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Process Matters
One of the differences between the Right and the Left is that the Left is concerned only about outcomes while the Right is concerned about outcomes and process.
When you think about it, all the major conflicts in America’s history have been more about process than the underlying issue. The American colonist’s slogan was not “No Taxation”; it was “No Taxation Without Representation,” which is fundamentally about process. Even when Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, the colonists weren’t satisfied because they had no say in the matter and thought — correctly — that the repeal was just as arbitrary as the original act. Most of the grievances leveled against King George in the Declaration of Independence were about the arbitrary exercise of royal power. The American Revolution was fought over process; the ability for free men to govern themselves. While the underlying moral cause of the Civil War was slavery, the proximate cause was about the process of laws and policies concering slavery that lead to secession.
What is the Constitution of the United States other than a document describing the process by which the people will govern themselves? When the Supreme Court issues rulings like they did last week, they usurp this most fundamental of all rights. The Left will never understand our concern with process, which they consider to be a minor detail on the road to utopian social justice. What they fail to understand is that someday the arbitrary exercise of power may go against them. By then it will be too late — and a country of the people, by the people, for the people will have perished from the earth.
Published in General
Okay, but then why is a corporation a person?
I am sure my response is out of context, but corporation is a person in the context of the law because a corporation is taxed, and is affected by policy. And a “person” ought not be taxed without being represented.
Ah. So a “person” is anything that is taxed and affected by policy. Good to know.
Okay, back to “Conservatives respect process: ”
signing statements :
George W. Bush used signing statements to challenge about 1,200 provisions of 172 laws he signed — twice as many as all his predecessors combined,
and the present Governor of Maine.
In the context of the law, I think so. I mean, let’s be reasonable. You aren’t going to issue a driver’s license to a corporation, are you? But in terms of equal protection, free speech, etc., yeah.
In law, “person” and “the people” are terms of art. To incorporations (made into a body, i.e. a person) attach only certain rights, privileges and immunities, but not all those enjoyed by natural persons. ” The people” in Constitutional terms, refers only to natural persons. As to which natural persons to which this term applies, one can read this, as an example of the contortions and torture to which language may be tortured by lawyers trying to erase the Second Amendment. They go so far as to assert that “the people” in the Second Amendment are not the same people referenced in other amendments in the Bill of Rights.
“A corporation is a person” is a legal fiction. Everyone knows that a corporation is not the same as a natural person. But calling it a “person” —which in context is a legal term of art—allows the corporation to have attributes that help it to achieve those of its purposes of which society approves.
As a fictive person a corporation can own property, enter into contracts, sue and be sued, and be subject to civil and criminal penalties, among other attributes of personhood. Additional attributes are, from time to time, added to the list or identified as not to be added to the list. For example, corporations have freedom of speech, but don’t have the right against self-incrimination, as I recall. They have some, but not all, the rights that natural persons have to make political contributions. They have their own peculiar rules determining of which state and country they are citizens.
In short, a corporation is not really a person, but the law will sometimes treat it as one if doing so leads to sensible and desirable results.
I disagree. The left is very much about process. Look at their obsession with making concessions in foreign policy. “Don’t you understand?! It’s a peace PROCESS!”
The difference is that their process is designed to remove their ideological enemies from all decisions.
At the time of the Constitutional Convention slavery was not an important issue for most Northern delegates, nor in some respects for some Southerners, so that the compromises on ending of the slave trade and on representation for census purposes was enough to satisfy the parties who valued forming a new Union more highly.
As to the South, as mentioned above, until the late 1850s, it felt it had enough control of the levers of government at the Federal level to protect the institution.
For the North, the abolition movement while gaining some strength in the 1830s and 40s was relatively small and it’s my guess that without the South’s aggressive moves to expand slavery in the early 1850s there would not have been a war in 1860. Those moves alienated many Northerners who had not felt strongly about the institution of slavery and led to the birth of the Republican Party (by the way, its first platform focused on opposition to polygamy as well as slavery). In fact, it was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 that brought Abe Lincoln out of political retirement.
Interestingly, both Lincoln and the South’s leaders realized that if slavery was contained and did not expand territorially it would eventually lose the political strength needed to preserve itself in the existing slave states.
Thanks, Axe-Man, and Civil: This helps a lot.
That’s what I was trying to say.
I would buy this argument if there weren’t so many on “the Right”” saying that SCOTUS doesn’t have a…right…to rule on the issue of gay marriage.
I.e., if we had gotten a decision we liked, we’d be ok with it. But since we got a decision we don’t like, then we say “how dare they rule on this issue in the first place”
The same analogy can be made about societal and institutional processes as well. Rarely is ever the process which leads people to engage in certain activities examined by “the Right”. That’s the problem with the “tradition for tradition’s sake” argument that is so popular on the right. That’s an outcome focused position, which doesn’t accept that if the causal processes leads people elsewhere, that that’s ok.
The extreme Left and extreme Right are both the same in this regard: they only want the outcomes they want.
I don’t know—my understanding (and admittedly, it’s been awhile since I read deeply on this) is that slavery was recognized as a problem right from the get-go. They just didn’t know what to do with it, so they punted.
I have a theory—and feel free to disagree; it’s not one I’ve nurtured long enough to feel motherly about—that it is the “weltenschaung” that defines an enemy and the war you fight against him.
World War 2 was about race—or rather, about what role, if any, race should play in our definition of what it means to be a human being.
This wasn’t the proximate casus belli but it was the ultimate. (Hitler pretty much declared this as early as the 1933 Nuremberg Rallies: “Europe is not a geographic entity, it is a racial entity.”) The war was “about” the Jews and Slavs and—had Hitler indeed conquered “the world”—everyone else who wasn’t a perfect Aryan.
On the one side you’ve got the hypocritical, muddled, not -always- elegantly expressed or perfectly enacted worldview that’s more or less this: there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, Slave nor Free and they’re all created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights…
And on the other, you’ve got the guy who talked about untermenschen and constructed Auschwitz.
But it didn’t seem to be about racism at the time. It seemed like it was about Alsace-Lorraine, or the Sudetenland, or whether the treaty of Versailles was just or unjust. Had Hitler stopped after the Anschluss, he might would have gone down in history as the guy with a weird mustache and a few weird ideas about Jews who unified Germandom. But of course he couldn’t stop after the Anschluss. The weird ideas about Jews and Slavs (et al) weren’t a bug, they were a feature. They the feature.
This is the sense in which the Civil War was about slavery and, of course, about race and who we define as a human being. Of course the slave states wanted there to be more slave states. And because you know more about this history than I do, you probably have all kinds economic and political explanations, and they’re doubtless perfectly valid, but beneath these is the basic human need to affirm the validity of a worldview by spreading it. (See, for example, the American Left). The alternative to expanding slavery was to allow slavery to dwindle to nothing…as if it was a bad thing. So of course the Civil War was about the enslavement of black Americans, and because that was a really bad weltenschaung defended by lots of really good people who also happen to be American against other Americans, it remains painful, uncomfortable, ambivalent and important.
I think this vaguely has to do with the process/outcome question…
Yes. In fact, after the Monica Lewinsky debacle (in which feminists and lefties explained away all Bill’s peckerdillos and threw Monica et al under the bus) I decided that the test for determining whether to be shocked—shocked!—by the behavior of a politician I disliked was to ask myself whether I might be less shocked and more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt if it was perpetrated by a politician we supported.
e.g.—-if GWB had had sex (sort of) with an intern in the oval office
—if a Republican president had handled the attack on our embassy in Benghazi exactly the way Obama did
—if a Republican candidate had a charitable Foundation/slush fund akin to the Clinton Foundation
—if a Republican candidate was female and wore pantsuits
It’s occasionally a useful exercise.
I read the book “His Excellency” about George Washington several years ago. It was very enjoyable.
What I got out of it, on this subject, is this: though he, as well as the Custiss Estate, owned slaves, Washington was opposed to slavery on both moral and economic grounds. But he did not believe the time was right to try to end slavery. He was petitioned by abolitionists in the North to make this a primary goal of his presidency. He refused, because he believed it would tear the fragile union apart.
So I think you are correct that it was an issue from the beginning.
I can’t speak for the extreme right, but most thoughtful people on the right are not saying that the Court doesn’t have the right to rule on homosexual marriage. They are saying that the ruling, whatever it is, should be, must be, in accord with the Constitution. This ruling was not. The idea that homosexual marriage is a fundamental right is not supported by any text, legislative history, or previous court decisions. It was born fully formed from the feverish imagination of Anthony Kennedy. This is not to say that homosexual marriage is not a good policy. It is to say that the Supreme Court are not our overlords, and that this decision is illegitimate.
That said, pretty much everyone except for the most intellectually honest and consistent people are going to be outcome-oriented from time to time. I had a very hard time, for example, with the logic behind the recent gun rights cases, although I liked the outcomes. I didn’t care for the reasoning in Bush v. Gore, although I liked the outcome.
If I had to choose one over the other, I would choose judicial restraint and the Constitution over outcomes.
I think that shouldn’t be an occasional exercise. If one is worried about process, that should be the first exercise. And we both know the answer that many would take if it was “their guy” doing the same thing. (e.g. the arguments that Obama doesn’t want to say “Islam is the problem”, even though his words are indistinguishable from those of our guy when he was in office).
Well the latter is a matter of opinion. But would even 30% of the people disagreeing with it now, accept it, if they found the argument to be acceptable with their view of the Constitution?
Probably not. (for the record, I personally don’t really care about the outcome, and I agree that the process was flawed, but it was flawed from both sides. Conservatives weren’t immune in twisting logic and process to get to the conclusion they wanted)
Yes they would. How do I know?
I live in a state that voted to prohibit homosexual marriage by a roughly 60-40 margin. It the vote had gone the other way I am confident that every conservative who opposed those marriages would accept the will of the people and those marriages. Grudgingly perhaps, but they would accept it.
It is very hard to accept this process, namely, Anthony Kennedy telling all 320 million of us that we have no say in how we are to be governed because he and four colleagues found a right in the Constitution that no one else could find since the founding, truth be told since the beginning of recorded history.
And my despair is not about homosexual marriage, rather it is for the end of Constitutional government. From the Court creating rights and ignoring the language of laws to a president assuming the power to legislate while refusing to enforce laws of which he does not approve, these are dark days for the Republic.
Yes, slavery was of importance at the beginning of the U.S. and that’s why there was debate at the Constitutional Convention and the two provisions in the document itself. But to Blue State’s question if it was of the same importance to the parties in 1789 as it was in 1860 the Union would have never been formed in the first place.
That “sense” of what the war was about prompted Lincoln’s musings in the Second Inaugural. But to come back to Look Aways point the post-war ambivalence is not solely because, as you put it, Confederates were good people defending a bad cause; it’s also because while there were abolitionists in the North, the majority favored emancipation only as a tactic to defeat the south; they did not accept freed blacks having full social/political equality with whites.
But that’s a supposition, not an “I know”. My supposition is they would not.
I agree.
I don’t see how one could think so. I’ve never heard a conservative say or write, “I refuse to accept the legitimacy of that referendum.”
People who had a chance to vote tend to accept the result of the vote. I don’t mean that they like the outcome, or that they won’t try to reverse the outcome through further political activities and pushing for another vote in the future. Rather, they accept the legitimacy of the process. That’s why Roe v. Wade and Bush v. Gore, and now these most recent cases (King, Obergefell) are so divisive. Not because of the outcomes, but because of the process.
In the same way, people are much more willing to accept a law passed by both houses of Congress than they are an executive order that goes beyond mere execution of existing laws. They may not like it, but they don’t have complaints about how it was accomplished.
You’re making my point for me. The South was concerned about the process by which they could protect slavery. I’m not minimizing the root cause; I’m just suggesting that the South believed they had lost the political levers they believed were necessary to protect what they considered important to them.
Like in the Senate?
Man With The Axe—re #54—agree. Nicely done.
#55 this was supposed to be a comment #14—what happened???
In Maine, we voted on this twice—2009 (SSM defeated) and 2012 (SSM passed).
In theory, we could have voted on it again and again, but the reality on the ground tended to work against revisiting the issue. The percentage of people adamantly opposed to SSM was never more than half, and when wavering minds changed they generally went in the direction of tolerance rather than opposition.
When even ideologically-committed people are faced with a bland reality rather than scary suppositions, they tend to lose interest in action even if they don’t change their opinions. If, on the other hand, the quotidian reality had turned out to be as unpleasant as predicted, people would eventually be provoked to collect signatures for a ballot referendum, contribute to the campaigns of candidates who argue for change and so on. Which, now that I think of it, sounds like…
democracy?
I never disagreed with your point. This whole discussion on slavery came up because Looks Away disagreed with your point.