Congress shall make no law
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
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