you are advocating popular control = democracy.
No not at all. I’m not sure you know what the word democracy means. Popular election of representatives, or judges in this case, isn’t democracy. That is Republicanism. In a Republic one elects Representatives to decide things for the whole. Democracy would be if we had the people directly vote on Supreme Court decisions. Maybe you just got off on an idea and are defending it no matter what. Moving on.…
The very presence of Amendment IX was to not have the government defining rights not enumerated.
I’m sorry but you’re off on this one too. The purpose of the Ninth Amendment was to make it clear that natural rights not otherwise enumerated in the Constitution were still to be recognized. One problem we have today is that the USSC has decided the Ninth Amendment defending natural rights is almost powerless in the face of the Enumerated Powers in the Constitution. Most scholars agree, between the Commerce Clause and the Elastic Clause, the USSC has all the justification it needs to let the government force us to buy health care. Our constitutional problem is that the USSC is made up of people defer to the other two branches, Scalia and Kagan both for instance.
You have me laughing; at what point does a form of government shrink from a republic to a democracy? Obviously, our opinions differ, but I’m not going to go ad hominem on you.
For clarification: The republican form of government I set as a baseline is the one that our Founders provided. After the 17th Amendment the States lost their influence in the legislative powers and, with that, the judicial appointment processes. It was then no longer a republic.
I won’t wait for the people to vote on our president’s cabinet members, or judicial decisions, to call a government a democracy. It crossed the line long before that; and I will not defend those changes as republican in character.