Posted on 07/16/2014 8:55:06 AM PDT by reaganaut1
The “living Constitution” theory amounts to saying that Supreme Court justices should be allowed to rewrite the foundation of our government as they see fit, sometimes adding ideas that weren’t included, sometimes ignoring ideas that were.
Mostly, “living Constitution” decisions entail the latter, turning a blind eye to the document’s clear limits on governmental power.
From their experience with the British crown, the Founders had a deep fear of government and sought to keep its authority strictly limited. But their philosophy on the proper scope of government conflicts with the views of Americans who believe that ever-expanding state power is the key to a good society. For them, the real Constitution is an obstacle to their goals — hence the need for a pretty euphemism – “living Constitution” to cover up their undermining of the rule of law.
Where did this ruinous idea come from? When and how did it arise? My supposition had always been that it was a creation of the “progressives” in our legal system early in the last century, exemplified by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and liberal intellectuals who favored FDR’s vast expansion of federal authority.
That view is not exactly right, argues John Compton, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Chapman University, in his new book The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution. Compton contends that the “living Constitution” idea arose much earlier in our history, an outgrowth the moral reform movement that swept across the United States from the 1820s until the early decades of the 20th century.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
A “living Constitution” is in fact, NO CONSTITUTION.
The term “Living Constitution” came about after the failed ERA amendment. The left decided it was too hard to get a true Constitutional Amendment through the congress and the States.
Making the US Constitution a “Living Constitution” means that is says what I tell you it says!
Leftists love the Big Leader making all the rules as he goes along. Like what Obama is doing at the moment. They're instantly hypnotized by the charismatic pol who will lead the faithful to glory on earth. That many of them are themselves consumed by the out of control fires they create is lost on them.
Evangelical Christians of the 1820’s may have pushed for more vigorous federal enforcement actions against “demon rum,” but that is hardly the same thing as the progressives' “living Constitution.”
Secondly, the Constitution reserves the police powers to local government and the states: the Constitution does not forbid prohibitions against alcohol at the local level.
The Constitution is designed to ensure that the federal government is a limited government, that it can only engage in those activities laid out for it in the Constitution.
The idea of the federal government as a limited government is what the progressives wanted to undermine, and what they have achieved. Christian evangelicals of the 1820’s didn't want to create a leviathan, and to attribute that motive to them is nothing but ideologically-driven scholarship.
Chapman has long been associated with the Disciples of Christ, a mainstream Protestant denomination generally hostile to evangelical Christianity and which now is embracing homosexual marriage and homosexual clergy.
What is missing is any mention of the 16th, 17th Amendments which fundamentally upset our Framers’ constitution and lead to today's tyranny.
bump
Ben Franklin believed in a living Constitution and Thomas Jefferson assumed it would be drastically changed over time.
The living Constitution “theory” was explained/warned about brilliantly by ‘Brutus’/Robert Yates, thus the “theory” has been around since the Constitution was ratified. BTW, this is not a “theory”, this is a feature in the Constitution.
“I think that’s reasonable as long as the changes are made via the amendment process or a Constitutional convention, with the full knowledge and approval of a majority of the citizens. I’m not OK with members of the federal judiciary inventing their own revisions to the Constitution in courtrooms.”
I agree, to a certain extent. I do believe the bulk of the Constitution is the best possible ideology available to sinful man, and I think today’s populace is so ignorant and so self-serving that I don’t trust them to deviate an iota from the Founder’s wisdom on the things that could be improved.
Granted, though, that moral reform should have been pursued solely through local and state governments.
Amen to your post #5!
Most likely by the legitimate amendment process. Jefferson was, after all, the "father" of "strict constructionism" (the now de-facto "one true interpretation" of the Constitution to most conservatives--a position I disagree with).
The Constitution is NOT a “living document”. It is ink on paper, inanimate, and immutable. It cannot grow or change of its own volition. That is WHY it is written down. In their (compared to today’s morons) infinite wisdom, its authors included the means by which it could be changed, and it CANNOT AND MUST NOT be altered by any other means.
This has always been one of the stupidest pieces of “conventional wisdom”, along with, “rules are made to be broken”, and “its the exception that proves the rule”, that are accepted simply because someone said them, and it sounds confusing enough that it must be really, really smart.
It begins:
“The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution.”
It sounds like some “tea-party wacko,” but Lawson is a professor of law at Northwestern and the article originally appeared in the Harvard Law Review.
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/hlr107&div=63&g_sent=1&collection=journals#1251
So what is an 1820 Evangelical, if it is a category that we have had since almost the beginning of the nation, why don’t we have more complete and historical data on the “Evangelical”.
Also, the writings of Arthur Selwyn Miller, constitutional law professor and author of “The Rise of the Positive State.”
But I think it is inescapable that Woodrow Wilson put it into high gear. His personal diaries reveal that he believed that every age was defined by one single great thinker and that in his day that was Darwin. He saw progressivism through the lens of social Darwinism with the white race surviving as the fittest. At Princeton he became a big fan of the theory of eugenics as part of his world view. The progressive “liberalism” of his day, of which he was a major part, was infected with this thinking.
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