Posted on 09/08/2002 9:43:03 AM PDT by tpaine
We are.
Only in cases where a state is specifically prohibited (as in "No State shall...") by that document from doing something. Otherwise, passive negaitive constructions (such-and-such "shall not be done") apply only to the federal government, because it is a Constitution of the United States, whose primary purpose was to create and define the powers of a new federal government. Just compare Sections 9 and 10 of Article I, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
You've never explained this 'untenable sitution'. Can you?
The situation is such that there are no clear ways of telling, in a legal sense, what I 9th-amendment right is. Everybody and his mother has a different theory of how to determine it (usually based on their own personal philosophies), but ultimately it comes down to the whim of a judge. And that subverts our system of government by putting legislative powers in judicial hands.
That's what they're hoping for.
We are.
But it's going to take a lot of work to keep it that way. We're already slippin'.
If the Constitution was meant to LIMIT the powers of the Federal government, then those powers outside the limits must go somewhere. The ninth and tenth amendments say where they go, to the several states and the people.
-PJ
But tpaine and his ilk would destroy the very systems of representative government through which such work is done.
Justice Goldberg, concurring, devoted several pages to the Amendment. ''The language and history of the Ninth Amendment reveal that the Framers of the Constitution believed that there are additional fundamental rights, protected from governmental infringement, which exist alongside those fundamental rights specifically mentioned in the first eight constitutional amendments.
. . . To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever.
From the context of the thread a reasonable person would assume that Tex was speaking of the use of the 9th Amendment for "support of the most dangerous political heresies" as 'illegitimate'- or ask him to clarify.
Tex is never 'reasonable', so I won't bother asking.
Can YOU reasonably specify these "dangerous political heresies"? - Bet not.
In August of 1982 [Michael] Harwick was charged with and arrested for violating the Georgia law criminalizing sodomy by committing that "crime" in the bedroom of his own home with another consenting adult male. The Court of Appeals ruled that the Georgia law violated Hardwick's fundamental rights because his activity was of a private and intimate nature beyond the reach of state regulation by reason of the Ninth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.The Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeals, arguing that the earlier right of privacy cases, Griswold, Roe et al, only dealt with intimate matters pertaining to family, marriage, and procreation, none of which are at stake, Justice White argued, in gay sex. Nor is Hardwick's sexual conduct one of those "fundamental rights" deeply "rooted in our Nation's history and traditions," a point Justice White supported by a long list of statutes and state policies criminalizing homosexual conduct. And to someone who might wonder whether the Georgia sodomy law is an example of "the legal enforcement of morals," the Court offered the following in reply: "The law is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the Due Process Clause, the courts will be very busy indeed."
FEDERALIST No. 10
From the New York Packet.
Friday, November 23, 1787.
MADISON
"...Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
And to someone who might wonder whether the Georgia sodomy law is an example of "the legal enforcement of morals," the Court offered the following in reply: "The law is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the Due Process Clause, the courts will be very busy indeed."
We have representative systems of government.
Read a book.
Touching words, but unfortunately they had nothing to do with the case before him. The married couple weren't on trial that case, so it had nothing to do with their right of privacy. The people on trial were the doctors who counseled the couple to use contraceptives and wrote prescriptions for them, and doctors do not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in what they do as part of their jobs. To say that the right to privacy extends to their professional actions is to completely stand the notion of privacy on its head. But that I guess is what you can expect to happen when a completely vague law like the 9th amendment is foisted upon society. It means whatever the enforcers want it to mean.
Post 35: You're a pitiful liar roscoe, and can NOT back up that statement.
Busted! That was easy.
They envision being able to twist it into a Constitutional wildcard that can be used to impose their will by judicial legislation.
Only in cases where a state is specifically prohibited (as in "No State shall...") by that document from doing something.
Exactly how Art. VI is worded. -- Read it. P> Otherwise, passive negaitive constructions (such-and-such "shall not be done") apply only to the federal government, because it is a Constitution of the United States, whose primary purpose was to create and define the powers of a new federal government. Just compare Sections 9 and 10 of Article I, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
You can't make a coherant comparison, so I'm supposed to 'see it'. Weird.
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You've never explained this 'untenable sitution'. Can you?
The situation is such that there are no clear ways of telling, in a legal sense, what I 9th-amendment right is. Everybody and his mother has a different theory of how to determine it (usually based on their own personal philosophies), but ultimately it comes down to the whim of a judge. And that subverts our system of government by putting legislative powers in judicial hands.
You haven't defined whats 'untenable', imo. - The job of the USSC is to protect individual rights. What rights have they 'legislated' away?
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