Constitutional Legal Scholars On the Unconstitutionality of

wasn't a give away, and the title Powerline blog, the poll results going to NewsMax sure was. And not a Constitutional scholar in sight. Nice refutation of the dozen or so I posted.

These guys couldn't tell legal if Lady Justice was screaming it in their ears.

Fox and NewsMax can't tell the truth, they've got too much to lose. Bob Dylan (slightly modified), originally said about Time Magazine.

Rob

Typical

Got any more gossip to share with us?

Smirking Chimp, Wonkette, etc....

COVENTRY

message

TownHall, NewsMax and god knows what else, but essentially neither of us will ever convince the other of the rightness of his argument or the wrongness of theirs for a simple reason. We come at the issue from two diffent directions. I'm a "Greatest Good for the Greatest Number" Utilitarian, Government has a role to play in the market place sort of person, and you come from a Libertarian, Freedom is the greatest privilege even the Freedom to starve, those who do well in society do so because they are the most deserving. Don't hesitate to correct my statement about your side of the argument. I can't claim to be unbiased or even to understand what seems to be an argument happy to consign half or more of the population to Coventry so long as the top half, third, quarter, one percent are happy. I suppose I can understand wishing to identify with a winner, but why would you want to identify with an oppressor.

I would like to see a society with a floor to it below which nobody could fall, which would ensure a decent life for everyone at the lowest cost to everyone. But minimum requirements from my perspective are healthcare, shelter, food, and productive work, and the best deal possible as one ascends the ladder. There are countries which come closer to this than others, and I find them more interesting than countries (mostly Third World Countries) whose attitudes are rooted in get as much for yourself and let the rest go to the wall.

Rob, living happily anywhere I choose, thanks all the same.

Who writes for SmirkingChimp?

Look at just who John Hinderaker is before you go off on your next rant.

I wonder if the clueless fool realizes that I NEVER cite either of the sources he attributes to me. Not that he ever reads anything correctly, or is accurate about anything.

...Ed's posts and credibility as you have done it for me. And that being:

If you dislike them, They must be of the highest crediality...and I don't even need to evaluate any further...Thank you very much.

if I missed any real constitutional scholars in either Evie or Eds post then it's regrettable. I do have trouble with sources that are already in the Republican pocket and I tend not to read them.

I have never believed the continuously repeated lie from the Nixon era onward that the Mainstream Media are in the pockets of the Democrats. Given the rough ride they gave Jimmy "One Term" Carter, and the free ride they gave Reagan and have to a large degree given both Bush's, I'd say they were lazy, sensation chasing folks intent on doing the least amount of work possible and making the largest amount of noise possible. They exist not to inform but to sell themselves as Rita Skeeter says in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I don't tout as an immpeccable source, but as a statement of the obvious. Any journalist will tell you the same.

So they followed the "Whitewater Inquiry through all of its twists and turns and changes of focus not because there was anything there, there clearly wasn't since they nailed Clinton over lies about shot-spots on a dress, but the press were happy to stooge for the Republicans all through that inquiry because it was easy, it was a gimme story. They were handed news briefs which they turned in as their reporting and the wheels turned and the newspapers and the News Programs for the big networks and Cable raked in the readership based on nothing but false pretenses.

Nobody said "This inquiry was about a land deal and now its about White house travel files, why?" "This inquiry has changed its focus a half a dozen times and they still have no evidence linking the President to anything, why is the Special Prosecutor changing his mandate so often, is it legal, and is it justified?" "How did we get from a land deal to personal misconduct which was not illegal until he lied about it?" or "How come they're investigating Clinton and they never investigated Reagan for Iran-gate, just the lower level folks?" But all of those questions lead to work, just like trying to get the truth about the intelligence that led us into Iraq required work. When the Adminstration was lying its way into the war, where was the press? Printing every Administration assertion and every hand out as though it was the Sermon from the Mount.

You may think I'm always wrong on everything which will make you right maybe half the time, but you have believed everything the Administration has told you no matter what the evidence. You've been lied to, as all the American people have been lied to and you seem to take that as not just a matter of course but the proper way of things. Its not. Republicans through history have made just as big a balls up of government as Democrats. The fact that Dwight Eisenhower didn't defend his close friend, and mentor George C Marshall against the egregious lies and attacks of the inferior Senator from Wisconsin is an example of how wretchedly politics can make a man of character act, the same might be said of his choice of Nixon after the Chequers speech.

But do please continue to think "If you dislike them, They must be of the highest crediality (sic)." I'm not here to earn friends or influence people, I'm here honing my chops for the writing I have to do, and to practice identifying truth from BS. The BS quotient here is the highest I've been able to find so far, therefore it is good training.

EdH is enormously knowledgeable about the period of the Revolution, and the various Congresses, Continental and State that went into the creation of the United States. He does however to get lost in the forest, rather than following the path of the 30 or 40 most influential people who built the edifice that is the Constitution the Bill of Rights and the Congress and Senate. It is one of the dangers of the autodidact that one's views don't get challenged by professors who's knowledge is even greater than one's own. Were he to take a crack at an MA in American History he might find that even the most conservative or Conservative professors would have contradictions and corrections to the theories he has developed. I appreciate reading Ed's posts on things historical because he always makes me think, even when I don't agree with him. On more modern politics he seems too much the True Believer in the fiction purveyed by the Extreme Right for me to listen as closely as perhaps I should.

But equally he, and you and virtually the whole of SE don't listen to me because you have me pigeon-holed as an extremist which I am not and have not been since about my Junior year in University. I am allergic to True Believerism of the Left just as much as the Right, which is why I don't pay much attention to Ralph Nader. And you have never been open to listening to me Jack, at least not so far as I have been able to discern, so don't state this as some new found Occam's razor, if Rob's for it, it must be wrong. You've always tended to Ed's side of the argument, so I wish you well, just don't pretend you were open minded to start with.

Rob

to take the mmst

http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-6130-0.html?forumID=50&threadID=177997&messageID=1952147

... or you wouldn't make such fool of yourself. Unless you think the judges ruling MULTIPLE times on the Constitutional issues shouldn't count.

The rest of the post has been filed under "D".

For most purposes, including electronic surveillance and physical searches, "foreign powers" means a foreign government, any faction(s) or foreign governments not substantially composed of US persons, and any entity directed or controlled by a foreign government.

I doubt you'll get a response from him anyway now. He seems to be on some kick about Americans throwing away newborns now.

Evie

As far as abortion is concerned, I would certainly be against any late term abortion. You would think they would know if they want it by then, if not sooner! I think it should be moved up to an earlier date, unless it definately turns into a "life of the mother" thing.

... and he did it for PHYSICAL warrantless searches of people's homes.

One of the most famous examples of warrantless searches in recent years was the investigation of CIA official Aldrich H. Ames, who ultimately pleaded guilty to spying for the former Soviet Union. That case was largely built upon secret searches of Ames' home and office in 1993, conducted without federal warrants.

Yeah, yeah, it's the Washington Times. Read it anyway and you won't embarrass yourself so regularly by regurgitating gossip inspired talkingpoints that lack substance.

for which you have my sympathy, really.

Do you remember that part of the BBC radio series, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Marvin the Paranoid Android is asked if he can read one of the other characters minds? "Yes", he says. "Well?" says the other character (Arthur Dent). "It amazes me how you can live in something that small" says Marvin. I think we'd better give the prescience prize to Douglas Adams back about late 1977 early 1978. The series of 6 was broadcast from 8 March to 12 April 1978. The line occurs in the 4th episode.

Rob "42" (well I was once) Boyter.

I am willing to debate that stuff that might possibly harm the United States might possibly need to be secret. I do not agree that stuff that will be embarassing to us, to our party or to our Administration if we get caught doing it without a warrant, should be secret. That's partisan secrecy versus true National Security Secrecy. Having read as much as I can stand, and understood as much as I am able, I understand that FISA gives broad powers to the Federal Government and requires little to obtain a legal warrant. Apparently that was too onerous for the Shoot From the Hip Brigade and its head wrangler Georgie. ("Lee-gality is fer Pansies 'n' Democrats," is the phrase I think he used, or would have if he could have thought of it.)

Angeline, you repose more faith in this President than I do. I grant that I started from the premise that he was not an honorable man judging by what he did as Governor of Texas, by what he did in Business, and from what I saw in the people around him. What I did not understand was the depth of his contempt for the American people, or his arrogance.

Virtually everyone who has anything to do with him says that he has no doubts about himself, his course, or the rightness of his actions. That's not a decisive President, thats a Psycho-path. No normal person does not experience self doubt. According to his friends and his colleagues and those he's worked with, the President has no self doubt whatsoever.

It might also be a difference of opinion if there were any reputable legal scholars on Bush's side of the argument. There aren't that I've seen. There are however a lot of Republican talking heads saying it's legal, and a lot of Republican blogs like PowerLine and TownHall.org saying it's legal, and a lot of Administration folks saying its legal.

I posted an open letter from a good dozen recognized legal scholars and Constitutional Law specialists. As soon as I see an equal number of equally well thought of legal scholars and Consitutional law specialists saying the opposite, then I'll agree that there's a difference of opinion. Right now the difference of opinion is between legal scholars and Republican spin doctors, one or two of whom might actually have a law degree. Even if they all had law degrees they'd still be paid party stooges commissioned to put the best possible face on an assault on the Bill of Rights. Either one is safe from unlawful search or one is not. Either one has a right to Privacy or one does not. Either one is entitled to freedom from warrantless searches or one is not. According to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights we are entitled to those things. According to George, "they aint important."

In re: Economists. Perhaps the analogy is well drawn, because the primary assumptions of Economists affects the outcome of their predictions or their pronouncements. If you have seen a Fascist government run economy and a Communist Dictatorship government run economy close up perhaps you become Friedrich von Hayek and you adopt a vigorous maybe even extremist free-market position. If you have seen the failure of free-market systems in the United States and Great Britain and a number of other countries through the late 20's and early 30's and then have helped in the government's intervention in those failing economies through the war years thereby producing strong healthy economies, you become John Maynard Keynes, and John Kenneth Galbraith and several dozen more and decide that government intervention can (not must, but can) be a good thing. But again please note. The inteventionists or mixed economy school outnumbers the Friedman Hayek school substantially. And about Milton Friedman. Are you all aware that he's the one who invented the Federal Witholding Tax? Why aren't you up in arms about him taking your money and using it before its actually due in April next year? Why does he get a pass.

I still think that the perfect paradigm for judging the current US economy is not how much it produces at the top, but how poorly it does at the bottom. That is an indicator of a net transfer of wealth upward from those who have least to those who need it least, and it is best exemplified by the infant mortality rate in the United States, which is about the worst in the industrialized world.

George Porgie and all his friends are celebrating their success on a pile of tiny corpses, and no Pro-Life activist says word one about it. If any of them did, better yet if their position was consistent -- you cannot take the life of the unborn but you must put in place programs to assure the survival and good health of all babies in the United States, and you must put in place programs to carefully place and monitor those adopted, then I'd have no problem. But its not about being Pro Life. It is about a punitive pre- peri- and post-natal policy that says, you must conform to our agenda, to our concept of a family, to our moral values, and to our economic values or you must suffer the consequences of offending us. You may not abort a child conceived in poverty, out of wedlock, or by accident, or by the failure of another form of birth control. (I have seen a friend's immediate post delivery picture of their newborn. The newborn came out clutching the IUD in his fist.) You must be in a stable male-female relationship and earn enough money to afford that child on one salary for as long as we deem it proper because we don't believe in parental leave, or day care.

Constitutional Scholars carry just that sort of baggage. You have the strict constructionists, the Biblical Literalists of the Constitution who wish that the country had frozen in 1789, as a small agricultural republic. You have the people who say 217 years have passed and strict constructionism is as relevant as an iPod was in 1789. And you have all the people in between. But the views of Constitutional Literalists who yearn for the agricultural republic should be relegated to the lunatic fringe because nothing will ever turn Time's Arrow around, nothing short of plague will return the United States to that tiny strip on the Atlantic ocean.

A Second Amendment describing a single shot flint-lock rifle and a militia for self defence has no relevance to a world of criminals armed with half a dozen automatic weapons dressed in Kevlar taking on the Police or worse a Post Office or a place of business or a restaurant. The 1789 Second Amendment while not irrelevant, is inapplicable as it stands to the 2006 situation. A simple statistical analysis of gun owners shot with their own guns or who shot an innocent person with that gun versus gun owners who managed to shoot the criminal shows that more people are killed by their own guns and accidentally than by those of criminals. Some of those deaths are accidental and some are suicide, but if nobody but criminals and the police had hand guns, then there'd be a lot fewer shootings in the United States and a lot fewer deaths. Impossible scenario, Right?

But that is the sort of baggage that Constitutional Scholars and all of us bring to the arguments. Even I have trouble quarrelling with the Second Amendment. Writing this makes me all flushed and sweaty as if I'm doing something wrong, when all I'm doing is saying that a 217 year old law is not the best guide to modern behavior. What is important is the spirit behind the laws, behind the Bill of Rights. They didn't write the Bill of Rights to Protect Criminals, the wrote it to prevent the Government from becoming criminals, or more particularly Tyrants.

Georgie Porgie is a Tyrant manque(accent aigu on the e). He wants to be, but he's not smart enough, and there's just too many damn' legislators out there that keep gettin' in the way. ("Damn' John Murtha, there's a prize, who's he think he is, a decorated Marine vet'run or somethin'. What's he got to contribute to a discussion about war, I know war, I was in Texas an' lemme tell you it was hell.")

As those who wrote the Constitution understood very well, it is at times of great stress that tossing away legal protections for short term security looks good. The problem comes when the stress goes away and you're left looking at George Bush with a shredded Constitution and Bill of Rights in his hands saying, "Ahm real sarry about the Concentration Camps an' all, but we wuz in a real bind and I had to destroy the Constitution in order to protect it. But doncha worry, Ahm sure there's some tape around here somewhere, an' it'll be a much shorter document once we get it back tuhgether."

Is there a cogent point in there anywhere?

long answer, NOPE

Mongo impressed

It's written in perfectly understandable grammatical english, I may even have avoided spelling mistakes. However, you and I are so divergent philosophically that apparently you can't understand what I write. I understand what you write, I just disagree with it. I wrote EdH a response before I noted his witless link, regarding coming at issues from different perspectives. I can't claim to express your philosophy without distorting it so I won't. I think that in the richest country in the world there should be a liveable position for every inhabitant. I don't think that a sector of the economy should be built on the backs of illegal labor, and I think it is.

I choose to use the analogy of a floor below which nobody is allowed to fall. It is conceivable that a few street people will choose to live in the basement, but even they are entitled to food, shelter and minimal levels of support. To me Health Care is a Right not a privilege, and should be available to everybody. Lots of countries do that and don't seem to suffer.

Now from my perspective I see a lot of distortion here about which economies are successful and which are not, but Europe does very well by the vast majority of its population. There are very rich people there, but there are many fewer poor people there than there are, or were in the United States when I lived there.

I used the analogy of how the United States treats its smallest and most vulnerable inhabitants as a metaphor. Why does the United States have so much wealth, and so many super rich people, and have one of the higher infant mortality rates. Its because the United States doesn't think they, or their parents are important enough to even care about them. From my perspective to restate it and perhaps give you a Cliff's Notes version, if the US is so wealthy and still has that level of infant mortality, then that is a deliberate economic choice. The United States chooses to value the having of wealth over the right of some of its citizens to live. However contradictory to the Constitution's statement, the Right to Life applies only to those who can afford it, who have had good pre- and peri-natal care, or who have gotten very very lucky.

If you're poor, you don't get pre-natal care, you get the lowest grade peri-natal care available and you get little or no post-natal care.

In my metaphor, the wealthy are in port supported by the corpses of the infants who are not allowed to live because they have no care, because there is no tax support for that care. Just look at infant mortality rates and see who beats the United States, practically everybody in the industrialized world beats the United States and some pretty primitive ones too. Cuba beats the United States, but not by much. So does Taiwan. Slovenia outperforms Canada which outperforms the US and Croatia doesn't miss by much. Have you seen Croatia on the news lately?

1. Singapore 2.28 deaths/1,000 live births
2. Sweden 2.77 deaths/1,000 live births
3. Hong Kong 2.97 deaths/1,000 live births
4. Japan 3.28 deaths/1,000 live births
5. Iceland 3.31 deaths/1,000 live births
6. Finland 3.59 deaths/1,000 live births
7. Norway 3.73 deaths/1,000 live births
8. Malta 3.94 deaths/1,000 live births
9. Czech Republic 3.97 deaths/1,000 live births
10. Andorra 4.05 deaths/1,000 live births
11. Germany 4.20 deaths/1,000 live births
12. France 4.31 deaths/1,000 live births
13. Macau 4.39 deaths/1,000 live births
14. Switzerland 4.43 deaths/1,000 live births
15. Spain 4.48 deaths/1,000 live births
16. Slovenia 4.50 deaths/1,000 live births
17. Denmark 4.63 deaths/1,000 live births
18. Austria 4.68 deaths/1,000 live births
19. Australia 4.76 deaths/1,000 live births
Belgium 4.76 deaths/1,000 live births
21. Liechtenstein 4.77 deaths/1,000 live births
22. Canada 4.82 deaths/1,000 live births
23. Luxembourg 4.88 deaths/1,000 live births
24. Netherlands 5.11 deaths/1,000 live births
25. Portugal 5.13 deaths/1,000 live births
26. United Kingdom 5.22 deaths/1,000 live births
27. Ireland 5.50 deaths/1,000 live births
28. Monaco 5.53 deaths/1,000 live births
29. Greece 5.63 deaths/1,000 live births
30. San Marino 5.85 deaths/1,000 live births
31. New Zealand 5.96 deaths/1,000 live births
32. Aruba 6.02 deaths/1,000 live births
33. Italy 6.07 deaths/1,000 live births
34. Cuba 6.45 deaths/1,000 live births
35. Taiwan 6.52 deaths/1,000 live births
36. United States 6.63 deaths/1,000 live births
37. Croatia 6.96 deaths/1,000 live births
38. Lithuania 7.13 deaths/1,000 live births
39. Korea, South 7.18 deaths/1,000 live births

So the US has twice the infant mortality that Japan has and Japan isn't even number 1 its number 4.

If there's an economy that you feel outperforms the United States, it's there above the United States. If on the otherhand you believe that the United States outperforms all the rest of the world, why does it throw away so many newborns. And if there are socialist economies (as opposed to survivors of Stalinism) and I think there are, they are all significantly higher than United States. Even a mixed economy like Canada is almost half way up the list from the US.

If the "pre-born" have a right to life, the United States is failing badly to ensure this, and this doesn't even include abortion statistics which are as you know horrendous. Protesting Abortion is a red herring in my opinion. Protesting the atrocious mortality rate among new-borns and ensuring their pre-natal and post-natal care is far more important. With the right education you could get the abortion rate down substantially, but much of the Anti-Abortion movement seems to oppose Education on matters of Sexuality. All those European countries with teens at least as sexually active as American kids have better abortion rates, some of them quite miniscule. The worst country for abortion in Europe is ... England.

Have you read Freakonomics which suggests that economic conditions for some people and some later children are improved by an abortion which does away with those most vulnerable to becoming wards of the state, criminals, and potential victims of abuse. It also suggests that the downturn in crime figures is predicated on Roe V Wade.

So to respond again, there were lots of cogent points. Whether you were in a frame of mind to accept them, or could ever be in a frame of mind to accept anything I say as true is another question. I have on a number of occasions agreed with people here on this forum with whom I thought it impossible to find common ground, including you. I don't write anybody off, though I may not always give them the hearing I should. I have disagreed in disagreeable ways but I have never said for example that I would never read somebody's post ever again, or consigned them to Coventry as EdH so "cleverly" did in his, in fact he was so taken with his extreme cleverness that he did it twice, which sort of defeats the point of being clever in the first place because he obviously continued to read. Self contradiction isn't clever, you see, it's dumb, it means you don't understand what you are trying to accomplish. Either I'm in Coventry at which point all reference ceases, or I'm not in which case the first statement is in Richard Nixon speak non-operational.

Part of the problem you guys have is that this is just a place where I warm up my chops. Musicians call it woodshedding, playing without an audience to improve your control, your inventiveness, your agility. I enjoy writing here not because there's anyone to persuade (I got over that really fast) but because you inspire me with your True Believerism, your incontrovertability, your immuneness to Beauty Truth, or a cogent argument. And so having warmed up, I move on to real writing, which seems to be going very well thank you. I promise you all a mention in my book, I just don't promise you will like it.

Rob