The Constitution is not a long piece of writing. Any Freeper who hasn't read it slowly, while thinking about what they're reading is a lazy and ignorant conservative.
But that's not what is going to get me in trouble. What will is the fact that nearly every phrase in the Constitution has been subjected to scrutiny by the US Supreme Court at some point in time. And an explanation of what those particular phrases has been made, or at least applied, to real fact situations.
In reality, there are a lot of footnotes to the Constitution which don't appear in the actual document and can only be learned by reviewing over 200 years of Supreme Court decisions.
Many people say, "It says what it says and that's the way it is." Fine, but two people can read the same thing and reach different conclusions. The 4th Amendment, for example, protects me from "unreasonable search and seizure". I can categorically tell you that any search of my house by the police is unreasonable, dammit, but if they think you're raping babies, knocking down your door in an effort to grab your computer is perfectly fine with me.
The long history of the Supreme Court in dealing with these matters provides the proper context for what the plain words of the Constitution seem to say, which is why it's an intensive and required course at every decent law school that I know of.
Reading the Constitution is mandatory, I think, for every citizen. But to fully understand how it governs this country today, you'll have to read much more than what is contained on those few pages.
Absolutely correct. And the government itself is aware of it, and by law, has created the annotated constitution.
http://www.eco.freedom.org/ac92/
2500+ pages of analysis and interpretation of constitutional law.
Many Supreme Court- and even Appeals and District Court- rulings are a delight to read for their insight into the Constitution and it's history.
The rulings that bother me aren't.
My second option is to hang out with people like you.
Stare decisis is just fine for deciding which of several reasonable interpretations should be used. Unfortunately, it is being used--illegitimately--far beyond that.
Perhaps someone needs to codify, whether by statute or constitutional amendment, what should already be--but isn't--practiced: Any court decision, in order to be valid, should be supportable without any reference whatsoever to stare decisis. This does not mean decisions should be made without regard to stare decisis, but they must be reasonable even without it.
I would further add another rule: No person shall be punished by the government, whether civilly or criminally, for any action in a manner beyond what a responsible and knowledgeable citizen would expect to have happen if caught.
This would have a few corrolaries:
For example, in Lawrence v. Texas, I would expect the defendants could have provided evidence that the state of Texas made little or no effort to prosecute individuals who engaged in sodomy 'discretely', even when police had reason to believe it was going on. The defendants could argue that, being aware of this, they had no reason to believe their activities would be of interest to the state. The state would then have to show some reason why the defendants should have been aware that their activities would arouse state interest.
My personal suspicion (just a hunch) is that the defendants were deliberately responsible for the burglary report. If that could be shown, they should be convicted. Such decision-making, however, should be the function of a jury.
BTW, one more thing I'd like to see as a legal practice change: make it 'acceptable' for a court to dismiss a case without prejudice and publicly state some acceptable arguments. There clearly were IMHO some arguments the Lawrence defendants should have been able to use that should have resulted in a remand, but they didn't use them. Had the Court told the defendants what arguments to use, the Court would then have been able to accept the defendants' case based on those arguments without setting bad precedent, or--if the defendants refused to offer such arguments--upheld the prosecution while making clear that the defendants--not the Court--were to blame.
Dog Gone is exactly correct. What once was a short and simple document is now (in its practical application) an unwieldingly long and complex set of legal precedents due to nearly 200 years of Supreme Court rulings. Each time they rule on the Constitution, it gets tweaked a little bit more. Supreme Court decisions have been officially archived since about 1825, I think, and in their entirety, are something comparable to 40 sets of encyclopedias. Experts on constitutional law are experts, not becasue they know the US Consitution so well, but because they've read and studied Supreme Court decisions.
I agree with you that you can't understand how the Constitution applies in real life just by reading it. Not even the framers could agree on what it meant, not even at the time it was written. It's full of compromises and gaps that had to be filled in over time, not always very satisfactorily.
A lot of the arguments about "strict construction" vs. "living breathing etc." are just a way of saying "I am right and you are wrong." Scalia is as bad as any of the rest of them in pretending that he's a "strict constructionist" when he really means "my interpretation is the correct one." They all do it. They always have.
For example - the author of the posted article says that "the Constitution relied on the Bible." Well, that's not anywhere in the Constitution, and there are plenty of sources that beg to differ. Argue about it all you want, it's still just an opinion.
Conveniently packaged as if it were factual in the hope that you are easily bamboozled, especially when you read something you want to believe because you like what it says.