Posted on 10/27/2009 7:05:14 PM PDT by opentalk
One of the most conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday his more liberal colleagues are trying to manufacture new constitutional rights that were never intended by the drafters.
“The fight is about the Supreme Court inventing new rights nobody ever thought existed,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in an appearance at the University of Arizona College of Law.
“Right to abortion?” he asked. “Come on. Nobody thought it violated anything in the Constitution for 200 years. It was criminal.” The same, said Scalia, is true of homosexual sodomy. Yet the nation’s high court has struck down state laws banning both.
“They may be bad ideas,” Scalia said. “But don’t tell me it’s unconstitutional.”
But Justice Stephen Breyer, who shared the stage with Scalia, said his colleague was taking an overly literalistic approach to the 18th century document. He said that the changing nature of society, by necessity, requires more than looking at what Scalia called “originalism.”
(Excerpt) Read more at eastvalleytribune.com ...
God Bless him. May he live a very long healthy life.
The two sides of the confrontation of ideologies
over the Constitution.
I’ll stick with the founders.
Yeah, it requires regarding the Constitution as meaning whatever he wants to impose on the rest of us.
Has no one ever told these liberal judges that “The changing nature of society” is why the constitution contains provisions to be amended?
Has no one ever told these liberal judges (and 0bama) we have the constitution to restrain those in official positions from merely imposing their will on the people?
Has no one ever told these liberal judges they are acting like tryant wannabes?
Scalia is one of the greats.
Legally sodomy is any sexual act that cannot lead to procreation—in other words anything other than penis in vagina. I believe more states currently ban all sodomy than those that specifically ban homosexual sodomy. It refers to oral or anal sex without regard to gender. I recall researching sodomy laws during the Lewinsky scandal. Had Clinton engaged in his dalliance with Lewinsky in Virginia or even Maryland he could have been prosecuted—luckily for him DC had no sodomy law.
I tire easily of people who pick and choose their morality. It’s all sin in God’s eye.
Some?
You mean those wise latina women I keep hearing about?
"It depends on what the meanining of "is" is." --BJ Clinton
I love Scalia but on abortion and homosexual marriage I think he is legally on unsound ground. I say that because all the documents of the Founding Fathers are quite clear about the idea that sound government and just law is directly related to Natural Law and God’s Law.
Based not only on Cicero and Blackstone and John Locke, it is obvious (at least to me) that certain inalienable rights can not be denied a person just because they are inside the womb. You can not legislate the right to kill certain persons under our Constitution—even if you are the State Legislature. You can not deny the biological truth of a living person inside the womb just because you may classify that person as a fetus.
The basis of our reasoning comes directly from Cicero who stated “True law is right reason in agreement with nature: it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting:...It is a sin to try to alter this law...” etc. etc. (He lived before Christianity, BTW) He states that laws that goes against nature are unjust.
On homosexuality....To try and legislate a behavior to be “equal or the same” as heterosexual relationships is odd and not only mocks nature, but is dangerous and disease causing and has proved destructive to the Institution of Marriage. Where is the fundamental right under Natural Law for a child to be raised by his biological parents? That is what our laws are supposed to support....those in agreement with Natural Law. Otherwise they are unjust.
Natural Law Theory has thousands of years of philosophy behind it and shouldn’t be discarded for some illogical Progressive philosophy that does not believe in Universal Truth.
While laudable, Justice Scalia is fighting an old fight. The truly grand fight of the past, the present and the future, is federalism vs. anti-federalism. And it is visible on the horizon with momentous consequences.
The legal groundwork for this fight is going to take the most brilliant legal minds on the court to flesh out. To see where America strayed from the constitution, and how the SCOTUS can help restore the balance between federal and State power.
Even with the extraordinary intellectual talent of several members of the court, they will need advice and consultation from those they consider the nations top constitutional scholars and legal historians to address the ramifications of their decisions.
This will not be just an intellectual exercise, either. Right now, it is being brought to the forefront by the individual States, and will result with the greatest collision of federal and State power since the Civil War.
The federal government will adamantly refuse to cede those powers it has unconstitutionally assumed over the better part of 200 years, but the States feel they have no choice but to wrest this usurpation from the federal government, or they will become nothing more than adjunct administrative districts, all their power and lands having been absorbed into a nation-state.
And the SCOTUS will likely find itself in the middle of this grand battle.
Its first inclination will be to honor the precedents of usurpation, and stand firmly in the anti-federalist camp. But as the SCOTUS stands with the executive and congress and bureaucracy, it risks falling with them as well.
For if the prerogatives of the States are not respected, then the States may very well agree to a constitutional convention. And though the federal government may try to prohibit or seize the convention for its own prerogatives, the States will not stand for this, and may choose instead to relieve any and all elected, appointed, commissioned or employed officers that interfere with them.
This may very well include federal judges who take it on themselves to enjoin or act upon a power far beyond their own. So unless the SCOTUS acts as part of the solution, it will be treated as part of the problem.
If, however, it acts in the restoration of the existing constitution, by diminishing the unauthorized power of the federal government, it may likely preclude a far more drastic conclusion.
We can but pray that Justice Scalia and his fellow justices become aware of, and part of the solution to our national problem.
Weigh the right to an abortion against the life of a human being.
For the sake of argument, let's say an abortion required that they cut off your right leg...How many would opt for abortion?
I also find that "arm bit" an argument for the "separate" human being...
Did anyone ask Justice Scalia about why he dropped the below language into Heller, depsite the text of the Constitution firmly establishing that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed?
“. . . nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
What part of “shall not be infringed” does Justice Scalia not understand?
I would guess it is secondary to the right of the parents to choose to not raise the child.
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