…if you listen closely to the left’s current campaign to marginalize and delegitimate the Constitution (from Jerrold Nadler’s protestations that the GOP ridiculously views the document as a “sacred text” to Dahlia Lithwick’s suggestion that it is “fetishized” by the right, almost like a parchment Buddha), you’ll hear this argument, which — for what readers I have left — should sound quite familiar to you: per Lithwick, appearing on MSNBC, “Part of what’s fraught about this conversation, is that the same people who are fetishizing the document as written, as framed by the framers — and bracket the idea that there wasn’t one framer, and there was no one agenda embodied in this — but even if you bracket that idea, I think there’s a real problem with the idea that we’re trying to […] fetishize the document at the same moment that we’re falling over ourselves to amend and change the parts we don’t like.”
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the amendment process is precisely how the Constitution is supposed to be changed — the left, naturally, prefers using courts they’ve stacked with politicized judges who believe it their role to rule in favor of “social justice” rather than apply the law — what Lithwick is suggesting here is, like Ezra Klein before her, that the Constitution can’t be appealed to in any kind of serious way because, as a document framed by a number of different people with differing agendas, it essentially has no usable intent, and so is only useful insofar as it can be currently coaxed to “mean” whatever it is that is useful to a particular political agenda. That is, the Constitution, being old and group-ratifed, has a meaning that is unrecoverable — the result being that it only means what we now can successfully pretend it means, without recourse to the intent of the framers and ratifiers (who being different people, can’t have possibly agreed on what the document meant when they decided to vote for its ratification).
This is where textualism takes you.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
One of Lithwick’s more vivid former associations evidently did not leave her with much of a “bracketing” on fundamental causes and effects such that she’d build a thorough and broad perspective on the subject, although it did afford her ample opportunity to dissemble rather aimlessly.
Oddly, the name Lithwick does not fill one with great regard in this context either.
That way really doesn’t lead the way that the proggs want it to lead. If the constitution is truly an outdated document which has outlived it’s ambiguous purposes, then what holds me, or like minded people (you know lovers of liberty) back from doing to them, what the founders did to King George and merry old England? It doesn’t end well for you proggs. It really doesn’t.
I don’t necessary believe that textualism gets you to where the Kliens and Lithwicks want to go – they hold that because there is some ambiguity, the Constitution is meaningless and you can act in bad faith and assign all sorts of meanings not from the text but from the reader of the text informed by “evolving standards” – as if “evolving standards” is less ambiguous than the text of the Constitution. As a textualist, I would say that the Constitution sets forth boundaries within which ambiguities (and they are few and slight) can be resolved, but there are, in fact, boundaries.
Interestingly enough, Court rulings that the Left likes are never amenable to any similar sort of “interpretation.”
Isn’t it interesting that the Progs consider Roe V Wade to be ‘stare decisis’, or settled law and a precedent that CAN’T be reinterpreted.
BUT, the 2nd Amendment, despite 240 years of supporting rulings in courts of every stripe and jurisdiction, is COMPLETELY OPEN to re-interpretation as they see fit.
So, in the warped Prog mind, a Supreme Court ruling divined out of thin air as a bastardization of the “privacy clause” to support an almost unlimited ‘right’ to abortion is INVIOLATE!
But, a clear statement allowing the ownership of firearms is not only
subject to re-interpretation, it’s just fine by them if certain jurisdictions (DC, Chicago, etc.) simply strip that right away from their citizenry by decree.
Can you say HYPOCRISY?
I knew you could……
Then you’d be mistaken, sad to say.
Let me put it this way: in theory, textualism takes you there. Whether or not you can make the appropriate arguments convincing enough will depend on a number of factors, including your own cleverness and the gullibility of your audience.
Tyranny was way different over 100 years ago.
I worry that they are being so open in their treason. There is a disturbing lack of fear in denouncing fidelity to our founding principles, oaths to the contrary not withstanding.
It’s like they know it’s too late for us to do anything about it.
“textualism” is one of the way’s you get flocks of birds drawing smiley faces in the heavens, right?
Is this question ultimately an ontological question? (Say, does such and such a meaning exist?) Does our necessary skepticism, even if tiny and reluctant in view of our usual habits to tacitly accept our judgments of the being of this or that, driven by our need to press on to action, force us to wander into epistemological territory on that account? And then, do our doubts, or even better, say, certainty that we don’t have all the answers when it comes to accounting for knowledge, and therefore our inability or incapacity to account fully for being and the manner of being in coming to be and passing away, make for the muddiness and playground of politics?
Ironic isn’t it, that there would be no clear meaning to a document that a group of men agreed to; before the rise of phony-baloney textualism, the nuances of personal truths and meanings, and emanating penumbras.
I mean, I don’t get it. Wouldn’t that mean also that longstanding SCOTUS rulings, voted on by a panel of Justices, would also have suspect intents?
That’s not proven under the Scottish common law superduper precedent.
Remember kids, if it’s not Scottish
IT’S CRAP!
If you run the schools, it’s easy to ensure the gullibility of your audience.
OT: a cheer out to Burt Blyleven on his election to the Hall of Fame. God what a pretty hook he had. And a quiet raspberry to Robby A., who played a gorgeous second base with a too frequently unconcealed ugly demeanor. Shame, that.
Better to honor the Constitution than spit on it like the reactionary left does on a daily basis.
And props to the voters who gave the steroid era players less votes than they did last year. I’m looking at you Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro.
A few almost finished with so low a vote total that they would have been removed from next year’s ballots.
But what to do about Bags? Never involved in the steroid rumors but was a fiend in the weight room and a teammate of several who were using.
Blyleven has been the perennial oversight. Finally. 60 shutouts? over 3000K (back when it meant something)?
Congrats.
People keep misspelling that. The correct spelling is as follows (and SW can back me up on this):
Note: there are five R’s in “crrrrrap.”
Aye, you need plenty of Rs. If you’ve run out, it can be spelled “Keech”.
I thought it was at least 5 R’s.
Sometimes, when you get an R rolling, you want to hold on for a few extra.
Maybe it’s just me. I have a few Scottish corpuscles floating inside me, but mostly I just like to talk like a pirate.
Arrrrrr, me matey!
Or “Obama.”
Holy shit! Glenn Beck is basing his show today on Star Wars. He’s quoting Yoda and advocating all us little ewoks rise up and smite the death star like they did in the movie or something.
I think I must have OD’d on football and need an intervention or something. It is so close to shark jumping that I’m loathe to change the channel fearful that I’ll miss the carnage.
Yoda always makes Beck crack up. I find it childish and silly.
fear the 5oclocker commie scum
Maybe if they redacted all of the N-words and replaced them with “slave”:
Well, I’ll be…
Never could roll my Rs. Not even in print. My dipthongs however are a thing beauteous zu hören
Holy crap!
O_o
Only tourists use more than five.
Amendments are hard. Stacking the Supreme Court is easier. Especially when the GOP keeps gives picks away with poor choices. Thank God that W got held accountable by the conservatives on his picks or Obama job would be that much easier.
[…] it sound like the muffled screams of a Constitution being smothered in its sleep with pillows by Ezra Klein, Dick Stengel, and Fareed […]