I see you are again engaging in your adolescent and puerile machinations of attempting to deny me humanity by not addressing me directly.
Your tag line claims you hold me as an equal. Yet you cannot bring yourself to even address me; instead referring to me only in the third person. You cannot even be true to your own claims. You do not hold me as an equal.
Oh well. I guess self-consistency is not required.
And, with that he dispenses with the 9th Amendment. Gone. Deleted.
Nope. And I really wish you'd be civil enough not to put words in my mouth (or keyboard as the case may be). Certainly your position is strong enough to stand without creating strawmen to gallantly knock over.
The challenge with the 9th amendment is it leaves entirely open to debate what is or isn't a right.
Do the unborn have a 9th amendment right to be born? How do we determine this objectively, Citizen? One simple case. Address it if you can, and we can move on to 1,000 other claimed rights, including the "right to healthcare".
You and I will agree in many cases, disagree in a few. But how do courts reach objective conclusions without simply imposing the will of a few judges on all of society?
The 9th amendment doesn't disparage or preclude other rights, but neither does it spell them out as having been agreed on.
Do you really want the courts (or any branch of government) to be the arbiter of what is or isn't a right?
Only previously "recognized" rights count. Recognized, as in, recognized by government--the very people rights are intended to restrain. Yeah, suuuuuuure.
Again, your use of sarcasm is adding nothing civil or productive to the conversation.
You evidence a fundamental misunderstanding of the constitution. It is not the government that controls that document, but the people. The government didn't recognize our RKBA, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to be secure in our person and papers, or the right to access counsel and compel witnesses to our defense. These are not gifts from government.
Those words exist in the Constitution because the people put them there. We can add additional rights via either the congressional method or the direct convention method. In either case, a super majority of States--either via popular ballot, or via legislators elected by the people--must approve the change.
The Bill of Rights (and some subsequent amendments) is what We the People have explicitly recognized as rights. Notably, most of those rights are protections of the accused against the power of government to fine, imprison, or otherwise punish. But in total, it is the short list of those rights that we agree are actually rights, nationwide.
One does wonder how, in a system made very complex by the machinations of rights-deniers, he would overturn a wrong decision. Lets say, Plessy v Ferguson. SCOTUS decidedly refused to recognize the rights of blacks. Officially, their rights were not only not recognized, but expressly un-recognized (denied). Now, this is just one example. But, the principle holds: their rights were not recognized. So, he would have us believe that their rights should have never, ever been recognized because, quite simply, after express un-recognition, their rights would have to be "discovered" (his word).
Again, you are uncivil and insulting by putting words in my mouth that have never been there. Also with accusations of "rights-deniers." Surely you can make your point civilly, without personal insults.
I fear you have mischaracterized Plessy. Where did it un-recognize rights? Yes, the ruling is offensive and wrong. But it was based on equality being possible with separation. Do we not continue this today with gender-segregated restrooms, dressing rooms, and single-sex dormitories available at colleges?
It was a wrong decision because it failed to protect true 14th amendment equality as intended for blacks by accepting the false myth that racially separate could be equal. Indeed, Plessy is not an example in support of your cause, but an example against it. Judges allowed their personal views about social mixing of the races, miscegenation, over-power their clear 14th amendment duty. The constitution was subordinated to their conscience.
It is what activist anti-RKBA judges do when they ignore the black letter of the 2nd amendment and instead prattle on about public safety as they invent excuses to permit infringements of our enumerated rights. These same liberal liars never seem to worry about public safety when an OJ walks free over a "technicality." You know what a "technicality" is? It is a constitution protection that might shock a few consciences, but must be respected to defend all of our rights.
Talk about a man receiving a grossly unjust sentence for a minor offense and I'll support a judge using his conscience. Even better, I'll suggest that sentencing should be much more in the hands of a jury whose job it is to act as the collective conscience of the community.
But speak of major social policy changes, matters of public policy, and whether to overturn or sustain a law, and I want judges bound down strictly by the constitution.
Moreover, Utbagpiper's view would force every decent judge to rule against his conscience--his view of equity. Utbagpiper's view turns judges into slaves of the law, rather than allowing them to be judges of how best to apply or not apply the law to the individual brought before him to face the awesome power of the state based on the law and their "recognized" rights.
Please do understand that Utbagpiper's view means that no judge anywhere can decide a case even on human decency--on all those rights we instinctively know we should grant another, but never ended up being written down in the law.
And so when 5 SCOTUS justices decide that their conscience demands equity for the unborn, you will herald that decision as an appropriate exercise of judicial power at the federal level? After all, the 9th amendment protects the unenumerated rights of the unborn to be born rather than be terminated for reasons of mere convenience. To rule any other way would shock the conscience of many in our society.
What Citizen proposes here, in his desire to attack me, is that judges be unrestrained from the law and constitution. I prefer that judges, like legislators and executives, be bound down by the chains of the Constitution.
If we all instinctively agree that certain rights are due one another, then we are not likely to pass legislation that violates such rights. We would certainly commit such rights to writing, giving them the full force of constitutional protections at either State or federal levels. If we fail to do that, should a judge or 5 save us from our complete failings, as perhaps some want them to save us from bad electoral decisions?
Your problem here, Citizen, is that you are attempting to argue that a system you hold in utter contempt should function in a certain way, which even if it did, you'd still hold it in utter contempt. It leads to all kinds of contradictions, misinterpretations, and inconsistencies. You'd do better, I think, to tell us what alternate system would work better, and provide examples of it working better than what we have today.
Charles
