Letters to the Editor
kovie
Published Letters: 688
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Huh?
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Which is provided by someone other than yourself or Congress. You got a problem? See you in court, otherwise the bombast above is just hot air.
WTF are you talking about? Where did I ever suggest that I or congress get to interpret the law when it appears to have been violated? I have no problem with the courts trying such violations.
Of course, with its current makeup, one cannot always depend upon the constitution's being interpreted the way one believes it should (and arguably actually should).
But hey, that's the breaks in our system of government--if you don't like a ruling, appeal, and if you don't like the appeal, tough, SCOTUS has the final word.
As opposed to your side, which is basically saying that when you don't agree with courts' final rulings, extreme extraconstitutional action is justified. So who's full of hot air here?
I see. You are a strict constructionist then, letter of the law kind of guy? For future reference.
You left out the part about its being subject to interpretation. The whole "strict constructionist" nonsense is a logical fallacy, because the definition of this specious term is itself subject to interpretation. And the courts get to do that, not you, I or congress. Let alone the Federalist Society. See, that's how this country works. Imperfect laws written by imperfect people and interpreted by imperfect judges, the final judgement of whom is binding and unalterable.
And yet your side makes the pathetically laughable and hypocritical assertion that when such constitutionally binding rulings are not to your liking, they can be ignored, because, of course, they're wrong. This appointing of yourselves to be the final judges of what the courts are already the final judges as specified by the constitution is what most starkly demonstrates the utter emptiness, hypocrisy and inconsistency of your ideology and why you can't and must not be taken serious on a logical level. Your side makes no sense, on your own terms.
Of course, you can try to go all meta on us, but we're smarter than you, and will win that always.
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DCLaw1
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Agreed. It is certainly foreign to what you, I, and most (but sadly far from all) Americans believe that this country is and should be about. I don't even make what I view as an arbitrary and intellectually lazy case of "natural rights". I simply believe that most Americans, like all people who have enjoyed a certain measure of prosperity, freedom and enlightenment for an extended period of time, quite understandably prefer our democratic form of government to any other form past, present or potentially future.
It is, in a purely sociobiological sense (as opposed to some abstract philosophical sense), and allowing for the various different forms of democratic self-rule, the "natural" form of government than any relatively free people would "natually" chose by which to govern themselves. And any other form of government is thus "naturally" foreign to most people, in the same sense that wanting to jump off tall buildings is foreign to most people.
Of course, this only tends to hold when times are relatively good, or at least not excessively bad, for an extended period of time. Which is precisely why BushCo tried to not only exploit but massively overblow and overinterpret the significance of 9/11 in order to make the implicit case for justifying its fascistic and anti-democratic grab for unconstitutional power.
Thankfully, reality eventually set in and appears to have stopped this, in the sense of the public's having eventually stopped buying into this fear-based propaganda--made more likely by BushCo's massive incompetence, dishonesty, arrogance and corruption. I'd like to believe (but cannot yet tell) that the latter merely accelerated the come back to reality moment, and didn't in fact make it possible. The reverse possibility is simply too scary to contemplate.
But I suspect that even if these tyrants were far smarter and more competent than they've proven to be, and they would have survived and consolidated power, while it might have taken far longer to take them down, the inherent unsustainablity and unnaturalness of tyranny would have eventually conspired to make it happen. Just as the Soviet Union rotten from within until it fell (whatever myths the other side likes to tell itself about how St. Ronnie did it in), so would they have. And, in a sense, on an accelerated schedule, they did.
Proving yet again, I think, that democracy, however imperfect, is better than all other forms of government. So maybe it is a "natural law" after all.