Who will defend the Constitution?

[Virgil]

Judge Gray, a former Republican, now running for the US Senate as a Libertarian says that the 9th and 10th Amendments went out with the drug wars. I agree with him. The Constitution has been trampled on for some time. We saw in the Patriot Act that the government could legislate away your Constitutional right to security of your person and home from a warantless search, without your knowledge and even an attack on free speech by making it a crime to tell someone you were searched under the Patriot Act. The ACLU would take some time to file a suit that asked that it be dismissed because on the face of it, it was unconstitutional.

The problem we have in this country stem from the concentrations of wealth corrupting our government and now our freedoms. But who is really going to defend the Constitution.

Let me bring in a cannabis perspective. The 18th Amendment was required to enforce a federal prohibition. It was well recognized that the federal government could not insist on hedgemony among all states just because it wanted to prohibit alcohol. No scholar ever challenged the need of such an amendment. It would have been regarded as an abuse of federal Constitutional authority.

But in 1937 the Marijuana Tax Act insisted on complete hedgemony on the federal position on prohibiting cannabis and even hemp if you can believe such stupidity. It would take 42 years to have it struck down as unconstitutional. Today we have state hedgemony on cannabis prohibition through the Controlled Substances act by mythological authority under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The authority rest on the corruption of the clear intent of these words. I am not asking if this has been corrupted, I know that it has. Its meaning is quite simple and clear to anyone with good sense.

Now who is going to call for the restoration of the meaning of the 8th section of the legislative powers where in the 4th clause the Commerce clause declares the rights the states ceded to the federal government with these words.

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

[proud patriot]

1. I n/t

[Mari333]

2. Me n/t

[NoKingGeorge]

3. I will. I do.

I try not to get frustrated. Small acts. Talking. Learning.
How DID the fore fathers keep their sanity when Our Country was threatened in the past....

[tom_paine]

5. Good question

Those were simpler times.

[Taeger]

4. Clark

I strongly believe that General Clark would defend the constitution.

[FeebMaster]

6. Right.

No doubt Clark will end the war on drugs, the war on guns, and repeal the patriot act. :eyes:

[Hammie]

7. You've got to be kidding

The Constitution is living document. It means whatever those with the badges and the guns want it to mean. Who cares what the people that wrote it thought it meant, they were just a bunch of unenlightened slave owning kooks. Can you imagine the kind of reception those reactionary jerks would get on DU today? Certainly we've evolved in our social consciousness that the actual words in the Constitution aren't to be take literally, we are much more enlightened today than the authors of that dusty relic.

For example, when it says that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people" we all know it actually means, all power not specifically delegated to the states by the omnipotent federal government is reserved to the federal government.

And when it says "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." actually it means that if it isn't here in iron clad black and white, forget about it. We're not really going to let you have the ones that are written down, much less those that aren't. Except for a whole bunch of new ones that sound like rights but are really privileges like the right to health care and the right to an education etc.

We know what we've got to do to achieve justice for the weak and this limited government and personal rights thing has to be interpreted with the end in view, and frankly the end is a massive government with absolute authority over every aspect of you life. Only then will we have achieved the paradise of those blissful souls in North Korea.

[Virgil]

8. So you do not defend the Constitution?

Well, if it is a relic, why does the President swear to defend it? Is that like saying, I swear I am a liar?

There was a good article on federal tyranny at AlterNet- http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17647

[Hammie]

9. You act like there is only one!

The real Constitution is the one that means whatever it needs to mean for social progress. I think that you must be talking about a different one. Per your link: "To which Taylor Carey, special assistant state attorney general in California responded that the Bill of Rights trumps state law. "When the government acted to protect the civil liberties of the children of Alabama, they acted with the highest degree of moral force. When they act to prevent critically ill people from obtaining medication...they are not acting with the same degree of moral propriety.""

See, Taylor's my man. It is the result that matters. It doesn't matter what the words say, only your intentions. If it is for the good, then it is Constitutional, if it is for the bad, then it is not.

The bill of rights trumps state law when we're talking about medical marijuana, but not when we talk about the right to keep and bear arms. See one is good, the other is bad. The words in the dusty old relic don't matter.

The first amendment, same thing: porn on the internet, good, criticizing elected officials before elections, bad. The words don't matter, the meaning will be whatever it needs to be.

And frankly son, if you don't want to end up on a no-fly list, you'd better get with the program.

[BeFree]

15. The idea has been corrupted

The idea, IMO, of the constitution was not to place limits on the People, rather the idea was to place limits on the governors of the People.

The People have the Right to change how the governors govern. But the People have shrunk from using that Right, leaving the governors to pretty much do as they please.

So, the governors have corrupted the constitution. They've twisted it, they've usurped the Power, and they white out parts of it whenever they think they can get away with it, and get away with it, they have.

The People are to blame for allowing the continued corruption of our constitution. We can put a stop to it at any time. Will this be the year we start?

[DrWeird]

17. "If you don't want to get on a no fly list.. get with the program."

So what you're saying is, you agree with the Patriot Act and the nazi pigfuckers in the white house who tore up the constitution and essentially spit on every grave in Arlington?

[iverglas]

14. methinks you might miss the point ;)

Hammie has undoubtedly read the ravings of myself, or someone else who, like me, is unceasingly bemused by the notion that something writ down over 200 years ago should be anyone's guide to what he/she/they oughta be doing today.

In Canada, you see, the Constitution *is* "a living tree", and we decide how we'll be doing things without all the time asking ourselves, and debating at length, what Sir John A. (that will be the first Prime Minister, and that was 100 years more recently than your own founders and framers) would have said. We basically just don't care, and we'd pretty much laugh at anyone who suggested that Sir John A. should be running our lives in any way, let alone have the final word about anything.

When we found that our Constitution no longer served our needs, we adopted a new one. Lots of countries around the world have been getting up to the same trick, many of them modelling their constitutional charters of rights on the one we adopted in 1981.

When it comes to the division of powers (federal-provincial), we have some dust-ups about that stuff too. (But I just don't think many of us would ever understand a description of what is done by a government that we elect, our federal government, that called it "federal tyranny".) But we really do tend to decide things from the perspective of what best serves our needs now, not what served the needs of the particular people involved in writing a >200-yr-old blueprint.

A blueprint is, after all, a blueprint. It is meant to be used to help in doing something, and not to prevent anyone from ever doing anything differently from what the blueprint says.

And I can just never get over this vision of human life as static that is reflected in the "unliving" constitution model. Circumstances change, new knowledge is gained, new insight into problems and solutions is achieved, new analyses of issues are done. Obviously, this has been recognized in the US at some point and in some way, or women and African-Americans would not be voting.

So it never seems to me that anyone is really as stuck on the US constitution as s/he might think, or let on ... it always seems more likely that what s/he is stuck on is the fact that, as interpreted and applied in the past, it serves his/her interests, just as it served the interests of the people who originally devised it.

But that's just me, the one, or one of the ones, that Hammie very likely had in mind in that little tribute.

.

[John BigBootay]

11. I disagree that it is a "living document"

This seems to imply that it can change with the times-- almost as if by magic or from an unseen source.

It can be changed in ONLY ONE WAY. Through the Amendment process-- and has been officially changed very few times.

What I fear is this very idea of a "living breathing document." This concept allows us to think of the Constitution as malleable OUTSIDE of the realm of an offical amendment. Malleable, open to interpretation, open to judicial tampering.

It is not. At least it is not SUPPOSED to be.

But, alas, this is not how it really is.

I want my Constitution back!

[Yupster]

18. Not magic or an unseen force, but

the Supreme Court.

The Constitution says whatever a majority of the Supreme Court says it says. They don't have to be right. They don't even have to make sense.

If they say the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition means the minimum wage cannot be over $ 6 per hour, then by golly, that's what it says.

[Hubert Flottz]

10. Not a single Republican in the White House, the House the ........

Senate or the SCOTUS or on TV! The Bushco Bible Club puts Bushco before America on EVERY Real Issue! Bush says himself that, it's his country! Everything Bush does he says "I Want" "I Need" and the lockstepping drones in all three branches follow the misleader, like a little row of duckies sniffing for crumbs and ducketts! They all stand up and tell lie after lie to sell Bush's line of selfserving crap, whatever it is! They love money over America!

We too have a few little duckies in the Bush pecker's line of shame and we need to weed them out this year! One Pecker even said he'd support Bush over any democrat! I think he's from Georgia but it's quite clear that he has a thang for Georgie instead!

[Yupster]

12. The Ninth Amendment disappeared

long before the drug wars. I'd say that one was erased way back at the time of the Civil War.

[thinkingwoman]

13. I will. I already do.

I am the publisher of a weekly newspaper. My very livelihood is tied to the first amendment of the constitution. I am passionate about our rights and how they have been trampled in the last century.

I will continue to fight as long as I can afford the ink and then after that I will simply shout in the streets. Whatever it takes. One voice can and does make a difference.

They'd have to kill me to quiet me. And then kill everyone I know who would take up the fight if I was gone.

Courage is contagious.

[Virgil]

16. Thank goodness for an independent voice

The Internet will eventually come to collective decision that the government is completely corrupted by concentrated wealth and that we are ruled by power and that the Constitution has long been trampled under.

The mantra of the things to come will be to pursue the greatest common good. You do not even hear the idea on conglomerate media and that is the concept that will call for restoration of Constitutional ideals and the removal of those in government that support Plutocratic Rule.

The fact that a person cannot even smoke a joint in peace is bad enough. To know that the plutocracy use the public treasury to fund a drug war that funnels land and resources into their pockets is all the worse.

I hope you read NarcoNews.com when they start back in a few days. If you tell people they still use coca in Coca-Cola they would think you nuts. But then, I know they are just ignorant.

[Beam Me Up]

19. Sweet sounds sister!

Courage is something we're all going to need a lot more of in the days ahead.