10-05-2020, 11:38 AM
(10-03-2020, 12:22 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(10-02-2020, 11:11 PM)David Horn Wrote: No, I'm unconcerned about consistency. It's a good thing overall. I am concerned about arcane rules of engagement, for lack of a better term. Digging around in dusty archives trying to ascertain the intent of this or that historical person as a guide to parsing language written decades or even hundreds of years ago makes no sense. We don't live in that distant past. We live today. More to the point, the impact of laws, especially their unintended consequences, weighs more heavily with me than the original intent from ages past.
So I might be a bit more stochastic than determinant.
Following the law does make sense. Putting your values ahead of the Constitution does not. A ‘living constitution’ is an excuse for putting the values of part of the country ahead of the social contract that is keeping the country together.
The temptation is to embrace law that disregards the values of the nation as a whole. The founding fathers believed in a right to self defense. They could not conceive of weapons that should not be in the hands of all citizens. The wrote the law accordingly. A good fraction of the population still holds these values, enough that the lawful means of changing the laws to reflect modern values has not yet been met.
Some can still read the intent of the authors. Some can still see the wisdom of it. Now, there is a lot of experience that might change it, a lot of room to compromise. Yet, it seems folks on both sides would rather legislate from the bench than work out a compromise. You don’t need 100 guns to defend yourself, to deter tyranny from the government, to discourage lawlessness. You do not need a full auto fire weapon with overkill power and an immense magazine. You do not need to have a nuke in you car trunk with a remote control to set it off. It is possible to come up with reasonable restrictions on military arms but still leave people a right to defend themselves, to own and carry civilian weapons.
But reasonable compromise is impossible as long as folks from both sides believe they can legislate from the bench. They believe their side can achieve an illegal total victory if they shred the law. As a result, we have this mess.
And you are part of the problem.
A lot of words here, but only one central idea: be true to your school. I'm going to demur. There is little if any reason to be faithful to an idea intended to hogtie average folks to preserve the American caste system. Look at the reality, not the words:
- the Constitution is purposely designed to be sclerotic. How many real amendments have there been to the original document? The first ten count as one. The 11th and 12th merely settled arguments on terms acceptable to all. The next three were the ACW amendment, none of which had a chance in the USA that included the slave-South. 16 made funding the government possible again. 17 and 19 are consequential and unbound to any crisis -- unique, in my opinion. 18 and 21 are a joke made and a joke repealed -- hardly consequential on any level. 20 is mere process change. 22 is punishment for FDR, and the others since then are more process change. Not much of great note for the ensuing 231 years of the Constitutional Republic.
- Rural areas are favored, and especially now. in just a two or three decades, 70% of the Senate will be elected by 30% of the people. That's not "preventing a tyranny of the majority", it's actively guaranteeing a tyranny of the minority. More important, there is no way to change this. Once power devolves to a group otherwise powerless, they are not going to give it up willingly.
- Our choice of a legislature and President system, rather than a Parliament, made it more likely than not that power will be split and even more sclerosis will ensue. The courts are then the only option to do anything, and not much of one at that.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.