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Tea Party will never understand the Constitution: What the right misses about its favorite document
Salon ^ | April 21, 2015 | Elias Isquith

Posted on 04/21/2015 1:28:33 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

GOP candidates constantly invoke the Constitution. A Yale Law professor reveals what they all fail to understand.

With the 2016 election cycle having kicked into first-gear already, any American who hasn’t inured themselves to the monotonous (and often ultimately meaningless) repetition of the word “Constitution” is advised to get to self-desensitizing — and quick.

Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have already made a fetishized version of the U.S.’s supreme governing document central to their campaign rhetoric; and even politicians less beloved by the supposedly Constitution-crazy Tea Party, like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, are likely to soon follow suit. That’s how American politics functions now, in the era of the NSA, Guantanamo Bay, lethal drone strikes and endless war.

But as that list of questionable policies suggests, there’s an unanswered question lurking behind so much of our happy talk about the Constitution — namely, do we even understand it? As dozens of polls and public surveys will attest, the answer is, not really. And that’s one of the reasons that Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar has decided to write a multi-book series about the Constitution so many Americans claim to love, but so few seem to understand. “The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of our Constitutional Republic,” released earlier this month, is that project’s latest addition.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Amar about the Constitution, his books, and why he sees Abraham Lincoln as perhaps the United States’s real founding father....

(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...


TOPICS: Government; Politics; Weird Stuff
KEYWORDS: 2016election; abortion; conservatives; constitution; deathpanels; demagogicparty; election2016; eliasisquith; homosexualagenda; indiana; memebuilding; mikepence; obamacare; partisanmediashill; partisanmediashills; rfra; salon; teaparty; tedcruz; texas; zerocare
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To: Eddie01
What a colossal mess this Yalie is. One of links in the Salon piece goes to this book written by the autorh, which ostensibly informs his "knowledge" about the real meaning of the Constitution.

It's instructive that a "professor" who thinks the Constitution doesn't mean what it says imparts that belief onto every graduating law student/politician. This is why it was an imperative for the communists to gain control of education.

41 posted on 04/21/2015 1:54:28 PM PDT by Sgt_Schultze (If a border fence isn't effective, why is there a border fence around the White House?)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Well, he’s not Muslim.


42 posted on 04/21/2015 1:55:05 PM PDT by Conscience of a Conservative
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To: miss marmelstein

Gawd, you HAVE to be kidding.


43 posted on 04/21/2015 1:55:17 PM PDT by RushIsMyTeddyBear (The White House is now known as "Casa Blanca".)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

A muzzie is educating us on the Constitution?

Wow.. The end really is near.


44 posted on 04/21/2015 1:56:23 PM PDT by NormsRevenge (Semper Fi - Revolution is a'brewin!!!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

HAHAHAHAHA An author for Salon lecturing on the constitution.


45 posted on 04/21/2015 1:56:32 PM PDT by Organic Panic
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
And...

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

-- Abraham Lincoln, in a letter o Horace Greely, August 26, 1862.

46 posted on 04/21/2015 1:56:38 PM PDT by WayneS (Barack Obama makes Neville Chamberlin look like George Patton.)
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To: Regulator
Oddly, I don't think I'll find his family name on the 1790 census.

Or the 1960 census for that matter.

Well, considering that he was born in the U.S. in 1958, I'd say you might be wrong. But boy, he sure does have a funny sounding name, amiright?

47 posted on 04/21/2015 1:57:16 PM PDT by Conscience of a Conservative
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Salon surely is Satan’s mouthpiece.


48 posted on 04/21/2015 1:57:27 PM PDT by grumpygresh (Democrats & GOPe delenda est. President zero gave us patient zero.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Ted Cruz doesn’t understand the Constitution?? (from Wiki)

He served as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to May 2008, after being appointed by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott

Cruz was also an adjunct professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, from 2004 to 2009. While there, he taught U.S. Supreme Court litigation.

Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy.

After graduating from Princeton, Cruz attended Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1995 with a Juris Doctor degree


49 posted on 04/21/2015 1:57:54 PM PDT by driftdiver (I could eat it raw, but why do that when I have a fire.)
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To: reasonisfaith

The underlying political difference between the left and right is that the left has an inherent trust in gov’t,
and the right, as did the founders, have an inherent distrust of govt.

These political differences are based on a basic split on the answer to “who is Man”.


50 posted on 04/21/2015 1:58:05 PM PDT by MrB (The difference between a Humanist and a Satanist - the latter admits whom he's working for)
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To: x

Lincoln didn’t give a hoot about slavery. If he did than why did he wait 1 1/2 years AFTER the Civil war started to give his Emancipation Proclamation? He did it because the war had become a drag on the North and they were actually LOSING the war at this point. AFTER his proclamation the North rallied and there was much more support for the war. I believe Slavery was a strawman rather than the reason. MONEY was always the reason. Free labor=Cheaper textiles!! The South was eating the North’s lunch when it came to manufacturing.


51 posted on 04/21/2015 1:58:45 PM PDT by timlilje
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To: RushIsMyTeddyBear

Gawd, no I’m not kidding. I assume that you’re responding to my remark that a friend of mine thinks that the American Indian wrote the Constitution? How does that have anything to do with the Magna Carta, et al?


52 posted on 04/21/2015 1:59:43 PM PDT by miss marmelstein (Richard the Third: "I should like to drive away not only the Turks (moslims) but all my foes.")
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
The Civil War was fought to save the union...not free the slaves. The freedom of the slaves was actually a side result.

The mistaken idea by the "constitutional scholar" Mr. Amar that without Lincoln the slaves would never have been freed or that we wouldn't have subsequent constitutional amendments banning slavery is preposterous. It's the old faulty logic that if one person hadn't done a certain thing, no one else would have ever done it.

53 posted on 04/21/2015 2:00:15 PM PDT by driftless2
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To: MrB

Great point.


54 posted on 04/21/2015 2:00:53 PM PDT by reasonisfaith ("...because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." (2 Thessalonians))
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Never mind the countless conservative authors who have examined the Constitution, the Founders, and their ideals in microscopic detail. Some latter-day deconstructionist liberal comes along and BAM! All knowledge to date becomes obsolete in the light of his brilliant discovery!

Or, one might suspect that this highly regarded Ivy League nobody is more full of crap than a Christmas goose, and is simply trying to rewrite history to empower his feeble ideological brethren, who seemingly can't survive without lies.

55 posted on 04/21/2015 2:01:06 PM PDT by IronJack
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To: buwaya
"editorializing...unsupported"

ditto.

56 posted on 04/21/2015 2:01:22 PM PDT by driftless2
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To: amnestynone

“I suppose that they do understand it! Obviously they don’t care about it.”

And THAT, my dear, is the gist of it.

They simply ignore. Because they don’t like it. They can’t like the Constitution when they basically hate all of America including its history, and the Constitution is really what defines “America”.


57 posted on 04/21/2015 2:01:36 PM PDT by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Federal-run medical care is as good as state-run DMVs.)
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To: oldplayer
This is the author:

Personally, I won't click on Salon, but whenever a liberal Obama shill like him professes to know more about the Constitution than even the most ignorant conservative, I call BS.

I don't need to click on the link to know what this person will say. I have said it many times over the years, I am grateful to liberals, in that you can glean the entire contents of their article or book by reading the first few words of what they say. They give it all away right up front, which is not bad, because they have saved me days, if not weeks of having to read their pap.

To know what they are thinking and what they plan to do, you need to do only two things: Listen to them, or note what they accuse their enemies of.

58 posted on 04/21/2015 2:02:44 PM PDT by rlmorel ("National success by the Democratic Party equals irretrievable ruin." Ulysses S. Grant)
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To: WayneS
I hereby retract my comment regarding Professor Amar being "muslim", and request that the last sentence of my post be amended to read:

"This leftist moron and his "Salon.com" sycophants know less about the U.S. Constitution than my cats know."

Thank you.

59 posted on 04/21/2015 2:05:01 PM PDT by WayneS (Barack Obama makes Neville Chamberlin look like George Patton.)
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To: timlilje

The north went to war to defend the union and wound up saving the slaves. The south went to war to defend slavery and wound up losing everything.


60 posted on 04/21/2015 2:05:56 PM PDT by rockrr (Everything is different now...)
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