Posted on 09/15/2006 6:14:05 PM PDT by AZRepublican
It’s time to give Justices like Stephen Breyer their just dues by no longer respectively entertaining their legal thesis built solely on ignorance or their hopelessly flawed historical antidotes’. Justice Breyer rhetorically asks James Madison, "James, when you wrote that document, did you have in mind a document that would actually work to produce a democratic society over a period of three or four or five hundred years, or did you want a document of pristine logic that would in fact not last all that long?" Breyer asked. "Did you want it to be workable or not?"
Breyer surely have expected Madison to reply that the “permanent success of the Constitution depends on a definitive partition of powers between the general and State governments.” And why would James Madison is absolutely right -- If you try to uproot the people’s democracy against their own consent and written constitutions, and attempt to pretend the national Constitution is the caretaker and final arbitrator of the peoples's democracy would lead to nothing but conflict and revolving inconsistencies.
In short, Breyer is asking Madison the wrong question because the US Constitution is not a instrument designed to produce democracy -- only the people through their own State Constitutions and acts produces democracy.
The peoples liberties and laws is not found anywhere in the US Constitution, but only in the declaration of independence and State constitutions which sprung from this immortal declaration long before the current Constitution’s ink had dried – a place for which the people's liberties was preserved and not delegated to the national government.
Madison couldn’t have said it better when he said: "The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all objects, which concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people."
Breyer also ignores the fact the framers of the current Constitution felt the greatest threat to the peoples democracy came from the federal government – for which is why was striped of unlimited powers and instead left clothed in very limited powers in order to protect the great liberty of the people to govern themselves.
Speaking of the 14th amendment, Breyer asks, “What's it there for? What did these people have in mind? What were they trying to do?” A better question Breyer could have asked since he is so pro-democracy is: “Why are we still recognizing this 14th article to the US Constitution as something democratically adopted by the free consent of three fourths of the States?” And further still, “Why do we continue to recognize such a tyrannical abuse of one party over the other in circumventing the Constitution itself to amend it at all costs by the end of a bayonet?”
Remove the corruption and bayonet of the radical Republican Party, and we find that only 19 States -- far short of the required free consent of 28 States – freely consented to adopting the 14th amendment. Obviously then, we are still required today to pretend the 14th article of the US Constitution was freely adopted by the required 28 States.
To help out justice Breyer here, the reason the 14th amendment was proposed was because of one man: President Andrew Johnson. This answer leads to answering Breyer’s other two questions, for which the answer was to remedy Johnson’s corrupt puppet governments (Sen. Howard had called them bogus-governments, while Bingham called them something far worst) he had established in the rebel States after the end of the civil war; and to make sure no one could again hijack State government to again risk another insurrection.
I’m afraid justice Breyer still has a lot of learning ahead of him.
I just wish he would resign and do his learning on his own time.
Maybe Breyer would like to ask Madison whether the US is to be constituted as a democracy, or as a republic?
There's no fool like an old fool.
Sorry.
If he hasn't learned by now, he's got no business sitting on the Supreme Court.
I submit the 14th Amendment happened because of the Governor of South Carolina, who began the conspiracy which resulted in the Civil War.
Once that happened, noone could put the eggshells back together. The State governments had to have some of their teeth pulled. Rather than being bulwarks against oppression by a Central government, the State governments became their own little engines of oppression. So Citizens had to be guaranteed their liberty even against the State Government. Slavery, a pernicious form of oppression, had to be ended. Rather than reconstructing the South as it was, the Union tried to rebuild it in a way that its natural resources could be used, and its people could get the benefit of their work, rather than have their work siphoned off to a landed class.
It is the 14th Amendment which applies the rights documented (but not granted) in the Constitution to the states. In theory, this means that the first, second, third, fourth and fifth amendment rights must be regarded by the State governments.
Ya got a problem with that, bub?
The go
Either Justice Breyer is a moron, or he believes the rest of us to be morons.
Hey Steve--the Constitution can (and should) be amended by overwhelming popular consent. Not by the likes of every pointy headed, self-aggrandizing intellectual who wears a black robe.
....yeah its basically all about HIM....forget the Founders, all of us....
> Either Justice Breyer is a moron, or he believes the rest of us to be morons. <
He's dead wrong on many big issues. But he's certainly no moron. In fact, I think he possesses the only formidable intellect on the Court's left wing.
So we'd make a serious mistake to underestimate his impressive ability to indulge in sophistic reasoning and his deceptively modest public demeanor -- both of which give him formidable and dangerous powers of persuasion.
Here's the overarching problem I see when it comes to Breyer:
He has come up with the wacky theory that whenever the existing law on some matter before the Supreme Court is not absolutely settled, then the Justices are duty-bound to decide the case by applying or making up whatever rule(s) will produce the most "democratic" outcome.
So original understanding, legislative intent, and the plain meaning of language all become secondary matters for him.
In any case, his twisted logic is superficially appealing to many folks. So our side is indeed now fortunate that in the future he'll increasingly be challenged at a purely intellectual level by the powerful Scalia-Alito-Roberts combo.
[Yes, I know Clarence Thomas is a smart guy. And I like him. But I don't think he's yet proved to be in the same league as Breyer, Scalia, Alito and Roberts.]
Or wipe his @ss.
Like most selfish, masturbating liberals Breyer looks at the Constitution as a "living" document; flexible; a "guideline". Breyer and his ilk like to conveniently forget that the Constitution was designed with a built-in mechanism for adjustment and "changing with the times".... It is known as the amendment process.
Why? Because he tends to listen more than he blabs? Or because he doesn't care to be bothered with the vanity of writing a lot of opinions?
> because he doesn't care to be bothered with the vanity of writing a lot of opinions? <
Writing opinions is not a vanity. Far from it. The written opinion an essential element of our legal process. If Justice Thomas wants to influence the course of the law, and if he wants go down in history as an important jurist, then there's no substitute for writing opinions.
I think Thomas an outstanding human being, and I'm very glad our side has his vote on the Court. But beyond his one vote, he can't have much of an impact (and he won't be remembered by history) if he doesn't write more opinions.
And I thought John Kerry was an IGNORANT Flip Flopper.
Very well, then. He believes the rest of us to be morons. He seems to respect no one other than Justice Scalia, and that, I suspect, only out of the fear of being exposed intellectlually. He (Breyer) certainly demonstrates no respect for James Madison nor, apparently, for any of the others of the Founding Generation, when he asks a question demanding, as it does, a scripted answer to the exclusion of any other answer.
If the writings of the Founding Fathers are read with attention - their letters, their diaries, their articles in the various publications of the day, as well as the records of the constitutional convention and of the various state conventions - you come away with the impression of just how very much aware they were of the history of republics, and of how little more they could do than secure liberty for themselves and perhaps for but a few succeeding generations. They could only hope that following generations would be possessed of the same understanding of government by consent of the governed. Surely, they would have been bitterly disappointed had they known that instead they would get The Swimmer and Justice Darth Vader Ginsberg.
It is for every generation to know and understand the principles of liberty which will secure the welfare of the several states which make up our nation. Does Justice Breyer not know this? Or does he hope we don't know this?
"It may not always happen that our soldiers are citizens, and the multitude a body of reasonable men; virtue, as I have already remarked, is not hereditary, neither is it perpetual."
. . . . . Thomas Paine, Common Sense
> Very well, then. He believes the rest of us to be morons <
Whatever he thinks about the public's moronic quotient, it doesn't really matter. What's important is that his superficial reasoning and sophistic judicial philosophy be exposed and countered by the superior intellectual firepower now residing on the Court's right wing. On the latter score, I think we may be cautiously optimistic.
He doesn't want to learn. It wouldn't achieve his goals.
The perfect example of how dangerous intelligent men with an agenda are in our judiciary.
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