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Old 01-25-2023, 09:52 PM   #142
Pete F.
Canceled
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: vt
Posts: 13,075
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim in CT View Post
wayne, if you’re ok with liberals deciding “what the constitution really means” when they’re in power,, that means conservatives get to do the same when they’re in power. Right? You’re ok with that? Not me.

Safer to stick with what the founders wanted, that’s the best guarantee that we the people get the protections that have been created for us. I’m don’t want Ihan Omar or that Santos jerk changing it to suit their sick desires.

If a big majority wants a specific change, there is a mechanism to do just that, which has been utilized many times. It’s called adding amendments.

What you call going backwards,,can also be called playing by the rules, instead of making them up as we go along.

The constitution is t frozen in time forever. Are you mit aware it can be amended? but we have to follow the rules in order to change it. that’s a good thing. in my opinion.
That’s not how it works.
Let’s look at the 14th amendment, The plain text reading would be that anything characterized as an "insurrection or rebellion" would disqualify an official.
You think we should go with that, or is it the framers' intention reading which would be that obviously this was enacted in the wake of the Civil War, so the type of "insurrection or rebellion" the 14A's framers were referring to was something akin to the Confederacy's prosecution of the Civil War, which January 6 was not.
Legal scholarship really can't tell you anything useful to decide a case like this. We already know that this provision was enacted in response to the Civil War- the legislative history is going to be all about DQ'ing people who participated in it.
And you certainly aren't going to find any conclusive evidence of what they thought about "lesser" forms of insurrection or rebellion, because they weren't thinking about that. They were thinking about DQ'ing participants in the Civil War.

This is one of the reasons why Originalism doesn't work the way its proponents claim. A LOT of interpretation issues just involve situations where one canon points one way and another canon points another way. And you have to pick.
And someone won’t like it.
That’s the way it works.
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