Compare and contrast: On one hand, a “living Constitution,” with a rather elastic idea of how the text functions in new contexts? Why, absolutely. Penumbras, etc., are an important component of allowing the Constitution to account for more modern ideas of “social justice.” On the other hand, a judge’s ruling that doesn’t specifically issue an injunction, but instead relies on the government to understand that the functional equivalent of an injunction has been issued? Suddenly, interpretation is a quite literal proposition…
in the complete ruling, Vinson wrote that “there is a long-standing presumption ‘that officials of the Executive Branch will adhere to the law as declared by the court. As a result, this declaratory judgment is the functional equivalent of an injunction.’”
Given the judge’s ruling, CNSNews.com asked Durbin on Wednesday whether he thinks the Obama administration should stop implementing the health care law.
Durbin, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said, “Personally, I don’t, because the judge was asked for an injunction, and he didn’t rule that there would be one. So he hasn’t enjoined any conduct or activity. At this point, we have 16 courts that have considered this case.
“Twelve of them have dismissed the complaint initially, on procedural grounds. Of the four courts that took up the substance of the Affordable Health Care Act, which you call Obamacare, they split,” he added.
“Two said it was constitutional, two said it was not, and Vinson in Florida, Judge Vinson, Monday had a chance to not only decide whether it was constitutional but to issue an injunction,” said Durbin. “He didn’t do that.”
CNSNews.com then asked Durbin to clarify whether the Obama administration should continue to implement the law.
“Oh, absolutely,” said Durbin.
In short, the Democrats are giving themselves the right to ignore a federal court ruling. And the mainstream media doesn’t seem to care much.
Now. Try to imagine a media that would go deep in the weeds to suggest that, say, a Republican administration was violating FISA law in its misguided efforts to keep a country safe from a radical Islamism that had declared open war on the US and had launched several unprovoked attacks against the country, its people, and its interests at home and abroad…
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a media that criticized and questioned all politicians equally harshly? They should be turning over all the rocks, not just the ones with an R on them.
we are all Egyptians now
President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court with the Cherokee. So Obama has that precident going for him.
The irony burns worse than hemeroids after a big meal of hot peppers.
OT: The morning Jolt linked to PW today.
Durbin’s just reminding us that the courts really don’t have the last say. I’m not sure, though, that he’s going to like the final say when it does come down.
To the Democrats, the Constitution is just a piece of paper, written “over 100 years ago”, they can wave in the faces of conservatives when it suits them. Other than that, it holds no special meaning to them.
As Ric Locke pointed out, Wickard v Filburn essentially rendered all Constitutional restrictions of Federal power over the individual citizen null and void.
It would have been nice if that CNS journo had asked Sen. Durbin what the phrase “declaratory judgement” meant. The dude is supposed to have a JD, after all.
Jennifer Rubin to Ezra Klein: “Supreme Court justices aren’t bloggers“.
For some reason I can’t sign up. Can you quote the excerpt for me?
On the ‘Constitutional Crisis’ thing…
I think we have one brewing.
In 133 BC, Tiberius Gracchus proposed land reform in the Roman Republic. He wound up getting killed. For the next nearly 100 years, the same half a dozen controversial issues continued to dominate Roman politics (the most contentious of which was land reform), with dictators and purges and increasing lawlessness, until the matter was finally settled and one side won – under the Dictatorship of Julius Caesar around 50 BC, and the republic effectively ended with his assassination, which launched yet another civil war and ultimately produced a sort of heriditary constitutional monarchy that mostly mismanaged the increasingly corrupt empire into oblivion.
It took a hundred years to play out, but these things don’t just go away. They stay until they get settled, one way or the other.
I think Fukuyama wrote about something like that, with regard to the benefits of war, and the tendency of ethnic cleansing to erupt on the periphery of collapsing empires. When you attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, you simply prolong the conflict indefinetly. Some differences just can’t be papered over. They’re contended until they’re decided with finality. Dragging them out over centuries just gives them more time to build up the body count.
Regardless of which side wins, it seems extremely unlikely to me that things can continue the way they are. One way or another you’ll wind up with a radically different sort of government from the bastardized compromise we enjoy at the moment, where the government essentially has limitless power, but only so long as it refrains from using it too obviously. Having a crisis over the very fundemental issue of how the government is constituted seems generally fatal to that government.
But I guess the point is, it might have seemed ridiculous to any Roman that in 115BC they were in the middle of a ‘constitutional crisis’ that would ultimately end the government in it’s then current form, and tear apart Roman society 6 ways from Sunday a dozen times over. But in retrospect, it’s inescapably obvious. To make good sense of Caesar’s political career, you have to start no later than 133BC, 33 years before he was born.
Here’s the Jolt mention:
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Thanks!
Constitution crisis? It feels more like a Constitutional voidance in the done deed.
And the mainstream media doesn’t seem to care much.
They care plenty; they’re just DOWN WITH IT.
They’ve joined the side they’re on. No need to rhetorically pretend otherwise.
Entropy, this is why I’ve been predicting and at least somewhat encouraging a second Civil War. It’s going to happen; we might as well get it over with. This video pretty much says it all.
It feels more like a Constitutional voidance
Same difference. I’m saying “constitutional” as in “the constitution of the government” and not neccessarily “the Constitution (of the United States of America)”.
We have a “constitutional crisis”, which may or may not be a “Constitutional crisis” (or voidance).
We done made a proper noun out of it so it’s easy to skim over, but the Constitution is supposed to be a document outlining how the government is actually constituted, after all.
The Romans also had a Roman Constitution, most of which does not remain for history, but from what bits are left, it seems to be practically all they had – every significant rule or law or social propriety or agricultural procedure or even popular witicisms wound up in it.
The constitutional crisis the Roman’s had, had probably not anything to do with the text of the Roman Constitution, which was ostensibly very fluid, but rather was a crisis of disagreement over what the state was actually supposed to be and do.
In the Roman’s case, the entrenched interests (which includes most of the very Senators that constituted the government) that had gamed the system to intrench themselves – the Optimates – thought that the sole purpose of the government was literally to maintain the government, along with the status quo, and reactionarily opposed nearly ALL reform of any sort, even as the system crumbled, the military withered while foreign threats loomed, corruption in government rose exponentially, and the number of free men (most of whom were unemployed and many homeless) had become dwarfed by the population of foreign slaves residing in Rome. Structurally, the Roman political system had been constructed to govern Romans in the agrarian city-state of Rome, not a vast and active global empire for which it made no allowances. Their answer to serious and pressing problems facing the republic was generally shut up. They offered no solutions because there was no problems, from where they sat life was peachy.
The only problem they had – and the only thing they ever sought to address – was that the masses did not agree, and thought there were legitimate problems. The people were their problem. As in ‘why won’t they shut up and enjoy their station’.
It is interesting though, in that late Republican Rome, like many places in many times in history, provides a very very different perspective on slavery then what it is conventionally understood to have been today. Which is not at all to say that it ever strikes me as a swell idea. But it is just different than the popular narrative portrays it. In many places, in many times, it might make damn good sense for a free man to sell himself into it.
Besides the fact that many Roman born citizens were unemployed and homeless, unable to compete with POW slave laborers, who were generally richer and had a better standard of living, a ‘socially aware’ sort of master would often reward decades of good service with freedom (and possibly, continued employment), which also came with automatic Roman Citizenship – something that was practically impossible for free foreigners living in Rome for generations over to achieve.
Durbin is a dim witted partisan hack – he wouldn’t know the law well, and even if he did, he wouldn’t care – just as Jeff points out. He is the essence of Illinois Politics, squirted onto the Senate floor.
I’m not sure it qualifies under the rubric of same difference Entropy, for the simple reason that the actual crisis we should put our finger on took place a long time ago, possibly even without being recognized as such by the vast majority of men at the time. That crisis having passed in favor of the victory of one side over the other, what we have now is the voidance of the thing we supposed so long to still stand as itself, a thing no longer there, a tissue, a ghost, a non-entity.
nothing for it but to start over
I think the new capital should be in Amarillo.
ol
Democrat copycat.
Debbie is quite stupid enough to believe this is a good cover strategy.
Replace slavery with “dependency” and there are plenty of buyers and sellers in our own little country who agree with you.
Once again, Durbin labors under the umbrella of “no risk of being punched in the nads for his stupidity”.
It’s the only feasible interpretation.
Well, Ernst, I am certainly not buying.
Just remarking that it would be advantageous in some ways, specifically economically. Most free romans certainly didn’t, for a variety of other reasons. But some did in fact do some things along those lines.
Just sort of like that old crypto-racist “the now-considered-white Irish were actually treated even worse than black slaves in those days, you know” argument… except not that one, a different one, that happens to be equally, um… well.. historically true.
Slavery, in today’s day and age, is certainly abhorent to me – I’m a freakin libertarian. But the cartoon simplification of it does it no real justice nor bare any real likeness. And historically speaking, while slavery is abhorent, in some times gone by it was most certainly the least of possible evils people were likely to be subjected to, and in that historical context, not really all that evil.
Death is always an option open to anyone – it’s not hard to court. It’s kind of a slut. Certainly it was not ‘evil’ to offer people a choice of something besides wholescale slaughter and genocide, which once upon a time, was the only realistic alternative. And for a few of those slaves, in some contexts, more of them than of free proles, it panned out well for them.
Which, you know – not at all to say that ‘best of evils’ argument applies to fuckin 1850 because it doesn’t. More like 1850 BC.
But the institutional system that was inherited had a sense to it once upon a time, as a mutually beneficial mercy even, in a far far crueler world. We inherited it, it had become obsolete, we got rid of it, good on us. It isn’t desirable. But not neccessarily a good reason for shame on any of the practicitioners once upon a time. You can’t judge history by the standards and in the context of the present.
Kaus has hit the nail on the head here.
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/kausfiles/2011/01/29/the-cheesy-catharsis-theory-of-obama-s-comeback.html
But another is that any seemingly minor lapses into old-style liberal politics will have exaggerated negative consequences no matter how many bland pro-business, centrist signals Obama tries to send through his appointments or his State of the Union address or his road trips. Independent voters are sensitized now, allergic to pre-shellacking liberalism.
Til the little woman goes out and gets another card and triggers the hate-fest all over again. And she will. Unless you divorce her ass. She’s addicted and unrepentant. Just biding her time and plotting new curtains and towels.
Imagine the Outrage if someone had DARED to suggest that George W. Bush ignore a court order. Let’s see the outrage now.
[crickets]
[/crickets]
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Or, go one step further, and defy a federal injunction, and be held in contempt of court.
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