Posted on 01/30/2013 4:26:31 PM PST by Kaslin
When someone tells you that the Consitution is a “living document”, what they really mean is that they want it to die.
Lincoln also rejected the idea that the Sup Court had the final say on all Constitutional matters. In other words he rejected judicial supremacy.
So even if this guy was right that Lincoln would be a champion of the modern day ‘living Constitution’, it also seems that Lincoln would reject the idea that the nation must obey whatever living Constitution nonsense the Sup Court tried to impose.
Interesting, given that Lincoln had contempt for the Constitution. Which, I suppose, would explain his “projected” acceptance of that august compact as a “living constitution,” whose meaning was whatever anyone in power (him included) wanted it to mean.
I have a suspicion this is a politically motivated piece that hits both Justice Scalia and President Lincoln. Has no good purpose!
The whole thrust of the bogus “living constitution” argument is nothing more than an attempt to get around the very stringent amendment process.
How long ‘til they re-frame Lincoln into Joseph Stalin ...
IMHO, it’s analogous to any lawyer looking for any loopholes in a contract.
Luckily, our Founders were smart enough men to write the Constitution in simple English...simple enough that lawyers and judges today still don’t comprehend (IE: “Congress shall make NO law; Shall not be infringed; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation; etc.)
But, what do I know, I’m just a publik skool edukated person who enjoys reading about our Founding and such...
Ity is well known that Lincoln was not happy with his emancipation proclamation. He worked long and hard on the document, but later confessed it to be a”poor”document. He was not satisfied with its legality, although it served as an expedient, and he seems to have concluded that whatever force it had would expire with the end of the national emergency. Which is why he pushed the ratification of the 13th Amendment. One can never know, but I think it could be argued that if he had lived that the 14th and 15th Amendments would never have been passed. Johnson simply let the Confederates get away with things that Lincoln never would, just as he squashed an attempt by Judge Campbell to let the Confederate legislature continue to function as the head of Virginia. As a Southerner himself who had been frustrated by intransigence of the slave owners of the border states in rejecting on principle of compensated emancipation, it seems to me unlikely that he would have allowed any but a state loyal to him and his policies to send representatives to Washington in December, 1865.
The Constitution is an instrument of government. It is not a legal code nor an embidiment of eternal principles but a means of establishing and empowering a limited government. The Bill of Rights aimed to reduce its powers without crippling it. One that worked but did not subject the people to its rule as a kingdom might.
The Constitution is an instrument of government. It is not a legal code nor an embidiment of eternal principles but a means of establishing and empowering a limited government. The Bill of Rights aimed to reduce its powers without crippling it. One that worked but did not subject the people to its rule as a kingdom might.
Lincoln went outside the Constitution a number of times, but he never showed contempt for it. Which is why he wanted the 13th amendment.
Lincoln went outside the Constitution a number of times, but he never showed contempt for it. Which is why he wanted the 13th amendment.
I believer you’re partially correct.
Yes, it is an instrument to setup a limited government. But it is as much legal code (IE: sets out what gov’t CAN do) as well as being an embodiment of principles, only ‘eternal’ in that gov’t must use the Amendment process to change.
To look at it any other way allows the distortion of limited gov’t and reduction of Freedom and Liberty by nefarious means.
Contempt? The War itself was contemptuous.
There was no ‘Civil’ War. The South did not wish to rule from D.C. They only wished to rule themselves, as they saw fit, in accordance WITH the Constitution.
It was Lincoln who had the idea of an unbreakable Union, which, to me, flies in the face of the Founders. Our own Declaration states “Free and independent States”; the Constitution only granted D.C. those power DELEGATED to it by the People or States. What is so given can be rescinded.
IE: The South had (has) every Right to take back any/all powers when they felt (feel) the Federal gov’t has overstepped its bounds.
But, I digress. A debate for another thread/time :)
Enforcement of any set of fixed rules “violates” one of the core tenets of the humanist worldview.
The elites alive today are better suited to making ad hoc, arbitrary decisions than anyone that lived in the past and wrote down some rule for future people to live by.
This includes the amendment process. This is part of the “fixed rules”, so it is despised as much or more as any of the other fixed rules.
Fact is that the South fired the first shots of the war. At a federal fort, no less. Jeff Davis, with usual mad judgment, gave the South Carolina firebrands their heads and provoked a war, which made Lincoln look justified in his actions. What’s more, as soon as Virginia seceded, the Confederate government moved its capital to Richmond, pretty obviously expecting to make another move to Washington, once Maryland’s secession forced Lincoln to withdraw to the safety of some northern city.
Well said. Our elites feel entitled to rule. The Tudors swore to uphold magma carta when they were crowned but pretty much made their own rules as it suited them. The most glaring one was the break with the Catholic Church, which Thomas More opposed because he realized how lawless an act it was, how revolutionary. The English got hot and bothered about the Spanosh inquisition, but the king’s “Star-chamber” courts were every bit as arbitrary if not more so.
Aside from the 1st shot, which I think was a BAD first move, the rest is conjecture. Good theory and debate fodder; but I believe the South was more worried about getting the Fed. gov’ts boot off its neck more than were they were to setup after the war.
I once was a Jeff Davis fan. Now I have the same opinion about him that Winfield Scott did and Joe Johnston did. If the Confederacy had had a different President, they might have won.
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