Sooner or later, you're going to have to come to the realization that words have meanings. They're not just little pieces of window dressing that we make cool-sounding phrases out of. Process means process, not the substance of the law. If you're going to demand that government not be held to the meanings of the words that define their powers, then you shouldn't complain when they use that latitude you've so graciously given them, to do whatever they please.
Another meaningless lecture mixed with straw men about what I supposedly 'demand'. --- You really believe in your powers of bafflegab, don't you? Whatta buncha bull.
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Well, CA is busy infringing my RKBA, with majority rule acceptance. The 14th is 'necessary' here, - NOW.
Translation: Your state's doing something you don't like, so you want the feds to get involved.
Translation: - You could care less that CA is violating the constitution. - Thanks for your admission.
You're sadly mistaken if you think Washington has any interest in protecting genuine liberty. They certainly will never use the 14th amendment to uphold 2nd-amendment rights, because they themselves have next to zero respect for those rights themselves. You'd have a much better chance of reforming your state government than reforming Washington, unless you think Washington is somehow inherently wiser - an odd position for a libertarian to take. Their history with the 14th amendment has been almost nothing but a history of judges using it to impose their personal preferences on society. What little it may have done to restrain states from doing things that truly violate peoples rights, has been completely overshadowed by the malignant growth of the federal government that the 14th made possible, albeit indirectly.
Thanks again. Your rant is very revealing of your fanaticism about the feds. I don't like federalism either, but I will not give up on respecting the constitution.
---------- And its the job of the constitution to see that individual rights are not violated. - Checks & balances, remember?
The job of the Constitution is indeed to preserve checks and balances, and that's done in a variety of ways, not the least of which - as the name of our country strongly implies - is the division of power between the state and federal governments. The 14th amendment hamstrings the states in their ability to govern themselves, leaving the feds to fill in the vacuum - all while doing next to nothing to protect individual rights.
You've made this same vague charge against the 14th this entire thread, yet never get to particulars. - All fancy rhetoric, it seems, but no real 'ham', just the string, the 'line'.
----------- You appear to have bought into the states 'rights' propoganda, - or - you have a statist type agenda of your own, based on the idea that a state can make 'moral' laws of some type, to control personal behavior. - Not so, under the 14th.
I'm sure it would be great if we had small government at all levels, that stayed out of peoples' business and just did what was necessary to protect lives and property, but until the federal government starts living up to those standards, I don't understand how any sane person can demand that they be the guardians of our liberties against the states - their only meaningful competition.
More 'straw men' demands. - Insane.
I DO demand the constitution be honored, by fed or state.
As a libertarian, I'm sure you can understand (and have probably heard before) that the more we demand of government to do for us, the more we authorize them to do to us. At no level of government does that hold more true than at the national level.
And just as a technical note, I'm wondering what you mean when you say that states don't have the power to pass "moral" laws to control personal behavior.
Did you even bother to read the 'due process' quote I posted this morning? - Are you really this dense? - Mindboggling myopia.
You seem to subscribe to the "original intent" school of legal interpretation, so I'll ask you: Was it the intent of the framers of the 14th amendment to overturn all existing state laws against fornication, sodomy, incest, polygamy, etc.?
Of course not. Most of those laws have a victim, - an injured party. - And a criminal who commited that injury. -- No one here has any problem with giving a fair trial to an accused criminal.
Many of us constitutionalists have problems with prohibitory 'laws' on victimless 'crime', however.
Well it looks to me like you "demand" that process be made to something other than process. And a forum like this one "demands" that you be clear in stating just what you mean. What is your understanding of the meaning of "due process of law"? It should be something you can answer in plain language, without quoting some judge, or pulling out some speech from a framer. It's a simple enough phrase, so it should have a simple enough meaning.
You could care less that CA is violating the constitution.
Notwithstanding the fact that it's only violating the Constitution as you read it, it's true that I'm not losing too much sleep about what's going on in another state, as long as they're not committing mass slaughters or something. Other than that, I'm happy to let you and the rest of the people of your state work things out for yourselves. I'll deal with my state.
Thanks again. Your rant is very revealing of your fanaticism about the feds. I don't like federalism either, but I will not give up on respecting the constitution.
In that last clause, you're confusing what the Constitution does say with what you think it should say. I know it's going to be difficult getting you to see what it does say, but as for what it should, it should not give the feds the power to control state laws and policies at whim, which is the power that they exercise now.
You've made this same vague charge against the 14th this entire thread, yet never get to particulars. - All fancy rhetoric, it seems, but no real 'ham', just the string, the 'line'.
Just to give two examples that I've already posted on this thread, one case from Boston in the '70's involved a "desegregation" order for the public schools in that city, even though neither the city nor the state had anything close to any kind of segregation laws on the books. The result was that thousands of students were forcibly bused to schools far from their neighborhoods, and their arrival at the new schools precipated waves of violence from those students already established there. Another case from St. Louis involved a judge deciding that the poor quality of the inner city schools was evidence of "unequal protection of the laws" and actually ordered taxes raised on the surrounding communities to pay for a new school (which ended up flopping anyway, because it didn't make the students any more motivated). And of course need I mention the numerous examples of the federal judges ruling against schools whenever the word "God" is mentioned loud enough for other students to hear? Or the harassment of police departments whenever they're accused of "racial profiling"? These things increase the cost of states running their schools, police departments, and other services. That, combined with their dependence on federal subsidies to do just about anything (which often is necessitated by the increased costs that litigation imposes), creates a culture of total submission to federal authority within state governments. So if a state were to take a principled stand against Washington overreaching - such as saying, "No, you're not going to federalize our airports" or "No, you're not going to take this child from this house and turn him over to Castro" - is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to think the feds (and their lefty pressure-group allies) would have ample means of punishing that state through legal harassment?
Let me ask you this: What has the 14th amendment, in practice, actually accomplished in protecting genuine liberty? I can think of the destruction of Jim Crow laws, but even that was then overshadowed by the reverse racism that developed, and by the feds getting more comfortable with using the National Guard as a national police force.
I DO demand the constitution be honored, by fed or state.
I think you demand considerably more than that. I think you demand that the Constitution charge the federal government with overseeing state laws to make sure they don't violate what you consider to be your rights, and I think you'd be adamantly opposed to any attempt to change the Constitution in way that removes that power of the feds. Is that true?
Was it the intent of the framers of the 14th amendment to overturn all existing state laws against fornication, sodomy, incest, polygamy, etc.?
Of course not. Most of those laws have a victim, - an injured party.
Huh?? Fornication has a "victim"? Sodomy has a "victim"? Even incest, when it doesn't result in pregnancy, has a "victim"? These are the kinds of laws I'm talking about, and I can guarantee you they were on the books in every state in the union in 1868, as well as in all of the territories, and they were taken seriously, too (they weren't just leftovers from the Puritan era or something). I'd be very interested in seeing whatever evidence you might have that the framers of the 14th amendment intended to overturn or even water down these laws.