We need Ash on the SCOTUS!
"Allright you primitive screwheads! Listen up!!! THIS is my BOOM STICK!"
Posted on 07/07/2003 7:00:07 AM PDT by mrobison
LAW OF THE LAND
Justice: Can Constitution make it in global age?
On TV, Breyer wonders whether it will 'fit into governing documents of other nations'
Posted: July 7, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
In a rare appearance on a television news show, Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer questioned whether the U.S. Constitution, the oldest governing document in use in the world today, will continue to be relevant in an age of globalism.
Speaking with ABC News' "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos and his colleague Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Breyer took issue with Justice Antonin Scalia, who, in a dissent in last month's Texas sodomy ruling, contended the views of foreign jurists are irrelevant under the U.S. Constitution.
Breyer had held that a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that homosexuals had a fundamental right to privacy in their sexual behavior showed that the Supreme Court's earlier decision to the contrary was unfounded in the Western tradition.
"We see all the time, Justice O'Connor and I, and the others, how the world really – it's trite but it's true – is growing together," Breyer said. "Through commerce, through globalization, through the spread of democratic institutions, through immigration to America, it's becoming more and more one world of many different kinds of people. And how they're going to live together across the world will be the challenge, and whether our Constitution and how it fits into the governing documents of other nations, I think will be a challenge for the next generations."
In the Lawrence v Texas case decided June 26, Justice Anthony Kennedy gave as a reason for overturning a Supreme Court ruling of 17 years earlier upholding sodomy laws that it was devoid of any reliance on the views of a "wider civilization."
Scalia answered in his dissent: "The court's discussion of these foreign views (ignoring, of course, the many countries that have retained criminal prohibitions on sodomy) is ... meaningless dicta. Dangerous dicta, however, since this court ... should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans," he said quoting the 2002 Foster v. Florida case.
Scalia's scathing critique of the 6-3 sodomy ruling was unusual in its bluntness.
"Today's opinion is the product of a court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct," he wrote. Later he concluded: "This court has taken sides in the culture war."
Both O'Connor and Breyer sought to downplay antipathy between the justices – no matter how contentious matters before the court become. O'Connor said justices don't take harsh criticisms personally.
"When you work in a small group of that size, you have to get along, and so you're not going to let some harsh language, some dissenting opinion, affect a personal relationship," she said. "You can't do that."
Breyer agreed.
"So if I'm really put out by something, I can go to the person who wrote it and say, 'Look, I think you've gone too far here.'"
O'Connor, too, seemed to suggest in the ABC interview that the Constitution was far from the final word in governing America. Asked if there might come a day when it would no longer be the last word on the law, she said: "Well, you always have the power of entering into treaties with other nations which also become part of the law of the land, but I can't see the day when we won't have a constitution in our nation."
Asked to explain what he meant when he said judges who favor a very strict literal interpretation of the Constitution can't justify their practices by claiming that's what the framers wanted, Breyer responded: "I meant that the extent to which the Constitution is flexible is a function of what provisions you're talking about. When you look at the word 'two' for two representatives from every state in the United States Senate, two means two. But when you look like a word – look at a word like 'interstate commerce,' which they didn't have automobiles in mind, or they didn't have airplanes in mind, or telephones, or the Internet, or you look at a word like 'liberty,' and they didn't have in mind at that time the problems of privacy brought about, for example, by the Internet and computers. You realize that the framers intended those words to maintain constant values, but values that would change in their application as society changed."
In an unrelated matter, O'Connor indicated on "This Week" that she would likely serve out the next term on the court, dismssing speculation that she was about to retire.
The current court is split between Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas and Scalia, who tend to hold the traditional constitutionalist approach to rulings, and the majority of O'Connor, Breyer, Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginzburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens, who tend to believe in the concept of a "living Constitution" subject to changes in public opinion and interpretation.
Expect the next words out of her mouth to be "I'll swallow your soul!"
Nietschze?
We need Ash on the SCOTUS!
"Allright you primitive screwheads! Listen up!!! THIS is my BOOM STICK!"
The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest governing document on earth.
Yeah, but is it still in use? :-)
From some of the neo-con rambling around here, one might question if the U.S. Constitution is still in use.
If you see the word "socialist" with President Bush, you can take it to the bank that they come from one of two camps -- DNC/Dean/Clinton or Buchanan -- throw a dart -- not much difference in any of them.Did we retake the House and Senate by advocating more spending, more government entitlements, more meddling in health care, and a larger federal bureaucracy?
This is just silly demonization.
I'm in neither camp, and I'll say flat out that the best face that can be put President Bush's prescription drug entitlement racket is that it gives us a socialist program now in return for a pipe dream of privatization later.
The rationalizations for every excuse given by folks who defend this President's intergenerational swindle of a vote-buying scheme fall short. Privatizing after encouraging more dependency is illogical. The forces against privatization will only grow stronger if an unearned prescription drug subsidy is implemented, because the subsidy itself buys votes against privatization.
What he did was look to Europe to build his case that Western society's taboo against sodomy had changed. He didn't say the SCOTUS is obliged to follow the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.
As Scalia said Breyer has, in cases where public mood matters, given some weight to the public moods of other nations. I don't like it, although I see where he's going if he's just responding to claims about the opinion of Western society, but it's very different from what the headline says he said.
President Clinton's second nomination to the Supreme Court is a man of difficult descriptions. Contradictory in many ways, Stephen Gerald Breyer defied simple classification, as a man and as a judge.
Philosophy of Language, if there is such a thing. Words are taken as subject, and then are predicated. The same word can have any number of predicates, that is, the word does not contain its function. Another odd twist is that words can have multiple meanings--especially older words that have been in use for a time. We constantly add new words to the language, but we also add meanings to existing words, and not just by new functions, but to the word itself. It would be a mistake, most unscholarly, to interpret the Constitution by using new meanings or predicates that didn't exist when the Constitution was adopted.
I heartily agree. By his own words, he violated his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, FOREIGN and domestic. Those who want to subordinate or eliminate the Constitution are, by definition, enemies of it. There should be no place on our federal courts for such people.
BESIDES, IMPEACHING BREYER AND REMINDING THE COURT FROM WHOM THEY DERIVE THEIR POWERS WOULD BE A HEALTHY DEVELOPMENT. WE SHOULD BEGIN AGITATING FOR HIS IMPEACHMENT IMMEDIATELY AND SERIOUSLY.
Some give the reason as a more civil body in the past. Of course that is all nice & fuzzy but the real reason is the internet & the wise sheeple have caught on to their game. The wise understand that Congress is virtually all bought & paid for by the elites/transnationalist. Yep, the same ones that bomblasted Buchanan & Nader or anyone else who doesn't bow to their whims. I called it the "good old boy network" back then. Today it's the "Two-Party Cartel".
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