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To: Jim 0216
Do you really think that overturning Social Security and Medicare, making sweatshops and Jim Crow possible again, and otherwise weakening the protections of the Bill of Rights would be a political winner? Or that these views can be sold on the basis that they are more in keeping with a document written centuries ago by white men in periwigs who met in secret, wrote with quill pens, and thought slavery tolerable?

Moreover, a comprehensive and abrupt reversal of more two centuries of judicial precedents to arrive at a true, original view of the Constitution is simply not going to happen and is not desirable. Many of the changes in constitutional doctrine that conservative scholars are critical of in the abstract are popular and election-winning. In many instances, Supreme Court decisions were the trigger for essential changes in American life like the end of segregation.

There is no way around the need to learn and engage with the body of American constitutional law as it is and to fight for changes, case by case, based on good reason from where we are, not where we would prefer to be. Originalism, or textualism as Justice Scalia took late to calling it, is a powerful critique of modern constitutional law but should not be fashioned into an engine of destruction.

The better approach is to appoint reliable conservative judges who will gradually undo the worst doctrines and decisions. In other words, the better approach is to win political power and then exercise it in a conservative and responsible manner.

94 posted on 07/14/2017 12:40:26 PM PDT by Rockingham
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To: Rockingham
overturning Social Security and Medicare, making sweatshops and Jim Crow possible again, and otherwise weakening the protections of the Bill of Rights

Who said anything about that?

a comprehensive and abrupt reversal of more two centuries of judicial precedents

It's about a century of reversing unconstitutional decisions that overturned about a century of constitutional precedents.

appoint reliable conservative judges who will gradually undo the worst doctrines and decisions. In other words, the better approach is to win political power and then exercise it in a conservative and responsible manner.

Substitute "reliable conservative" (nobody knows what a "conservative" is) with "judges faithful to the Constitution as written and originally understood and intended" and I think you're on the right track.

95 posted on 07/14/2017 6:32:01 PM PDT by Jim W N
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