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Quote of the Day – The Meaning of Laws
“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.” – Thomas Jefferson
The good news for woke activists judges and the Living Constitution advocates is that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder and therefore anything he says that disagrees with their viewpoint can be disregarded. And certainly they will disagree with this – that the plain wording of the law is the plain meaning of the law. It was the foundation rock of this republic; the rock Progressives are trying to dissolve to sand.
Published in Law
What is the point of America without a written Constitution as supreme law?
Or the point of a written Constitution whose meaning changes while the words stay the same?
Or point of a written Constitution whose meaning is not learned by reading it?
The paradox of the advocate’s of the living, breathing Constitutionalist is they are trying to strangle it to death.
That is because they do not really believe in it. They are using the concept to destroy the Constitution. Similarly, complex interpretation of plain legal language is a means to circumvent the purpose of a law when it is inconvenient.
Similarly, what is the point of America without John Roberts to properly divine the otherwise obvious for us unwashed masses?:
We can only hope that the ship will be turned around, slowly but surely, in spite of the odds. May truth and the Constitution reign!
A quote like this from a brilliant president is to be savored.
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Those who want to destroy the Constitution simply want tyranny and dictatorship, while hiding behind nostrums that they are the “compassionate” ones. Instead they the epitome of evil.
I agree wholeheartedly with Jefferson’s quote and the post. It is one of those basic tenets that shores up one of the most, perhaps the most, essential one – the Rule of Law.
It will be, and has breen, tempting to stray from this from time to time. There will be times when hewing to this principle may result in outcomes you don’t like in particular cases, political defeats, etc…(recent controversies over birthright citizenship and “emergency” declarations come to mind), but it is important to stick with it nonetheless.
What? No penumbras of emanations?
My tagline back in BBS days was “A living Constitution is no Constitution.”
Jefferson has it wrong. The purpose of laws is to justify the whims of power and the powerful.
The good news is that no matter how much it is ignored, someday it will be easier to return our freedoms simply because that’s what’s in writing. Without the Constitution as written, rights would have been trampled much earlier and there would be no hope of ever restoring them.
Witness the second amendment. It almost died in the 1980’s after about six decades of determined action against it. Today, the second amendment is not entirely restored, but we are much better than we’ve been in a long time and the only reason is because all the justices on the Supreme Court followed the language of the amendment in Heller and restored what had almost been permanently lost. Were it not for the Bill of Rights enshrined as part of the Constitution, we would have been lost long ago with respect to all of our freedoms.
The fight never ends, but we have something to fall back on after we stumble.
It’s not back and forth, hewing to some center. It’s always erosion of local power, and centralization of power. The income tax was perhaps the fundamental loss, but just look at the size power and solidarity of the Federal Bureaucracy. We consider it a major victory to slow its growth when most of it shouldn’t even exist? The school system? Even private schools have to adhere to norms of that massive, for all intents and purposes federal system. We play at the edges with charter schools. We’re ending like all major civilizations ended, with centralization, all of them, even those we only know after they centralized like Egypt, Babylonia, even marvelous small places like Athens.
The principle Jefferson expresses is also the basis for the idea that “ignorance of the law is not a defense for a violation of the law.” The laws are supposed to be few enough and clear enough that “normal people” can comply readily. Otherwise, the law becomes a trap for the citizenry. Unfortunately, we have arrived at that point (see the “Three Felonies a Day” concept).
I think most of them are quite fond of the Constitution and believe it to be good – and being good, it couldn’t possibly prevent them from doing the things they believe to be good and necessary.
The British have operated under an unwritten “constitution” for centuries based on history and a series of negotiations for power between the Sovereign and the elected representatives. Our American Colonial ancestors saw that the government (both the Sovereign and the “elected” representatives to whom the colonists had little to no input) could do much mischief yet still claim to be within the parameters of the unwritten constitution. I suspect this was a motivator for the Founding Fathers to write down the constitutional parameters of the new United States government. A “living” constitution that changes based on the whims of the powerful who control those changes is no better than an unwritten constitution.
I don’t share the full measure of your cynicism, but only the powerful get to determine the meaning of a “living constitution.” Therefore, although those who advocate for a “living constitution” often claim to be advocating on behalf of the powerless, in fact they are pushing a system that will inevitably favor the powerful.
The beauty of a system of simple written laws (and constitutions) is that the system tends to protect the less powerful.
Funny that the fact that Woodrow Wilson was an out-and-racist does not mean that the progressive movement he launched should be jettisoned. Or the fact that Margaret Sanger was so racist she even had top Nazi pen pals (“we must breed a race of thoroughbreds”) does not mean that Planned Parenthood is illegitimate.
Nevertheless the very principles and documents that ground our protection of natural rights regardless of race, creed, sex or IQ must be dumped because half of those who implemented them in the late eighteenth century could not see their way to undo the slave-holding social order in which they were born and raised. It was the very principles they brought to life that made slavery untenable. Yet we are called upon to reject them in favor of doctrines that literally enslaved millions.
It is not just that our high schools and colleges turn out grossly ignorant products. It’s that they graduate not realizing they are grossly ignorant. Self-aware stupidity is always forgivable. If colleges were to say in the brochure “there’s a ton of good stuff over in the library but for ideological reasons and to conceal the widespread incompetence of our faculty we are going to present political drivel instead” that would be better than producing people like AOC who sincerely believe they have a handle on things.
I at least partially disagree. I don’t think they are fond of the Constitution and believe it to be good. I believe they just think of the U.S. Constitution as something that is. Justice Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court has even said she does not think the U.S. Constitution is good, and she would not recommend it to others.
I think the advocates of a “living constitution” believe they are good, and can’t believe that any Constitution that is good would prevent them from doing things they believe to be good and necessary. The focus is not on the goodness of the structure, but on the goodness of the people doing the rewriting.
Very well put. I emailed this to several friends/relatives. (With attribution, of course.)