Posted on 08/29/2011 1:56:16 PM PDT by Da Bilge Troll
Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom. All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, and Sauron understood everything just when it was too late to act.
Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas in the New Yorker gives readers new insight into what Sauron must have felt: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.
In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be the Frodo Baggins of the right; his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.
Writes Toobin:
In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.the-american-interest.com ...
Wickard v. Filburn was rejected in 1787.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2741806/posts
If I found this from the Constitutional Convention, the Harvard lawyer wizards of Scotus in the FDR era knew it as well.
Would that the author be right that Justice Thomas’ efforts will reverse the federal power grab via the commerce clause. If the next election installs a decent conservative to replace what we now have, perhaps the nation will be steered toward the Founding Fathers’ original vision.
You could call Sméagol a hobbit. You could also call him a sort of cousin of the Shire (and Bree) hobbits.
The ancestral hobbits developed into three races, the Fallohides, Harfoots, and Stoors, who lived in the upper Anduin valley (a good ways north of Lothlórien). In the mid-Third Age, most hobbits migrated west into Eriador, eventually settling in Bree and later the Shire as well. By the late Third Age, when LotR takes place, the three races were pretty well intermingled in Eriador.
From the Encyclopedia of Arda, "Gollum's identification as a Stoor is based on Gandalf's words in The Lord of the Rings I 2 The Shadow of the Past, 'I guess they were of hobbit-kind, akin to the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors'. Gollum's people split from the other Stoors in the fifteenth century of the Third Age, when troubled times in Eriador led them to migrate back eastwards across the Misty Mountains, and settle on the banks of the Gladden River."
http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/g/gollum.html
We're going to have to do something different than what we've been doing before that's going to happen. GWB claimed to want Supreme Court justices that subscribed to an "original intent" interpretation of the Constitution during his campaign. The he sent his Justice Department before the court to argue to uphold Wickard v Filburn in the Raisch case.
Stare decisis? I don't see any reason to feel any more bound by it than they did.
Suppose a state legalizes pot, which I believe is likely to happen in this decade. Do you send in the feds to close it down, or do you let the state decide?
Too bad not even one of them will face up to the fact that the child in the womb is a person, and therefore should be protected by the explicit, imperative requirements of our Constitution.
In a perfect world, yes, it would be a State issue. We don’t live in a perfect world, no such world exists in reality. It’s become intensely complex, and turned inside out. Reality bites.
If pot truly is a medicine, it should be a controlled substance, approved by the FDA, manufactured under controlled circumstances and under license, prescribed by a doctor, and dispensed through a pharmacy. I could tell you that it is a psychoactive drug, a dissassociative hallucinogen. But you probably know that. I could tell you that it has been peer pushed onto our children, told that it’s not harmful and, yes, it does lead to worse drugs and drug use. But you might dispute that. There’s a lot I could say in defense of my position, but I won’t. I’ll just finish by saying...
I believe evil is real, it exists. Evil uses anything to propagate itself, and drugs are just one of the many ways it does that. Millions have lost their lives to it, many by murder, and millions more lives have been wasted and ruined because of it. Evil transcends oceans and borders and it respects no class or position or child.
Drugs are evil.
That's exactly the Obama administration's tack on requiring the "personal mandate" in their attempt to destroy health care in the US.
Mark
In his University of Chicago Law Review study of the history of the Commerce Clause, Randy Barnett makes the case as follows:
In Madison's notes for the Constitutional Convention, the term "commerce" appears thirty-four times in the speeches of the delegates. Eight of these are unambiguous references to commerce with foreign nations which can only consist of trade. In every other instance, the terms "trade" or "exchange" could be substituted for the term "commerce" with the apparent meaning of the statement preserved. In no instance is the term "commerce" clearly used to refer to "any gainful activity" or anything broader than trade. One congressional power proposed by Madison, but not ultimately adopted, suggests that the delegates shared the limited meaning of "commerce" described in (Samuel) Johnson's dictionary. Madison proposed to grant Congress the power "to establish public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, commerce, trades and manufactures," strongly suggesting that the members understood the term "commerce" to mean trade or exchange, distinct from the productive processes that made the things to be traded.Nor was this a secret usage confined to the Convention. In several of his contributions to The Federalist Papers, ardent nationalist Alexander Hamilton repeatedly made clear the commonplace distinction between commerce or trade and production. In Federalist 11, he also explained the purpose of the Commerce Clause, a purpose entirely consistent with the prevailing "core" meaning of the term "commerce":
"An unrestrained intercourse between the States themselves will advance the trade of each by an interchange of their respective productions, not only for the supply of reciprocal wants at home, but for exportation to foreign markets. The veins of commerce in every part will be replenished and will acquire additional motion and vigor from a free circulation of the commodities of every part. Commercial enterprise will have much greater scope from the diversity in the productions of different States..."
In Federalist 12, he referred to the "rivalship," now silenced, "between agriculture and commerce," while in Federalist 17, he distinguished between the power to regulate such national matters as commerce and "the supervision of agriculture and of other concerns of a similar nature, all those things, in short, which are proper to be provided for by local legislation." In Federalist 21, Hamilton maintained that causes of the wealth of nations were of "an infinite variety," including "situation, soil, climate, the nature of the productions, the nature of the government, the genius of the citizens, the degree of information they possess, the state of commerce, of arts, of industry." In Federalist 35, he asked, "Will not the merchant understand and be disposed to cultivate, as far as may be proper, the interests of the mechanic and manufacturing arts to which his commerce is so nearly allied?"
In none of the sixty-three appearances of the term "commerce" in The Federalist Papers is it ever used to unambiguously refer to any activity beyond trade or exchange. At the time of the framing, then, for Hamilton, a proponent of broad national powers, the term "commerce" in the Constitution referred to trade or exchange, not to the production of items to be traded, and certainly not to all gainful activity. Even later, with the contentiousness of the Constitution's adoption behind him, Hamilton's usage did not change. As Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton's official opinion to President Washington advocating a broad congressional power to incorporate a national bank repeatedly referred to Congress's power under the Commerce Clause as the power to regulate the "trade between the States."
(et. seq). From: The Original Meaning of the Commerce Clause; Copyright (c) 2001 University of Chicago; University of Chicago Law Review - Winter, 2001 - 68 U. Chi. L. Rev. 101; Randy E. Barnett
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I've read Madison's notes along with the sketchier notes of other attendees. NOTHING from the Convention supports an expansion of the commerce power beyond what it clearly says.
I suppose the Left should be cr@pping their britches in fear of a few more Thomases on the Supreme Court. The whole regulatory state rests on a lie discernible by anyone who can read.
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Scalia is out of his mind on the Commerce clause.
It was only intended to make the Fed gov an arbitor in disputes between the states WRT commerce, not an originator of controls.
Rush reading this now.
I read Thomas’s book a couple years ago and was very impressed by him and what he went through.
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