Neither of them were on the Supreme Court.
Walt
Ah, yes - your tired old cicular argument: you insist that the court determines what the Constitution means because the court says it determines what the Constitution means. One legal scholar recently made this observation regarding your court:
“The careful reader will no doubt notice that judges are not exactly the heroes and heroines of my tale [of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights]. Federal judges, after all, enthusiastically enforced the infamous Sedition Act of 1798, cheerfully sending men to prison for their antigovernmental speech and neutering juries along the way. It is hard to imagine a bigger betrayal of the original Bill of Rights, whether we look at the First, or the Sixth, or the Tenth Amendment. A century later, the Supreme Court strangled the privileges-or-immunities clause in its crib in the Slaughter-House Cases; blessed Jim Crow in Plesy; and blithely allowed judges to fine a newspaper publisher (in a juryless proceeding lacking specific statutory authorization) simply because the publisher had the audacity to criticize the very judges in question. [Patterson v. Colorado, 205 U.S. 454 (1907)] (Thus a single [federal] court acted as legislature, prosecutor, complaining witness, judge, and jury - quite a trick if you can get away with it.) Due process of law, according to the Taney Court, was satisfied by fugitive-slave hearings presided over by a financially biased adjudicator, but violated by free-soil laws like the Northwest Ordinance. And although Roger Taney himself (rightly) had doubts about the federal government’s power to draft citizens outside the Constitution’s careful militia system, the Supreme Court, in the Selective Draft Law Cases, gave this argument the back of its hand.
“...As Phillip Bobbitt and Richard Fallon have observed, textual arguments count in court - and so do arguments from history and original intent - but precedent counts, too. Judges must consider all these factors, and others as well, when deciding cases...”
In other words, the precedent established by your 'men in black' is hardly the flawless icon required by your 'whatever-the-court-says-is-right-is-right' argument. Perhaps you should consider "textual arguments," "history" and "original intent" (i.e., 'reality') from time to time...
;>)