Question for Kovie

If it's wrong for the president to go beyond his constitutional powers acting (for the sake of argument) in the national defense, why is it acceptable for the Supreme Court to go beyond its constitutional powers in the pursuit of (for the sake of argument) an issue of social justice? And if both of those things are acceptable, what does it mean to say we have a government of laws rather than of men?

National defense against what?

Ronald Reagan's famed Alien invasion? Al-Qaeda's navies and invasion fleet off our shores? You dim-witted fuckwit. You think Reagan was actually a socialist now, don't you?

Are you all paid up on your John Birch Society dues?

He's Gordon Kahl with a college degree instead of a gun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Kahl

Good thing, too. He'd hurt himself with the gun. Your basic FedSoc monkey.

I've warmed to common law and judge-made law of late, and it seems to me that the reason why recent judicial activism is so unpalatable to so many people is that... Zzzzz

"Judicial activism" is a political term. No credible legal scholar or theorist, (Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas are not legal scholars), would be caught dead using the term.

Clown boy thinks he's an originalist...

Original Intent:

The better known variant of originalism, and the one that Mr. Bork first adopted and held as recently as 1986, was the philosophy of original intent. The Constitution means what the Framers (or perhaps the Framers and ratifiers) meant it to. This is also the most influential version -- the judicial philosophy championed by recent Attornies General. But if the philosophy of original intent is the most popular version, it is also the easiest to blow out of the water. Listing the arguments against it is the kind of arduous, lengthy and repetitive task which Victorians believed suitable for the rehabilitation of convicts. I undertake it here in the hope of acquiring virtue.

First, the idea that the intention of the original author must govern the meaning of the text is simply not true as either a practical or a philosophical matter. Actually, in both law and life we use lots of different interpretive criteria to establish what something "means."

Second, even if original intent was the preferred method, there is strong historical evidence that the intention of the Framers was that their intentions should not bind future generations. Original intent tells us to obey the Framers and the Framers said, "our intention shouldn't govern."

Third, even if original intent wasn't philosophically and historically bankrupt, the records we do have of the Framer's original intent indicate that it is either contradictory or indeterminate. Sometimes both. Since the proponents of original intent argue that we must embrace their method or else admit that the Constitution could mean anything, it is bizarre to find that his method itself is no more than a judicial Rohrsach blot.

Fourth, in those few areas where original intent is clear, it is sometimes morally outrageous. Any protagonist of original intent must confront the question of whether or not, as a moral matter, we can responsibly allow the intentions of men, some of whom believed ardently in slavery and almost all of whom believed in the innate inferiority of women, to govern current constitutional interpretation.

Fifth, to adopt original intent as the supreme method of constitutional interpretation flies in the face of most of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, the vast majority of scholarly writing, the opinions of most constitutional historians and, probably the majority of the American people. It also raises impossible questions of transition from our current constitutional arrangements. As Mr. Bork once put it, "[t]his Nation has grown up in ways that do not comport with the intentions of the people who wrote the Constitution -- the commerce clause is one example -- and it is simply too late to go back and tear that up. I cite to you the legal tender cases. These are extreme examples admittedly. Scholarship suggests that the Framers intended to prohibit paper money. Any judge who thought today he would go back to the original intent really ought to be accompanied by a guardian rather than be sitting on a bench."

To sum up, original intent is a philosophically incoherent method which appears to contradict the Framers own intentions. It is sometimes morally objectionable, sometimes indeterminate, flies in the face of precedent and scholarship and raises insuperable problems of practical implementation.

http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/bork.htm

I narrowed it down, with your help, a few posts ago.

You said you were a Republican.

I said your were a stupid sonofabitch. Only stupid SOBs are still Republicans. That's a fact.

That's because the idiot took a beating for his "originalist" nonsense.

Where do you think the verb "to bork" comes from?

He's not a better troll. He's a moron.

Did "people like us" scream bloody unconstitutional, judicial activist murder when they created an Air Force? No. It was tools on the right, like this moron. I'm not wasting any more time on this cretin.

"I voted for Steve Forbes in the primary."

Go away you moron.