Posted on 04/21/2015 1:28:33 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
GOP candidates constantly invoke the Constitution. A Yale Law professor reveals what they all fail to understand.
With the 2016 election cycle having kicked into first-gear already, any American who hasn’t inured themselves to the monotonous (and often ultimately meaningless) repetition of the word “Constitution” is advised to get to self-desensitizing — and quick.
Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have already made a fetishized version of the U.S.’s supreme governing document central to their campaign rhetoric; and even politicians less beloved by the supposedly Constitution-crazy Tea Party, like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, are likely to soon follow suit. That’s how American politics functions now, in the era of the NSA, Guantanamo Bay, lethal drone strikes and endless war.
But as that list of questionable policies suggests, there’s an unanswered question lurking behind so much of our happy talk about the Constitution — namely, do we even understand it? As dozens of polls and public surveys will attest, the answer is, not really. And that’s one of the reasons that Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar has decided to write a multi-book series about the Constitution so many Americans claim to love, but so few seem to understand. “The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of our Constitutional Republic,” released earlier this month, is that project’s latest addition.
Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Amar about the Constitution, his books, and why he sees Abraham Lincoln as perhaps the United States’s real founding father....
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
You’re probably referring to this damn-fool equivalency of the Six (Five) Nations councils or whatever to the Constitution of the US.
My mother (history as well as other teacher all the way up to high school) got an EARFUL from some Indian mother when she gave a lesson on the Constitution. Including this long-winded paper (you could find it on line, although that was 15 years ago) about the 6 Nations and how they are the cradle of democracy in America. She was angry about it, mom said, slamming down the paper and everything.
My dispute is with the low IQ people of whatever ethnicity who will never contribute to the country but will be perpetual leeches. And their numbers are growing.
Ummm...no.
His parents came here from India in the 1950s so it is unlikely, but not impossible, that his family is muslim.
IOW, you can’t prove a negative.
I’ve noticed that Salon considers Ivy League as ‘genius’ and anyone else as ‘cow college’.
Just more random liberal bigotry, I guess.
Holy smokes. It sure does look like him, doesn’t it?
Muslim?
******************
Good question. Amar was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan where his parents were medical
students from India studying at the University of Michigan. So was he Hindu,
Muslim and Christian or some other.
That was Abraham Lincoln talking, not me.
Amar is a law professor, which means he has a strong incentive to sensationalize his theories so he gets published. That's ok, because that's what academics do in a post-modern world. As I understand it, his theory is that the constitution legally prescribes only one method for amendment, but practically we have to understand that amendments happen all the time. The SCOTUS amends the constitution regularly. Popular culture amends the constitution by incorporating popular beliefs into the framework within which judges interpret it and legislatures theoretically work within it and executives apply it. It's a positive account of what really happens, even if we don't like it.
There are plenty of other academics saying that Amar is dead wrong, that the original language actually means what it says, and the SCOTUS is grievously in error when it adopts the living constitution stuff.
The Salon article is stupid because it takes one guy who believes one weird thing about the constitution and says that wow, people who don't agree with that one guy are really wrong. And stupid. And tea party. Etc. The piece of garbage author doesn't even see the irony of his own stupidity.
Amar forgets that Lincoln wasn't going to do anything about slavery until the South forced his hand. Lincoln at first actually thought he didn't have the constitutional power to end slavery.
Everyone claims everything good and wonderful about America for themselves. And yet they all hate us. Strange, right?
You do know that he was quoting Abraham Lincoln, right?
He doesn't say that. He doesn't speculate on whether slaves would have been freed without Lincoln. And he doesn't say that "we" wouldn't at some point have had anti-slavery and citizenship amendments without Lincoln.
But that "we" got them -- that we got the amendments we actually got when we got them -- does owe a lot to Lincoln. Look, I could say that without Washington or Jefferson we eventually would have become independent, but that doesn't change their role in making us independent, in the real world, rather than in some speculative counter-factual reality.
And why do I put "we" in quotes? Because it's entirely possible that in your counter-factual reality we wouldn't be one country, but several, and while slavery probably would have ceased to exist some time after the 1860s, racial equality could have taken a lot longer to come along.
This article is chump-bait. Elias Whathisname takes a scholarly book that may or may not have a valid thesis and tries to twist it into some salvo in today's culture wars and people respond emotionally based not on the arguments that may be in the book, but on the attitudes Elias attributes to it.
...even politicians less beloved by the supposedly Constitution-crazy Tea Party, like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, are likely to soon follow suit. That's how American politics functions now, in the era of the NSA, Guantanamo Bay, lethal drone strikes and endless war.What's his FR nick?
where his parents were medical students from India studying at the University of Michigan
Since at that time the McCarran-Walter Act was in force, these people were very new to the country: prior to 1952 their residency would have been temporary in virtually all cases. Admission as lawful permanent residents would have been mostly out of of the question.
So they are almost certainly Hindu, not Muslim, but I don't know; to me it makes not much difference.
They have virtually no history in the United States, their Caste culture is utterly alien to the egalitarianism developed over 1000 years of Anglo-European history, and their investment in the country is negligible, so I have no idea why anyone would waste time listening to them explain the country through the prism of their own prejudices as self identified victims.
Yeah, because Pakistan.
Bumped for later perusal.
Well, if by “Constitutional law” he means tactics used to circumvent the Constitution, he might actually have a point.
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