montecristo

Does the federal government work as originally intended and stipulated in the Constitution? Forget whether you like or dislike the decisions and actions of government today, just consider whether or not we have the same United States federated republic that was founded originally by the Constitution in 1791. That is the question. Libertarian legal theorist Stephan Kinsella says no, and gives evidence of his conclusion with two examples, those being the recent Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action in university admissions and the overturning of sodomy laws in Texas. I agree with Kinsella, even though I also agree that whatever consensual activity goes on in people's bedrooms is no business of any governmental body, local, state, or federal, and that the court obfuscated and tried to have its cake and eat it too on affirmative action. The problem is, people don't mind when the federal Goliath goes after monsters they want destroyed, but when their supposedly tame beast turns on them...

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For a government body to decide 'X and not Y' means that the government body has implicitly asserted a jurisdiction to decide between X and Y. Hence, to decide 'X not Y' is to assert, indirectly, an authority in the future to choose 'Y not X'.

-- Frederick Schauer, Slippery Slopes, 99 Harv. L. Rev. 361, 367 (1985).

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We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.

-- Richard Mitchell

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It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

-- James Fenimore Cooper