Now that gives one pause....
In light of some of the so-called new rights we have developed in the not too distant past, "privacy" being one of the most significant, can it be that not enumerating rights, granted or guaranteed, is no bar to additional rights, and that they actually can be FOUND in the shuffle?
***GRJ***
========================================================================
At 07:54 AM 4/15/2004, Charles Curley wrote:
On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 07:03:11PM -0700, Joe Waldron wrote:
> >>"It's not just gun rights for us, it's the Bill of Rights," [snip]
> >
> > In a sense, the foregoing is true. Many SA supporters are truly BoR
> > supporters that any infringement of those guaranteed rights tends to get
> > our attention. I guess we're all libertarian freedom lovers at heart.
> > But
> > the bottom line is that we cannot back off Bush now and let Kerry get
> > elected. That is purely unacceptable to my one issue voting arm when I
> > get
> > into the voting booth.
>
>
>
> As a general rule, the Democrats want to eliminate the 2nd and 10th
> amendments and half of the first. The Republicans want to ditch the 4th
> and 5th amendments and the other half of the 1st.
>
> But if I had to cut back to one amendment, the second is it. As long as
> the 2A is widely exercised, the people retain the power to "fix" the
> system. Take away the 2nd and the others aren't worth the parchment
> they're written on.
How about we trim the entire Bill of Rights back to its first five
words? And make that edit retroactive to 1789?
It is important to recall the origin of the BoR, specifically that it
is the result of a political compromise between the federalists and
the anti-federalists. Madison had to craft it so as to attract enough
of both camps to get majorities in enough states to get
ratification. He was willing to lose the ends of the spectrum, such as
Patrick Henry (who stomped out of the Virginia Convention saying that
he smelled a rat, and never accepted nor sought federal office).
Several of the states appended proposed Bills of Rights to their
ratifications of the original constitution. It is instructive to read
those, and learn how horribly little Madison and the subsequent
ratification process left us. It is similarly instructive to read
anterior documents like state BoRs, the English BoR, and Magna Carta.
On one point the federalists were correct: if you have a BoR and do
not enumerate a right, it will get lost in the shuffle. In spite of
the IXth and Xth Amdnts, by and large that has happened.
--
Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards
and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email
http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email
Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
_______________________________________________ To post, send message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof
