Posted on 12/31/2012 7:28:28 AM PST by Nachum
Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it.
“As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downrght evil provisions,” Seidman writes.
Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.
He goes on to detail the number of American politicians who have used every opportunity to sideline the Constitution; from John Adams to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
(Excerpt) Read more at mediaite.com ...
The gridlock surrounding the “fiscal cliff” is exactly what the Framers wanted.
When a divisive issue appears, the authors of the Constitution wanted lengthy and ferocious debate. (They had more than a few of those, themselves.) Man is a flawed animal and only a system of checks and balances, pitting one faction against the other, could keep one side from dominating the other, sometimes to ill effect.
Haggle, argue, bicker, negotiate and sometimes fail to reach an agreement. Fine. That’s how the system is supposed to work.
Funny. But of course if you boiled it down to his actual beliefs he would be against the BOR too.
Questions like "Should Catholic hospitals be forced to supply birth control" or "Should Catholic Churches be forced to perform same sex marriages" or "Is private gun ownership a right" would show that he would eliminate nearly all the BOR anyway.
In that case, I think that Louis Michael Seidman should be arrested for anti-government speech, and held indefinitely without charges.
And if his lawyer should file a writ of habeas corpus, it should be denied out of hand...
I miss Tennessee; can’t wait to get back there (G-d willing)...a Happy New Year to you, as well. We do win in the end; but it is going to be a bumpy ride until that day.
‘Give Up’ On The ‘Archaic, Idiosyncratic’ And ‘Evil’ Constitution”
This guy just shot up to be frontrunner for an Obama nomination to the supreme court.
That’s for certain!
LLS
“John Adams in a speech to the military in 1798 warned his fellow countrymen stating, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
http://www.free2pray.info/5founderquotes.html
The right to keep and bear arms, for one.
That's why they hate things like the US Constitution, privately owned guns and true freedom of political speech.
Anything which helps provide a bulwark against totalitarianism is despised, mocked, and demonized.
Thus, is it any surprise that our legal establishment has a perverted view of the Constitution?
LMBO!!
This assclown Rothman is allegedly a "constitutional law professor"? Oh... Of course he is.
Anybody with the slightest clue understands that America's problems today are the result of the scumbag politicians' insistence on ignoring the Constitution, not their "obedience" to it. Georgetown again... Where does one college come up with so many simpletons? I wonder if Rothman is chums with that Georgetown slut Sandra Fluke who thinks her neighbors should pay for her sexcapades?
Oops.. Rothman is the author of the article.
The simpleton Georgetown perfesser is Louis Michael Seidman.
My bad.
I'm inclined to suspect that the good Professor's actual academic corpus is a little more refined than this - surely no one with even a slight familiarity with the origins of the Constitution can fail to recognize that it was not Madison, but Montesquieu, who insisted that an inefficient government is preferable to an omnipotent one. This is not, however, the message the Times wants to float. As I recall they were very much on the side of Constitutional propriety when they were hounding Richard Nixon from office. Less so when the fellow in the sights was a Democrat named Clinton, far less so now.
The Constitution is an experiment in a world-wide petri dish, and one cannot explain the success of its adherents merely by accusing us all of theft. As a plan of government it is skeletal - contrast, for example, the encyclopedia of bureaucracy that is its counterpart in the European Union. That is, in the case of people determined to circumvent its provisions, unfortunate - one merely heaps tiny exceptions to it in small doses until the principle is buried under an insupportable burden of contrary case law. That 0bama has Czars, executive boards, discretionary spending powers, and a lickspittle press to make the whole thing go down easily, is not the fault of the Constitution, but of academics and politicians who insist that they can do better if they just don't have to obey it.
But the actual results where such conditions exist suggest otherwise. The Professor scoffs that we will enter a state of Hobbesian chaos, and rightly so - it's only a straw man anyway. What we very well may enter is the long, sad story of the persistent and repetitive failures of autocratic government. A police state is not chaotic - it's much worse than chaotic.
There are other frustrations 0bama's little band of czars is facing than merely financial. One is their insistence on opportunistic gun control in the face of a clearly contrary Constitutional stance and a clearly refractory polity. It is here that the screaming is loudest against government "by the people" - and here that the danger of autocracy is greatest. We are not simply going to go through a period of infinite "dialogue" and compromise until "no" becomes "yes" even if it is the received opinion of the entire New York Times editorial board AND the faculty of Georgetown University. The answer is no.
And so the Constitution staggers along under the load of this sort of detritus. If it ever does collapse the result won't be pretty.
C'mon, folks. It's time for a reality check. The Constitution doesn't count for anything. It means whatever nine unelected judges says it means. And they can, quite obviously, be coerced. So ultimately it means whatever the guys with the dirt decide it means.
We need to secede. It's over, my friends. Give it up.
Let's get out of this and start again.
1) If Mr. Seidman is a Constitutional law professor, but believes we ought to get rid of the Constitution, then the only intellectually honest thing he could do is resign.
2) If we do away with the Constitution, then those of us in red states can secede and the blue states have nothing to say about it. Then the red states can reinstate the Constitution - then let's see who prospers.
This is some big time kook stuff. Even for the whack left NY Slimes. A reputable paper it is not.
Rothman? That’s Chinese right???? Seidman? That’s Kenyan, right?? Silly me!
“This traitorous a-hole should be disbarred and run out of town on a rail.”
Insufficient. There are millions like him.
The only question is, will it be Chile, or Indonesia. We will not be done with people like this until the Mississippi runs red with their blood.
Sounds like the pefesser has it exactly back-asswards. It is the 75 years or so that the Constitution has been whittled away at by the “liberals” that has caused the mess we’re in. I wonder how many unconstitutional laws (both Federal and State) there are out there today since so many SCOTUS’s have opted to read Marxist tea leaves instead of the Constituton.
Stalin, before he died, was preparing a vast pogrom, a genocidal pogrom, of Jews living within the Soviet Empire. The ultimate Soviet Socialist was preparing to finish the work in eastern Europe that the National Socialist paperhanger began.
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