Posted on 05/10/2014 11:00:08 AM PDT by Jim Robinson
I have argued since I first began writing and speaking on this issue that the First Amendment restrains only the actions of Congress. The first word in the First Amendment, after all, is the word "Congress." "Congress shall make no law..."
The Founders quite intentionally were not imposing restraints on what a state could do in offering prayers before legislative assemblies, or what a city could do in erecting Ten Commandments monuments, or what a school could do in offering prayer and Bible reading over the intercom or at graduation. Congress and Congress alone is bound down by the chains of the First Amendment.
This has enormous implications for public policy, because it means that the only entity in America that can violate the First Amendment is Congress. A state can't, a city can't, and a school official or student most certainly can't. State constitutions may have something to say about what those entities can do, but the federal government, including the judiciary, has precisely zero constitutional or moral authority to intervene in such matters.
That, my friends, is freedom. Freedom for states, cities and schools to decide matters of religious expression for themselves without black-robed tyrants on the other side of the country deciding such things for them.
Thus the recent Supreme Court ruling, allowing cities and, in fact, all government bodies to offer invocations in Jesus' name before meetings is a good ruling. But the matter never even should have been before the Court in the first place. The First Amendment prohibits any kind of federal interference in religious expression whatsoever.
And while in many ways I have been a lone voice crying in the wilderness on this topic, I now find there are two of us crying out in the desert of out-of-control jurisprudence. Clarence Thomas...
(Excerpt) Read more at renewamerica.com ...
Incorrectly, of course. Unlike the First Amendment, the Second Amendment does not mention Congress.
Bm
But in becomes a two edge sword regarding speech. .that means everyone but congress can limit speech..
It means everyone on but congress can establish a local religion.
And if you apply to guns..
It means everyone but congress is free to take them from you.
Truth is we live in a world of government and buercrat anarchy...
There a collection of federal, state & local agencies can do to you whatever then dam well please at their whim and toss enough legal BS justification spin that they get away with it.
They have a very low and tight lid screwed on the jar grasshopper
See Post #20. The “incorporation clause” is another invention of an activist SCOTUS.
——Congress and Congress alone is bound down by the chains of the First Amendment.——
Now if we could bound down Obama and his EO’s
The man thinks he is King.....
Profoundly true and most problematic when, for example, the Islamic lobby pushes campus code-type laws and restraints, as far as state constitutions allow, at the state level.
As Thomas Jefferson said, What difference does it make if my neighbor worships one god or a hundred gods? He neither steals my wallet nor breaks my leg.
Courts would do well to remember that where there is no harm, there is no call for legal intrusion. Of course that proposition plentifully applied would ruin the legal industry, so expect it to appear sparingly.
One would seem confident in assuming that the other clauses were likewise closely drawn and intended for the limiting of the Federal government only. That was, after all, why the Bill of Rights was insisted upon in the first place. There was no intention at that time to be limiting the rights of the States, as the Ninth and Tenth Amendment illustrate.
It is safe to say that the Founding Fathers never even conceived such a usurpation of power to the central government as was extracted from the postwar Union in the creating the Fourteenth.
Supreme court ruled that the 2nd amendment IS incorporated against the states.
Couldn’t happen if it didn’t exist.
Sec 1 Amendment 14.
Thank You for beating me to having to say it.
Pretending that Supreme Incorporation of the Bill of Rights is needed to bind the States to them is reversing the outcome of the Civil War.
It and the Constitution limits ALL of the Federal Government.
PN, look up “MacDonald Vs Chicago” and “Nordyke Vs King”.
Also:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2233526/posts
Yes they do.
NY “Safe” act for example.
A lot of confusion over the years might have been avoided if the 10th had been put first in order.
Bkmk
At the moment, though, a typical state operates like a smaller version of the federal government with all the same potential abuses of power.
Perhaps what we need are city rights or town rights. People could then pick and choose the town or city that's right for them, or incorporate a new town or city. Reducing the restraints on any government larger than that though is just too dangerous.
What we need to do is never give up the fight of defending the constitution and the founding principles. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Thomas Jefferson spelled out our final recourse when the government becomes destructive of our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the ability to secure these rights.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.