[Nachum]

Mr. Banks (from Mary Poppins): '....It turns out, with due respect, when all is said and done, that there's no such thing as YOU!'

[Kickass Conservative]

The only good Commie is a dead Commie. Just sayin...

[denydenydeny]

OK, so we can secede then.

[newfreep]

Twitter exchange via LegalInsurrection...

Glenn Greenwald
Just in under the wire, a clear winner for dumbest and most incoherent NYT Op-ed of 2012:

Matt Yglesias
ggreenwald calls it the “dumbest and most incoherent NYT op-ed of 2012.” I think it’s pretty good:

Glenn Greenwald
There seems to be a “Progressives against the Bill of Rights” group rapidly emerging on Twitter: exciting!

Matt Yglesias
ggreenwald Whatever, I’m back to the fiscal cliff beat. Just don’t run around saying I’m against the bill of rights.

Glenn Greenwald
mattyglesias That’s what that Op-Ed you endorsed is saying - that’s ignore- rather than amend - the Constitution means.

[Publius]

The purpose of this editorial is to float a trial balloon for Obama to dismiss Congress by use of force and rule as absolute dictator.

[DNME]

The gridlock surrounding the “fiscal cliff” is exactly what the Framers wanted.

When a divisive issue appears, the authors of the Constitution wanted lengthy and ferocious debate. (They had more than a few of those, themselves.) Man is a flawed animal and only a system of checks and balances, pitting one faction against the other, could keep one side from dominating the other, sometimes to ill effect.

Haggle, argue, bicker, negotiate and sometimes fail to reach an agreement. Fine. That’s how the system is supposed to work.

[kiryandil]

But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downrght evil provisions,” Seidman writes.

In that case, I think that Louis Michael Seidman should be arrested for anti-government speech, and held indefinitely without charges.

And if his lawyer should file a writ of habeas corpus, it should be denied out of hand...

[BwanaNdege]

“John Adams in a speech to the military in 1798 warned his fellow countrymen stating, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

http://www.free2pray.info/5founderquotes.html

[dead]

Every leftist is a totalitarian at heart. It's at the very root of their ideology.

That's why they hate things like the US Constitution, privately owned guns and true freedom of political speech.

Anything which helps provide a bulwark against totalitarianism is despised, mocked, and demonized.

[okie01]

Understand that it is people like Seidman who are "teaching" our lawyers and judges.

Thus, is it any surprise that our legal establishment has a perverted view of the Constitution?

[Lancey Howard]

“As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution..."

LMBO!!
This assclown Rothman is allegedly a "constitutional law professor"? Oh... Of course he is.

Anybody with the slightest clue understands that America's problems today are the result of the scumbag politicians' insistence on ignoring the Constitution, not their "obedience" to it. Georgetown again... Where does one college come up with so many simpletons? I wonder if Rothman is chums with that Georgetown slut Sandra Fluke who thinks her neighbors should pay for her sexcapades?

[Billthedrill]

What we have here is the shrieking of spoiled children that they won the Big Game and hence are entitled to anything they demand. No, the American government is neither "broken" nor "paralyzed", it's functioning precisely as designed. If the President wants a money-related bill out of Congress he deals with the House and compromises, and this one won't. Too bad.

I'm inclined to suspect that the good Professor's actual academic corpus is a little more refined than this - surely no one with even a slight familiarity with the origins of the Constitution can fail to recognize that it was not Madison, but Montesquieu, who insisted that an inefficient government is preferable to an omnipotent one. This is not, however, the message the Times wants to float. As I recall they were very much on the side of Constitutional propriety when they were hounding Richard Nixon from office. Less so when the fellow in the sights was a Democrat named Clinton, far less so now.

The Constitution is an experiment in a world-wide petri dish, and one cannot explain the success of its adherents merely by accusing us all of theft. As a plan of government it is skeletal - contrast, for example, the encyclopedia of bureaucracy that is its counterpart in the European Union. That is, in the case of people determined to circumvent its provisions, unfortunate - one merely heaps tiny exceptions to it in small doses until the principle is buried under an insupportable burden of contrary case law. That 0bama has Czars, executive boards, discretionary spending powers, and a lickspittle press to make the whole thing go down easily, is not the fault of the Constitution, but of academics and politicians who insist that they can do better if they just don't have to obey it.

But the actual results where such conditions exist suggest otherwise. The Professor scoffs that we will enter a state of Hobbesian chaos, and rightly so - it's only a straw man anyway. What we very well may enter is the long, sad story of the persistent and repetitive failures of autocratic government. A police state is not chaotic - it's much worse than chaotic.

There are other frustrations 0bama's little band of czars is facing than merely financial. One is their insistence on opportunistic gun control in the face of a clearly contrary Constitutional stance and a clearly refractory polity. It is here that the screaming is loudest against government "by the people" - and here that the danger of autocracy is greatest. We are not simply going to go through a period of infinite "dialogue" and compromise until "no" becomes "yes" even if it is the received opinion of the entire New York Times editorial board AND the faculty of Georgetown University. The answer is no.

And so the Constitution staggers along under the load of this sort of detritus. If it ever does collapse the result won't be pretty.

[Gluteus Maximus]

The Constitution is ignored all the time anyway. When was the last time Congress declared war? Where does the Constitution allow the federal government to even have an opinion on abortion, gay rights, etc.? Where does the Constitution allow federal regulation of milk prices? The Obamacare decision last summer finally laid to rest any lingering doubt that the Constitution is a dead letter - Obama's "penalty" isn't a tax for purposes of jurisdiction, but it is a tax for purposes of decision on the merits! And it's a tax, so it had to originate in the House? We'll just ignore that one.

C'mon, folks. It's time for a reality check. The Constitution doesn't count for anything. It means whatever nine unelected judges says it means. And they can, quite obviously, be coerced. So ultimately it means whatever the guys with the dirt decide it means.

We need to secede. It's over, my friends. Give it up.

Let's get out of this and start again.

[BruceS]

Two thoughts:

1) If Mr. Seidman is a Constitutional law professor, but believes we ought to get rid of the Constitution, then the only intellectually honest thing he could do is resign.

2) If we do away with the Constitution, then those of us in red states can secede and the blue states have nothing to say about it. Then the red states can reinstate the Constitution - then let's see who prospers.

[darkangel82]

This is some big time kook stuff. Even for the whack left NY Slimes. A reputable paper it is not.

[Doc Savage]

Rothman? That’s Chinese right???? Seidman? That’s Kenyan, right?? Silly me!

[trebb]

Sounds like the pefesser has it exactly back-asswards. It is the 75 years or so that the Constitution has been whittled away at by the “liberals” that has caused the mess we’re in. I wonder how many unconstitutional laws (both Federal and State) there are out there today since so many SCOTUS’s have opted to read Marxist tea leaves instead of the Constituton.

[SuperLuminal]

Louis Michael Seidman...Another candidate for the town-square list...

[4Liberty]

I - I’m stunned.

His thoughts should be in the dictionary next to “throwing baby out with bathwater - see illust.”