Justin Mack, writing for the Journal & Courier, has an article about the tea party rally in Lafayette yesterday. Mostly they got together on the government-built footbridge and talked about freedom and stuff. But this caught my attention:
As hundreds of people placed both tea bags and loose-leaf tea into the box, a trumpet player played Taps while a copy of the U.S. Constitution was lowered into the Wabash River — an act that was to serve as a eulogy for the document.
That old Constitution has been killed more times than Rasputin. Long may she live.
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I’d love to administer a test to these attendees–perhaps my Law and Policy midterm–to determine the level of actual acquaintence with the Constitution and Bill of Rights (not to mention the Federalist/Anti-federalist arguments and other historical context).
My impression is that they have “read” the Constitution in much the way they’ve read the bible…that is to say, very selectively if at all.
Can we give every Hoosier expert on Our Failing Schools the ISTEP while we’re at it?
I second the motions by Sheila and Doghouse.
A notion from a source I’ll not mention (because he has fallen into disrepute – mostly unjustifiably) caught my attention almost 21 years ago:
“We in the U.S. are not still on our ‘first Republic’ so as to gain bragging rights over the French. We entered the Second Republic when the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation. We entered the third with Reconstruction. We may have entered a fourth just before WWI with the addition of a federal income tax, followed by the Federal Reserve and New Deal (the consolidation of central power that the founders had been anxious to avoid). The tenth amendment, which struck down laws as recently as 1935, is now a dead letter.”
So maybe the constitution has died 4 or 5 times.
Can someone enlighten me on exactly what has happened to “kill” the constitution? If any of the laws recently passed are unconstitutional, the SCOTUS will turn them down. Sounds to me that these tea baggers should be whining to the COURTS, not the rest of us.
Also, why do we keep worrying, and harping on, and feeding this fringe of our society? Just ignore them and leave them be. The radicals will become terrorists, the non radicals will eventually get tired, or get jobs and get busy, and the rest of society will keep moving on like it always did. Pretty sick and tired of all of the media attention feeding an uppity minority group of loud whiners.
Not necessarily. The Supreme Court has let plenty of unconstitutional laws slide by.
The key is to remember that what the Constitution actually says is metaphysically independent of what the Supreme Court says it says.