saintmichaeldefendthem
Gold Member
Hmmm...apparently the Supreme Court is NOT superior to Congress or state legislatures and does not have the final say. Couple this with Hamilton's aforementioned acknowledgment that the Supreme Court lacks any enforcement mechanism whatsoever, the willingness of legislative and executive authorities to go along with their decisions is a key component, a cooperation that can be rescinded. Which brings us to your next blunder...
Ah, but you missed the part that shred your claims.
and that where the will of the legislature, declared in its statutes, stands in opposition to that of the people, declared in the Constitution, the judges ought to be governed by the latter rather than the former.
Right there. When the legislature issues statutes that conflict with the constitution, the judiciary should follow the constitution, not the statute. That's my argument.
What about this do you disagree with? You're babble about the 'superiority' of the judiciary is your strawman. I, Hamilton, and jurists for generations have said that the USSC has the authority to overturn the laws of the legislature if those laws violate rights. Not based on the 'superiority' of the judiciary. But the superiority of the rights.
Did you get that part about how rights trump powers?
As for the courts relationship with the States, that changes radically when the 14th was adopted. Rendering any of the founders opinion on the matter moot, as the constitution changed long after they were dead. You might as well post quotes of the 'will of the founders' in regards to how senators are elected by the state legislatures. They aren't. An amendment changed that too.
Gonzalez Vs. Raich militates against your notion that the Supreme Court has the final say on an issue.
Like Federalist Paper 78, you've never read Gonzalas. You have no idea what its about. If you had, you'd have instantly recognized that the case had NOTHING to do with the federal courts authority to prevent the violation of rights by the State.
Its an interstate commerce case.
Where it was argued that the Federal government couldn't prosecute a man growing weed for his own personal use because State law allows it and the federal government lacks jurisdiction under the commerce clause. The USSC found that the feds did have jurisdiction.
And guess what? The Feds STILL have jurisdiction. How then does that case 'militates against your notion that the Supreme Court has the final say on an issue'?
I don't think 'militates' means what you think it means.
You assert that the state laws cannot violate the rights of federal citizens (whatever that means) meaning you missed the point thinking it was an issue of civil rights instead of states rights.
Whatever that means? What part did you not understand? The 'federal citizen' part? Or the 'rights' part?
Federal citizens is short hand for 'Citizen of the United States of America'. Just like federal constitution is short hand for 'Constitution of the United States of America'. Does that alleviate your confusion?
And if you don't understand what rights are....then you're clearly not equipped for this conversation.
You then go on to claim that "the courts never ruled that the states couldn't create laws that conflict with federal law" which undermines the point that the states weren't asking for permission to countermand federal law, they just did it.
Only if you confuse rights with laws. Which no one even remotely familiar with either would ever do. They aren't the same thing. Laws are rules. Rights are freedoms.
Let me give you yet another example as eventually one of these has to sink in. If the Federal government has passed laws that criminalize marijuana possession, a state decriminalizing it doesn't violate the rights of any citizen. As there's no 'right to have marijuana criminalized by the State'.
The State can have any laws it wishes that conflict with federal laws (like, say medicinal marijuana...which California still has, btw) within certain constitutional boundaries related to the respective powers of the Federal and State government. The States can't create laws that conflict with federal rights.
And by 'federal rights', I mean rights recognized by federal government as being protected by the federal constitution. And by 'federal constitution', I mean the Constitution of the United States of America. Just so I don't lose you again.
Rights are different from laws.
If however, the federal government has recognized abortion as a constitutional right, and a State creates a law that forbids abortion....then the federal government can step in and overturn the State law as it abrogates the rights of federal citizens.
Federal citizens are Citizens of the United States. Every citizen in this country is a citizen of the United States and the State in which they reside. Its known as concurrent jurisdiction. So every State citizen is also a Federal Citizen. And the federal government has the authority, under the 14th amendment, to protect the privileges and immunities of Federal Citizens.
And by 'Federal Citizen' I again mean 'Citizens of the United States'. Of America, if that wasn't clear.
So you see the difference between rights and laws now?
Had you not been fully persuaded that the Supreme Court is an ultimate authority, you might have perceived that yourself.
I've never claimed that the Supreme Court is the 'ultimate authority'. That's your strawman. I've said that rights trump powers. And if the States create laws that violate rights, that the federal judiciary can overturn those State laws using the authority granted the federal government by the 14th amendment.
Not based in the 'supremacy' of the judiciary. But the supremacy of the rights being protected.
The Constitutional crisis we're in right now is that in our entire history, the only time the Supreme Court set itself so adversarily against the people is when they upheld the Fugitive Slave Act. 19 years later, this country was in a state of civil war.
Yeah, there's not going to be any civil war over gay marriage or Obamacare. If you believe there is, you're delusional.
First off, most of the 'revolutionary' republicans are complete chickenshits. They will talk about civil war, but when pressed to start doing 'patriot shit' like fighting and dying, its always someone else that has to do the bleeding. Jeffersons don't win wars. Hamiltons do. And you've got boatloads of the former. And precious few of the latter.
Second, if ever some of that 'precious few' started killing our cops and soldiers in the 'name of the revolution', the rest of the citizenry would simply kill them like animals in the street. It wouldn't take a day. There are way more of us than there are of you. And we're better armed and organized.
And both the chickenshits and the 'precious few' know it. They don't have the numbers. Not by orders and orders of magnitude. So there will be no civil war.
If you believe otherwise, you're going to be very disappointed.
And now we have state marriage laws, popularly passed by the people via referendum and state legislatures all being overturned. The abolitionists of the early 19th century warned that war would result when winning hearts and minds was abandoned as a strategy and more obtuse, compulsory measures took its place. The same despair that plagued the people of Pennsylvania when their popularly passed law was overturned by federal power is setting on people today who believe, and rightly so, that the regulation of marriage is by 10th Amendment right, a state prerogative. Only in this case, as if to add fuel to the fire, the Supreme Court thinks to duck its constitutional duty to weigh in on a national controversy that's proving to be so divisive.
The whole question of the 'state prerogative' on marriage laws was asked and answered in 1967 with Loving V. Virginia. The interracial marriage bans in Virginia were overturned as being unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. This in the height of the civil rights movement, this with the public supporting such bans by ludicrous margins.
And nothing. There was no civil war over interracial marriage. Majority support for interracial marriage bans lingered until the mid 90s. And still, nothing. There was your perfect storm, every ingredient you cited....and nothing.
In the case of gay marriage, there's no real question of whether or not the federal judiciary has the authority to overturn unconstitutional state marriage laws. Of course they do. Loving answered that question nearly 50 years ago. And the public already supports gay marriage by a wide margin. 12 to 19 points.
So why would the public have a 'civil war' over the implementation of something they overwhelmingly support? They obviously wouldn't. Your 'civil war' jabber is plainly stupid. Based in a comic misread of the national pulse, a laughably overestimation of folks who think like you do, and straight up ignorance of the legal questions being resolved.
You're about 50 years late to the party.
People will not long tolerate a government that with a waive of a magic wand undoes the will of the people over and over; especially the American people. The push back against Gonzalez Vs. Raich is just the beginning.
The problem is....the push back, isn't. The Feds still have federal jurisdiction. And the ruling never said that States couldn't create laws not in sync with federal laws. California allowed medicinal marijuana before Gonzales. It still allows it. So your 'pushback' against the USSC's authority is pretty much imaginary.
When states begin to secede you'll see history repeat itself as we are forced to the same decision of whether to let them peacefully egress or to use force to dragoon them back in.
Wow. You've really got this fantasy of yours mapped out. There's no significant support for secession. Nor any state government who is interested in trying it.
Your fantasy is well mapped out. Its that bridge from the wasteland of your imagination to the world the rest of live in where you run into problems. Conspiracy batshit does not a bridge to reality make.
And who knows. Maybe that's what you want. I bet you really enjoyed the fact that 600,000 people died because of thick headed tyrants like you.
Or, nobody dies as you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
It's hard for me to argue against somebody so monstrously stupid he can't figure out that states legalizing marijuana even though it's still illegal under the federal government is pushing back against the Supreme Court AND the federal government. How do you miss such a simple point in logic.
And a civil war in this country wouldn't go down the way you narrate which indicates you have no grasp of history and how things play out in the real world. But that's another issue. I know already that when that day comes, you'll side with tyranny. I hope you get shot.
But your whole argument is a large scale strawman because it predicates on gay marriage being a "civil right" and so therefore the courts must (according to Hamilton) allow gay marriage and strike down any law that prohibits it. I'm sure that would have come as quite a shock to Hamilton who, being very progressive for his day, did not envision the Constitution as protecting deviant behaviors.
The Bill of Rights was a list of 10 amendments grafted into the original document each as a reaction to abuses experienced at the hands of the British. Even defunct amendments like the 3rd demonstrate that there were specific issue addressed. This is important because it lays down some important groundwork for the 14th Amendment which too was designed to address very specific problems. Just like the "general welfare" clause, the "privileges and immunities" clause cannot be defined beyond the scope of the specifically delegated, enumerated powers the Constitution grants to the federal government, none of which include the regulation of marriage.
State marriage laws allow that any person can marry any other unrelated person of the opposite sex. This applies regardless of race, gender, previous condition of servitude, religion, or even sexual orientation. To say that the 14th Amendment guarantees every person the right to marry is a stretch because, as I mentioned earlier, it can't be interpreted in such manner as to grant additional powers to the federal government. But to say it guarantees that everyone who can marry can additionally marry whoever they want is untethered from anything remotely within the letter or the spirit of the Constitution in its design to limit the role of government. That means polygamy, marrying within family, ANYTHING goes. This is a flight of fancy to put it in the kindest terms.
So no, there is no Constitutional "right" to marry whoever one wants nor could there be without another amendment with specific language to that end. Therefore the courts are not siding with the Constitution and your whole argument falls like a house built on shifting sand.
And if you want to convince me you're smarter than me, you've succeeded. Not many are.
But that doesn't make you right.