Posted on 01/07/2005 3:51:55 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
The most important legal document in America is the United States Constitution; and, when asked, more than 90% of the American people say the Constitution is important to them. Congress also recognized the ongoing importance of this document in 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was asked to proclaim September 17 to 23 of each year as "Constitution Week" in remembrance of the signing of the United States Constitution.
This year, two hundred and sixteen years after the Constitution was adopted, many Americans will celebrate Constitution Week with recitations of the Preamble, with events reliving the signing of the Constitution, and even with a special ceremony of public bell ringing in Philadelphia where this important document was drafted.
But just how many Americans have actually read the Constitution or know what this document actually says? After all, many law schools do not even require that law students read the Constitution as part of their program of study.
According to various surveys taken of the American people in recent years, 95% of them could not correctly answer basic questions about the Constitution:
Despite this lack of knowledge about the Constitution, 84% of Americans believe that in order for our American constitutional form of government to work as intended, Americans are required to function as an active and informed citizenry. Citizenship Week this September is a good time for all Americans, and especially Christians, to resolve to become both informed about the Constitution and active in ensuring its preservation.
The following is a list of the key provisions in the various articles of the United States Constitution. If you learn these few facts, you will instantly be more informed about our Constitution than the vast majority of Americans.
Other key amendments that have become part of the Constitution include: the abolition of slavery (Amendment XIII: 1865); authority for a federal income tax (Amendment XVI: 1913); the right of women to vote (Amendment XIX: 1920); a two term limit for Presidents (Amendment XXII: 1951); lowering of the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen years (Amendment XXVI: 1971), and delaying the effective date of Congressional pay raises until after an election (Amendment XXVII: 1992).
Finally, there have been fifty bills proposing additional amendments to the Constitution of the United States introduced into the current 108th Congress. Many of these proposed amendments are attempts to check the extraordinary powers currently being exercised by the federal judiciary, which are often contrary to the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives at the state and federal levels. The following proposed Constitutional amendments currently before the Congress specifically focus on moral and religious issues:
It is intentionally very difficult to enact and ratify a Constitutional amendment. An amendment must be approved by two-thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate, and then be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures or by conventions in three-fourths of the states. This difficulty was intended to make amendments rare and to preserve the stability of the government.
James Madison, who was the father of our Constitution, understood that men could not effectively govern themselves without a clear understanding of the Biblical doctrine of man’s inherent sinfulness. As a result, he drafted the Constitution so that no one branch of government was given absolute control over the others and so that a rigorous system of checks and balances would protect the people from tyranny. The following provisions demonstrate this basic theological understanding:
When the first Congress, assembled after the Constitution was ratified by the states and took effect in September 1789, one of the first acts of the legislators was to ask the President…
[T]o recommend to the People of the United States, a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed, by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a Constitution of Government for their safety and happiness.
More than 200 years later, we should share this same spirit of thanksgiving and prayer, particularly as we consider that James Madison and other Founding Fathers described the successful drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution as a miracle which could only have been brought about by Divine intervention.
All Americans, and especially Christians, should also carefully consider the advice of our first two Presidents as we celebrate our continuing Constitutional government, which has served us so well for these past two centuries.
President George Washington said in his Inaugural Address on April 30, 1789:
[T]he propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.
President George Washington said in his Farewell Address on September 19, 1796:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. . . . And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. . . . reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
Finally, John Adams, our second President, warned in 1798:
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
As Christians, it is our duty to maintain the moral and religious foundation on which our society was built and for which our Constitution was drafted. We must work hard to resist the efforts of those who would tear down the moral fabric of our society and undermine the true intent of America’s Founding Fathers.
A good first step to defending the Constitution is learning what it actually says. A second good step would be to pass that knowledge along to your children, grandchildren, and fellow citizens. Finally, a good third step would be to thank God for the Constitution that we have the privilege of living under in this nation. Then also pray that the spiritual and moral intent of the men who wrote the Constitution would be revived once again in our land.
How was roe v. wade decided on the issue of privacy using the 9th amendment?
Amendment IX: Retention of non-enumerated rights by the people;
Maybe Constitutional Law drives people nuts because of the way of the country today, or drives them out of Constitutional Law.
Ann Coulter and Mark Levin were constitutional lawyers.
-PJ
Gee. I wonder how many pubic screwels even mention the Costitution during this week. I mean, does it coincide and interfere with MLK Day, or some Salaam-Farqua-Abdul-Mysalami day, or perhaps a week of Gay Studies and "How You Can Learn to Love Butt Boogieing"?
FMCDH(BITS)
Anybody wanna tell me what the mechanism is that was used to subvert a 3 branch republic into a one branch tyranny? I know what it is, I'm taking responses.
Where is Jonestown? I first read it as Jonesville - which is near Marshall.
I believe the 10th amendment and the enumeration of powers was supposed to bind the federal government. It is quiet a shame that the Bill of Right, as they are called, are not entitled the Bill of Federal Government Allowances and Restrictions. We have slowly come to think that the 1st amendment restricts our religious liberties when in fact it was designed to keep the federal government to the hell away from ruling on this matter. The 2nd amendment was never designed to mean the federal goverment would allow the people to have or not bear arms. We told the federal government that we would not let them say anything about the subject. And so on. We have forgotten the lessons of our forefathers and we suffer now because inexcusibly we have not taken care of our God given freedoms. There is always a strong man ready to take them and use them against us.
Maybe someday I'll write a book on this, but I don't think enough people would care to make it work.
But the Constitution was flawed, in that nobody could be the final authority. That was perfect for the model of checks and balances, but it's no way to run a country, especially when nobody was the final authority as to what the Constitution requires and prohibits.
Our Founders were absolutely brilliant, but they didn't think this one through to its logical conclusion.
That's why the Supreme Court made a power grab in Marbury v. Madison to fix the flaw.
And frankly, it's the logical fix. Presumably, at least at the time, legal scholars who had read the Federalist Papers and had become learned in the law could make more informed decisions on how the Constitution should be applied than anyone in the other branches of government.
While briefly ignored at the time, Marbury has stood the test of time. We now leave the final decision on what the Constitution requires to the US Supreme Court. And it's worked fairly well. We are the most free country on the planet.
The downside to it is the decisions that we don't like, and I don't think I have to name them. Some are based on specious legal reasoning, and some are essentially based on something wholly imaginary.
We have to deal with those, while recognizing that the Supreme Court doesn't like to reverse itself at all. It's incredibly rare. Nibbling at the edges of previous decisions is they way it almost always chooses to go, until finally a previous decision topples under its own weight.
Sudden Supreme Court decisions almost never happen.
In any event, I'm more comfortable with the Supreme Court telling us what the Constitution requires than whatever jackass President might get elected. The Supreme Court respects past rulings, which means the Ship of State can only turn slowly. That's a good thing.
Don't make it any higher than fourth. Lawyers are worse than wives, always seeing danger and threats in everything that's fun.
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.
It was also a perfectly logical fix when Andrew Jackson said, "Mr. Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it."
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.
"...notwithstanding this abstract view of the co-ordinate and independent right of the three departments to expound the Constitution, the Judicial department most familiarizes itself to the public attention as the expositor, by the order of its functions in relation to the other departments; and attracts most the public confidence by the composition of the tribunal.
It is the Judicial department in which questions of constitutionality, generally find their ultimate discussion and operative decision… "
There can be no final authority if the people are. That's not really a "flaw"- effectively the mob rules if their desires do not filter through the elected branches. I'm probably not being very clear- but there has to be a blank spot at the top for "the people".
"some are essentially based on something wholly imaginary. "
Yep, them's the ones I mean. They usually start off with a sentence like" "the Founders give us little guidance..."
I don't think I disagree with any of those points, although I'm having a little difficulty reading this thread while trying to devour enchiladas at the keyboard. I'm finding that challenging at the moment.
Perhaps it was logical, but it wasn't practical. Somebody or something has to be the final word, or civil war would break out every generation.
If the Supreme Court doesn't like what the President does, how are they going to stop him?
When Civil War did break out, who saved the union? Was it the Supreme Court, or was it they who caused the war with their incorrect rulings?
Ultimately, we the people control the power. It's only because we believe that the President must follow the orders of the Supreme Court that he'll do so.
Even the Supreme Court is subject to political pressure from us. That's why the fights over new appointments are the most critical political events for our country, whether most people realize it or not. It's FAR more important than a presidential election, and certainly any congressional one.
But I have no illusions. If 75% of us decide that we want the USA to go commie, the Supreme Court will ultimately allow it. It's just a trailing indicator of public opinion.
The war was going to happen, no matter what. The reasons were complex, far more so than are taught at anywhere below the university level, but they involved very diverse economic, moral, and legal reasons. Political, too, I suppose. You can't blame it on any cause, although that's what is typically done.
Best regards,
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