Posted on 01/09/2006 8:26:54 AM PST by PatrickHenry
More like Salem.
The ramifications, quite simply, would be granting the judiciary the power to legislate and to amend the Constitution by judicial fiat.
That would pose a problem, since the 14th Amendment was passed in 1866. The Civil Rights Act of 1871 gave rise to the 15th Amendment.
Is your daughter taught that Islam is a reasonable alternative tomainstream science? Is she taught this in science class?
I tend to agree that teaching about Islam outside of a religion or philosophy class, and without including all the major world religions is unbalanced and probably unconstitutional.
Like that would be possible. But we can dream.
Hey lady, aren't you're cats hungry?
Hey lady, aren't your cats hungry?
They did do that...those rights found in the 1866 Civil Rights Act are what were known as "privileges and immunities"...the legal term of art that means that person A (or in the case of the 1866 Civil Rights Act...a black person) will be treated no differently than anyone else by the state
John Bingham himself, who the incorporation advocates always cite as "proof" that the 14th Amendment was designed to incorporate the Bill of Rights, did not believe Congress had the authority to pass the 1866 Civil Rights Act. So, Bingham stated many times that he had drawn the “privileges or immunities” clause of the 14th Amendment from Article IV, Section 2. I don't think there is doubt in anyone's mind at what the P&I clause in the Article IV was intended to accomplish. The problem with Article IV is that it had nothing to say as to how states treated blacks within that state. It did prohibit states from discriminating against blacks from other states but, unlike Article I, Section 8, Article IV provides no enforcement power...so the 14th Amendment, by guaranteeing that every state had to treat blacks in that states on the same footing as whites, effectively remedied the defects in Article IV from which Bingham says he took the P&I clause of the 14th Amendment.
As to Bingham...as I wrote before...he said many contradictory things about the 14th Amendment. In 1871, he himself submitted a Judiciary Committee report on the 14th Amendment that stated:
the 14th Amendment does not in the opinion of the committee, refer to privileges and immunities . . . other than those privileges and immunities embraced in the original text of the Constitution, Article IV, Section 2. The 14th Amendment, it is believed, did not add to the privileges and immunities before mentioned.
He also stated during debate on the 14th Amendment that, under it, "the care of the property, the liberty, and the life of the citizen . . . is in the States and not in the federal government. I have sought to effect no change in that respect."
He also stated "this proposed amendment does not impose upon any State . . . an obligation which is not now enjoined upon them by the very letter of the Constitution."
Bingham was all over the map and its never been clear to what he was referring in his statements on incorporation. Most of remarks cited in support of incorporation were taken from Bingham's remarks concerning his proposed amendment “The Congress shall have power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper to secure to citizens of each State all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States and to all persons in the several States equal protection in the rights of life, liberty, and property.
Bingham claimed his amendment “stands in the very words of the Constitution . . . Every word . . . is today in the Constitution." (as was typical with Bingham on this topic, he didn't have his facts quite right as “every word” was not “in the Constitution”...“equal protection” did not appear at all)
"[T]hese great provisions of the Constitution,” he continued, “this immortal bill of rights embodied in the Constitution, rested for its execution and enforcement hitherto upon the fidelity of the States." As Professor Fairman pointed out in his article, Bingham was discussing Article IV, Section 2, and the 5th Amendment due process clause which Bingham equated with “equal protection. There is no reason to believe that his subsequent references to the Bill of Rights extended beyond those...and certainly his fellow Republicans did not believe that the 14th Amendment did more. William Higby of California thought that the Article IV, Section 2, clause and the 5th Amendment due process clause constituted “precisely what will be provided” by the Bingham amendment.
Thaddeus Stevens, who was probably Bingham's closest confidant, once famously said of Bingham:
In all this contest about reconstruction I do not propose either to take his counsel, recognize his authority, or believe a word he says
Two years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court elaborated on "privileges and immunities" in Paul v Virgina:
It was undoubtedly the object of the clause in question to place the citizens of each State upon the same footing with citizens of other States, so far as the advantages resulting from citizenship in those States are concerned. It relieves them from the disabilities of alienage in other States; it inhibits discriminating legislation against them by other States; it gives them the right of free ingress into other States, and egress from them; it insures to them in other States the same freedom possessed by the citizen of those States in the acquisition and enjoyment of property and in the pursuit of happiness; and it secures to them in other States the equal protection of their laws
Don't you hate it when no one responds to your posts?
What cats?
What cats?
Dude, you are fricken hilarious.
No...but I believe we should be faithful to the Constitution and I trust the citizens of each of the 50 states and the people therein to take care of protecting the rights of their citizens as they see fit because I believe in the federalist system of government we were given
C'mon, unless she suffers from some sort of short-term memory loss, she's trolling for the lurkers.
Aside from that, you have nothing to offer in the way of answering the question other than to simply speculate that there were gradual steps. In a way, that makes even less sense.
At what point does a transitional form become a new species and why is any such transitional form not a separate species?
And none of ths even addresses the problem evolution has explaining how one classification of life can be transformed into another classification. An example would be how did a cold-blooded animal get transformed into a warm-blodded animal? Any answer to such a question requires a tremendous amount of speculation.
It's not nice to disabuse a guy of his ignorance. ;-)
Why not?
Because the mutational changes thru time recorded in specific sites in the genomes of two related emergant species are in different locations in the genome's DNA slice. We can usually tell what the extinct common ancestor's genes looked like, by cancelling out both sets of changes we observe in their disparate offspring. Since the changes are infrequent compared to the length of the genome itself, that doesn't leave crawlspace for an argument that the supposed ancestor was really a forerunner--what with being extinct and all.
Never in their wildest dreams did the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment think they were making the 1st Amendment applicable against the states.
I've read that argument, but it just doesn't make sense. Clearly the Founders anticipated the states to be bound by the Consitution - if rights can be curtailed by government in any form, they aren't rights.
Then there was the awareness that moving from a decentralized government in the form of the Articles of Confederation to a centralized on under the Constitution meant that the states would be subject to a measure of Federal control, which was why many state leaders (like Governor Clinton in New York) were so vehemently opposed to its ratification.
You can't seriously believe that the Founders intended states to be able to hold persons without trial, or be able to quarter troops in private homes without the owner's consent, or ban gun ownership. That just doesn't make sense - such freedoms are worthless unless the states are held to the same standards. Same for the First Amendment - it's worthless if the states are not bound by its guidelines.
Now, why is it that some states had laws on the books that were specificially un-Constitutional? I believe the answer is simple - the fragile experiment was too precious to let die, so some violations had to be ignored. The Founders were bold men capable of bold action but also very familiar with the concept of "small steps" when necessary. If ignoring a couple of laws on state books was what they needed to do, they were willing to do it. That part's just my opinion.
"We can usually tell"
But not always? So it's open to interpretation?
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