Oh dear, it isn’t goodbye. I would miss you.
You refused to see that Napolitano and I are saying the same thing about the federal government’s powers. Of course, you needn’t agree with us, but I knew the response I’d get.
What you have made clear over time is that you hold deeper principles that drive your “historical” views. Chief among them is your “Living Constitution” jurisprudence, which I realize was probably unconsciously held by you until this exchange. You idolize Lincoln and his war. In fact, you are the perfect audience for the “war as necessity” dodge employed by all power mongering political “leaders”. The war you so love didn’t “correct” the Constitution; it was anti-Constitutional. I realize that you don’t read much or have the emotional strength to come to terms with opposing views, but Professor Jeffery Hummel’s Emancipating the Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the Civil War might be therapeutic for you.
You also have the quaint view that the “Progressives” are the source of the problem. Actually, they were just a manifestation of the metastasizing cancer mercantilism and other big government tendencies introduced by the Republican Party during and after the War. There is no discontinuity between your principles and the Progressives. In fact, I think you’d be a big defender of the “necessary adjustments” made by the Progressives if they had gone no further than they had by 1917 (I’ll bet you love that war, too). The trouble, of course, is that once sown the seeds of tyranny continue to grow. Lincoln was an enemy of the American Constitutional Republic, just as both Roosevelts, Wilson, Hoover, etc. in an almost unbroken line up to Obamalini. We are only talking differences in degree and style.
“Statism”, of which “Progressivism” is just one species, has always been around. All of the actors in the Founding generation were quite aware of the evils of statism because they had before them, not so much George the III, who was a relatively weak monarch, but example of the Tudors and the Stuarts, whose views of the rights of government were statist to the core.
I think the real difference between us is that you are a “moderate” socialist, while I am not. Your real objection to our government is that it has gone farther than you like, while I view it as illegitimate because it is lawless and unconstitutional.
Lincoln and his armies didn't just free the slaves. Slaveholders, too, were freed from a culture of dependency which led too many of them to erroneously believe that they could not take care of themselves any longer and that they could not face the world without the assistance of slaves. Just read Mississippi's declaration of secession. The slaveholders had degenerated to the point that they could see no possible way forward without slavery. Slavery was no longer seen as an alternative, but a necessity, a full-blown addiction. Generations of them had been virtually raised by slaves. Slaveholders were progressively weakened by their indolence and dependency. Most of the slaveholders managed to adjust to the loss of slavery. Admittedly, some could not be reconstructed; a few of them even moved to Brazil.
Now, nearly every American, North, South, East and West, is grateful that Lincoln and the Union freed both the slaves and the slaveholders from the pathology of slavery. Nearly everyone now is opposed to slavery. Slavery is over and gone for good; it's not coming back.
There is nothing that happened 150 years ago that compels us to govern ourselves in any particular way today. Lincoln does not rule us from the grave. We as a people need to take personal responsibility for the choices we make today.
Without exception, all of your accusations against me are false.
They have no basis in anything I've posted, they are simply your script, over which apparently you have no control or influence, and can only continue to post, regardless of how ludicrous your accusations are shown to be.
That's why I say, you have no IQ -- because nothing posted here has any influence over your ridiculous claims.
Therefore, I will agree, that you and the good judge are saying the same things, if and only if: you can quote where Napolitano mocks and condemns the Founders themselves for failure to abide by their own Constitution.
But I don't think he ever said that, or would hold such a position today, and therefore, you and the judge are not on the same page, whereas, he and I are -- at least on this subject.