Posted on 05/24/2007 6:03:30 AM PDT by Rebeleye
...he was stunned to see two large Confederate flags flying from trucks...emblazoned with the words "The South Shall Rise Again." I'm stunned, too, that people still think it is cool to fly this flag. Our society should bury these flags -- not flaunt them...because the Confederate flag symbolizes racial tyranny to so many... ...This flag doesn't belong on city streets, in videos or in the middle of civil discussion. It belongs in our past -- in museums and in history books -- along with the ideas it represents.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansas.com ...
So, I guess it doesn’t matter one bit who is on the bench.
“Nothing in the Constitution says I have to agree with their decision in order for it to be valid. Same with you.”
Actually, nothing in the Constitution gives them the power to do what they have done. Their decision in that case is unconstitutional and illegal.
I never said that.
Actually, nothing in the Constitution gives them the power to do what they have done. Their decision in that case is unconstitutional and illegal.
Article 3, Section 2: "In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." "Jurisdiction" is defined as "the power, right, or authority to interpret and apply the law". Constitutionally they do have that power.
Sounds like it, if you view all USSC decisions as valid. Does that include decisions based on cherry-picked foreign law?
“Constitutionally they do have that power.”
No, they don’t. They assumed that power themselves. This “sole arbiter of the Constitution” thing. Congress is too cowardly to call them on it. Constitutionally, they have very LITTLE power beyond what is granted by Congress. They (read the Federalist Papers) were intended to be the weakest branch, not the strongest.
I'm merely pointing out that nowhere in the Constitution does it say a Supreme Court decision needs your approval to be valid.
Does that include decisions based on cherry-picked foreign law?
For example?
No, they don’t. They assumed that power themselves. This “sole arbiter of the Constitution” thing. Congress is too cowardly to call them on it. Constitutionally, they have very LITTLE power beyond what is granted by Congress. They (read the Federalist Papers) were intended to be the weakest branch, not the strongest.
Marshall summed it up in his Marbury v. Madison decision, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each." My question to you is if not the Supreme Court then who? Would you have the court not be a branch at all? Do away with the checks and balances altogether? Let Congress and the President do what they wish because, after all, that's how Jeff Davis wanted it?
Just another Democrat trying to stop things that should have been done 90+ years beforehand. Obstruction, not Reconstruction, is what held back Dixie for so long.
And just look how that got watered down. It was missing entirely from the final version of the constitution. When the confederate congress passed their legislation authorizing the delegation, the wording had changed from specifically mentioning debt and property to "...the settlement of all questions of disagreement between the two governments upon principles of right, justice, equity, and good faith." Davis watered it down even further in his letter to Lincoln, making an offer to "...agree, treat, consult, and negotiate of and concerning all matters and subjects interesting to both nations..." What if Davis didn't find responsibility for debt or payment for property seized a matter or subject of interest? I suppose it wouldn't have come up for discussion.
Regardless, both the confederate congress and Jefferson Davis made any talks contingent on the Lincoln administration first recognizing confederate sovereignty. If Lincoln had admitted that their acts of secession were legal then wouldn't that have meant recognizing all their steps to date, including repudiating debt and seizing federal property, legal as well? Removing any need for payment of any kind?
And I'm supposed to be impressed by Judah Benjamin? Ethnic background is irrelevant when his edict had a part in sanctioning a Confederate oppression in East Tennessee that would have impressed the Gestapo.
Southern dominated? The parties were split almost evenly since the Constituion was ratified. Southerners weren't stupid, tariffs were the only method of raising revenue, Southerners wanted monies to be allocated for DEFENSE, not pork.
Here is a plank from the Republican Platform of 1860, calling for reform of tariffs: "12. That, while providing revenue for the support of the General Government by duties upon imports, sound policy requires such an adjustment of these imposts as to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country ...
Economics is not a difficult subject - the Republican Party advocated HIGHER tariffs (DUH - that encourages 'industrial interests'). These industrial interests are the northern capitalists/industrialists - not the average workers.
... we commend that policy of national exchanges which secures to the working men liberal wages...
Note these are NOT agricultural interests - those are referenced next in the plank. These 'working men' are northern workers, employed by the 'industrial interests' ante. The only way that northern men can be guaranteed higher wages is to enact TARIFFS on their competition, ensuring that their products are the cheapest (even at higher prices). Simple economics would have market forces set the wages, not to rely on artificial protection.
... to agriculture remunerating prices ... The Republican platform relating to the South is for them to simply be compensated for their efforts, no artificial protections. In other words to compete on the world market as should have the northern industries, but Republicans/yankees we economically chicken.
... to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor and enterprise.... Another reference to northern workers/industry - the Republican plank is one of REWARD (above average renumeration).
Southerners weren't stupid - the Republican platform was one that pillaged the South in favour of lining Northern pockets with Southern gold, and one of expending the bulk of tariff receipts on yankee soil.
As Judge Judy Sheindlin wrote, 'Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining'.
I find it hard to believe that tariffs were the driving issue that the post-war Lost Cause types propose. It didn't seem to concern the Dems in 1860.
The South had protested high protectionist tariffs almost from the founding. Speeches in Congress, sectionalism, a threat of secession in the 1830's, continuous agitation between the states over revenues and expenditures had occurred for decades. History, you can learn a lot from it.
Lamon says the following in his book, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln:
My interview with Governor Perkins was, to me, a memorable one. After saying to him what President Lincoln had directed me to say, a general discussion took place touching on the critical state of public affairs.
Apparently Lincoln himself had directed Lamon to say the fort would be evacuated. Lincoln later changed his mind or later revealed what he had intended all along. Right before the fleet was to arrive, he sent a letter advising Governor Pickens that an attempt would be made to re-provision the fort. However, the fleet was delayed by storms and didn't arrive when expected.
I suspect Lincoln was trying to catch the South off guard by giving so little advance warning as to cause the South to make a precipitate hasty decision to attack the fort when confronted with an armed fleet. Given Lincoln's short history of being duplicitous about the evacuation of the fort, there was no real assurance that the fleet would not reinforce the fort, despite Lincoln's claims to the contrary.
If Lincoln had intended peace he would have informed the Governor of his intention to resupply the fort with food earlier than that -- Lincoln had been working on the secret fleet plan some 8-10 days before Pickens received the letter. Nobody said Lincoln wasn't shrewd or devious.
It was also only after the fleet preparations became known that the South stopped allowing Anderson to buy provisions in Charleston.
If the Republican tariff policies were such a dominant issue, why did the northern Midwest, which was also largely agricultural, have strong support for the Republicans?
When mutilated masters returned from the bloodbath, some slaves raged as well as wept. "Dey brung" Massa Billy home, one South Carolina slave grieved to a contemporary, "with he jaw split open . . . He teeth all shine through he cheek. . . . I be happy iffen I could kill me jes’ one Yankee. I hated dem ’cause dey hurt my white people."
William W. Freehling, The South Vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War, New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 90.
Sure slavery was wrong but the myth that slaves were regularly beaten and killed is wrong.
Some even carried guns, but the revisionists would one believe therwise.
Other aspects of the new work regimen operated to the slaves’ advantage. Slave lumbermen, many of them hired out for short periods of time, carried axes and, like slave drovers and herdsmen, were generally armed with knives and guns – necessities for men who worked in the wild and hunted animals for food and furs. Woodsmen had access to horses, as did slaves who tended cattle and swine. Periodic demands that slaveowners disarm their slaves and restrict their access to horses and mules confirmed that many believed these to be dangerous practices, but they did nothing to halt them. In short, slave lumbermen and drovers were not to be trifled with. Their work allowed considerable mobility and latitude in choosing their associates and bred a sense of independence, not something planters wanted to encourage. Slaves found it a welcome relief from the old plantation order.
Ira Berlin. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, Boston, MA: Harvard Univerity Press, 2004, pp. 90-91.
Yes, Southern Democrat dominated. If you look at the make up of the Congresses from the "Nullification Crisis" in 1832, through the election of 1858, you will discover that the majority of the time, the Dems held the house, and held the Senate almost continually. It is in the late 50's, culminating in the Dem meltdown of 1860, that they began to lose grip.
Southerners weren't stupid, tariffs were the only method of raising revenue, Southerners wanted monies to be allocated for DEFENSE, not pork.
Tariffs paid mostly in Northern ports.
sound policy requires such an adjustment of these imposts as to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country ...
Economics is not a difficult subject - the Republican Party advocated HIGHER tariffs (DUH - that encourages 'industrial interests'). These industrial interests are the northern capitalists/industrialists - not the average workers.
Interesting you didn't choose to bold the phrase "of the whole country". Instead, you go directly to claiming industry only benefited the North.
.. we commend that policy of national exchanges which secures to the working men liberal wages...
Note these are NOT agricultural interests - those are referenced next in the plank. These 'working men' are northern workers, employed by the 'industrial interests' ante.
To echo you, DUH. The laborers of the "agricultural interests" of the South were SLAVES. Fat chance prying any "liberal wages" out of the plantation owners for them.
... to agriculture remunerating prices ... The Republican platform relating to the South is for them to simply be compensated for their efforts, no artificial protections.
... to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor and enterprise.... Another reference to northern workers/industry - the Republican plank is one of REWARD (above average renumeration).
Such is your parsed spin on the meanings. In actuality, "remunerating" and "rewarding" are synonyms. And "adequate" reward is now "above average"? Who is trying to pee on whose leg?
The South had protested high protectionist tariffs almost from the founding.
Because they were in the near monopoly position of producing a product, cotton, and didn't need the tariff protection that their Northern countrymen did for their fledgling industrial sector.
So, are you currently a "free trader", or do you think we need to place some restrictive tariffs on, say, China?
Spot on! Good post.
Devout Christian? Conservative? Just as Osama bin Laden and Sadaam Hussein are devout right?
He just believed slavery was an abomination and used pretty extreme tactics to see it abolished.
Despite the fact that neither God nor Jesus Christ condemned it, or listed it in any one of the ten "Commandments" (breaking one of those condemned one to an eternal hell absent God's forgiveness).
Extreme tactics? Like murder, butchering 5 innocent civilians in Kansas; theft, robbery, mutilation, armed insurrection, and treason?
I am anti-slavery, anti-abortion, but that goes not grant me the right to kill anyone because of it. John Brown wasn't a madman, he was lucid, an archetypical Jim Jones.
Two things, can you point to anyone/anything granting Abraham Lincoln the power to act as a moral surrogate for our Lord and Saviour? Jesus Christ healed the slave of a Roman centurion while praising the guard for his faith - never once did He condemn him.
And two, can you cite any Biblical verse that condemns slavery or slaveowners? In I Tim 6 slaves are exhorted to praise their masters and in Exodus 21 the guidelines of the sale and treatment of slaves are proscribed.
Anyone understanding basic economics, especially someone degreed in such, understands that protectionist tariffs on imports reduce the available money supply for purchases in kind, thereby repressing the exports of the importer. It's not rocket science.
... that the imports we had (esp. in the south) were different types of finished textiles than the U.S. produced.
The bulk of goods imported were not textile. The textile export revenues of the South were affected. Less revenue for foreign exporters to the US resulted in less money available to purchase Southern textile exports. It's simple economics.
In other words, we would have bought them whether the tariff was there or not at the same prices.
Wrong. The quality of goods also affect the desirability, aka demand. Despite the North churning out vast amounts of inferior products, the South continued to purchase superior European products to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
The more work that economic historians do on the tariff issue, the weaker and weaker it becomes as an issue for secession. The data is not on your side.
I guess that explains why the South protested over the amount of the tariffs almost since our founding? </sarcasm>
My how things have changed. </sarcasm> If this were true today it would blow the entire Wal-Mart business plan right out of the water.
2) In the major speeches, they were overwhelmingly focused on slavery, not the tariff.
3) No, it's not "wrong." The fact is, if you import bananas and you don't make bananas, you either get them or you don't. A small tax on bananas doesn't do a lot to change consumption if there are no subsitutes. What the new evidence on the tariff is showing is that the types of imports covered by the tariffs were subject to substitution---you could buy British textiles, or make your own, or whatever. But southerners were not locked into buying the products. They CHOSE to buy them, then grouse about it.
I do NOT favor a tariff, period, and certainly not one disporportionately aimed at a particular group. But it's sophistry and a smokescreen to try to blame the tariff for disunion and secession. It was all about slavery. They knew it, and you know it.
No, you're supposed to be impressed by the lack of ethnic malice evinced by the Confederates who elevated him to a public trust that he could have occupied in no country of contemporary Europe save Britain.
That includes many of the Northern States, methinks, where white-shoe antisemitism burst fully into the open five or ten years after the Civil War, when Jews were suddenly excluded from the summer watering-holes of the well-to-do in upstate New York.
Be impressed by that.
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