FoxNews' Judge Andrew Napolitano : Fierce Watchdog of the Constitution (Village Voice)

Village Voice ^ | August 1st, 2003 4:00 PM | Nat Hentoff

[lainde]

bttt

[Gracey]

This may be foolish to many here but it is the moral calculus that most people evaluate government actions by.

Never have I heard anyone articulate this phenomena as you have. I've usually just stated that I don't care about laws being obeyed explicitely, under certain circumstances, but that the end result was most important. Now I have something concrete to mutter to my "libertarian" friends.

Many times the discussion revolves around Congressman Ron Paul and his anti war stance. He says the US moved into Iraq against the constitution because "congress" did not declare war.

[NittanyLion]

I've usually just stated that I don't care about laws being obeyed explicitely, under certain circumstances, but that the end result was most important.

So in certain situations the end justifies the means?

[Question_Assumptions]

Never have I heard anyone articulate this phenomena as you have. I've usually just stated that I don't care about laws being obeyed explicitely, under certain circumstances, but that the end result was most important.

The only thing you have to remember is that the ends are not always clear before you start and that no person is entirely infallable when it comes to predicting how things will turn out. The world is too complex for any one person to understand fully. The purpose of having the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and a Republican form of government are because those things are designed to help ensure that fallable people will do things that produce good end results and that we'll avoid very bad end results. For this reason, they should not be ignored. Not without a very good reason. And I do think that the three branches of government (particularly the Judiciary, but the other two branches, as well) are ignoring the Constitution much too often, more because it is convenient than because they have a very good reason.

The reason why Congress didn't declare war was simple -- it didn't want to take responsibility. Congress doesn't want to take responsibility for much these days -- it prefers to hand the hard decisions off to the courts (via vague laws), bureaucratic agencies (via regulatory authority), and the President (via war authorizations instead of declarations) and take responsibility for playing Santa Claus with taxpayer dollars. There is something fundamentally wrong with a Congress that doesn't want to take responsibility but that reflects the indifference of the voters. If people want Congress to assume it's Constitutionally designated role, then they need to get voters interested in electing congressmen and women who are interested in fulfilling that role instead of looking good in a Santa Suit.