Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
This is like saying you believe in God but God is the problem. You're making little sense today.
You said: "Your 'fiat changes' are part of the system they [The Founders] created and are the law of the land." To which I responded "They are part of the system like cancer is a part of a system."
Fiat Changes, changes made without using the amendment process are not part of the system the Founders created.
To use your God analogy, my response would by like saying that my disobeying God's commandment not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge as stated in the laws of His "system," in The Garden of Eden, would be my "fiat" creation of a sin, a sort of cancer in God's system--a destruction of the Garden.
Or, more simply put, not following proper procedure is like throwing a monkey wrench into the works.
A cancer becomes a part of a system by debilitating it, and eventually destroying it. Changing the Constitution by fiat decision rather than properly amending it, weakens it, becomes, at first, a small precedent like a beginning cancer, and expands, by that precedent, as a method to change, eventually to entirely subvert the way it is made to work, eventually to make it null and void, replaced with something different, a giant tumor of law by whim.
At the time there was a debate if the United States should have a standing army or if our national defense should be composed of militias as defined at that time. You don't seem to want to include this in your thought process. Context for these remarks really does matter, and laws passed since then under the Constitutional framework they agreed to matter as well.
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My thought process was in response to zimmy's "There was no way for them to know that state militias would become obsolete." Militia being, at that time, the whole people, zimmy's notion would mean that the whole people would become obsolete. In which case, there would be no need of a Constitution, or anything else.
I knew there was a debate about the danger of a standing army at that time. I mentioned that recently in another thread. The Quora link I posted above mentions the Anti-Federalist's (Mason was an Anti-Federalist) fear of a standing federal army, and Mason specifically feared that what he, and the other Founders, understood the militia to be ("the whole people") would someday be changed and would be replaced by those unfaithful to what the Founders were attempting, and would replace it with various forms of standing armies.
To a great extent, Mason was right to hold that fear.