’s statement and Marshall’s statement are not illegimitate. The cold, hard fact is they are not nearly as significant, in terms of evidence of what the founders collectively intended as to “exclusivity” in the Constitution, as the official action of the first president and the first congress reflecting a collective, contemporaneous understanding of these men who were to a large extent involved in writing the Constitution.
But your approach was not to respond to the fact of it, but rather to ignore it or pretend not to understand it, throughout most of the discussion. And even now you pretend not to grasp the larger principle that if the grant of original jurisdiction as to ambassadors was not exclusive, then neither was any other type of case enumerated in the same sentence of the Constitution. Or else you are claiming that Washington and the first Congress did not understand their own Constitution as well as YOU do now.
Your argument for the most part merely consists of repeating the phrase “the Constitution is clear” and ignoring contemporaneous evidence of the founders’ intention.
It is not possible to have a reasonable discussion about a topic where one party displays a lack of integrity.
In post 38 you actually cited the text of the 1789 Judiciary Act as if it were a good, current authority as to which types of cases the Supreme Court now has exclusive original jurisdiction as opposed to concurrent original jurisdiction. Of course it is not, and any lawyer or even any informed person on this topic would know that.
But that’s not my point. My point is, if you don’t know what you are talking about, why are expressing such strong opinions?
I expect that from liberals, but it is always disappointing to see that on Free Republic.
Your general approach seems to be that anyone without any particular knowledge of its subject matter can simply read the text of the Constitution and come to a definitive understanding of it.
That proposition is patently absurd.
For example, an average person reading the phrase “a well regulated militia, being necessary...” is unlikely to come to a proper understanding of what it means without knowing quite a lot about the legal and historical background of these terms and their use in other contexts. In fact, that person is unlikely to properly understand even the one word “regulated.” But I know that hasn’t stopped many ignorant people from expressing strong opinions about it.
Perhaps it was the disagreeable tone of my posts that provoked you into irrationality. If so, you allowed your pride to cloud your judgment.
I thought you were “done”.