Are we realy this gullible?
POSTED BY: oldenglanddry
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 22, 2006 01:53
VIEWED: 13731
PAGE 8 of 18
I'm still hoping I'll get an answer to my question. The reason I'm asking is b/c there's been a tendency to minimize the importance of the Constitution, and in fact, the argument has been successfully made that the Constitution ONLY protects citizens from the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. That is why corporations can gather your private data, turn you in to the police for software piracy, why state workers have no federal civil rights protections etc.
So it got me to wondering - if the Constitution isn't the basis for anything except to protect citizens from their Federal government - what is the legal basis for murder laws - protecting one citizen from another?
DT - interesting idea 'bout the Federalist papers.
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"US President George W. Bush seized on a foiled London airline bomb plot to hammer unnamed critics he accused of having all but forgotten the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks."
And you know what? I hope he keeps ON trying to ride his golden 9/11 moment. What a fool.
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Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
What I mean is this:
What is the legal basis for murder laws if not in the Consitution? (since the Constitution only addresses the relationship of Federal government to people)
Most laws concerning murder are State laws. These are covered under the 10th Amendement, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people". They pretty much derive from English Common Law.
There are also Federal laws relating to murder, although most murder prosecutions are at the state level. There are several references to murder in Title 18 of The US Code.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/index.html
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Cool. So this is my question - if the Consitution only protects people from the Federal government, and the States can pass whatever laws they like that devolve to them - how can the Supreme Court rule on the Constitutionality of any state law?
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I suspect, generally speaking, corporations have little interest in having you arrested. It's the police and government that can garner financial rewards from arrests, it's business to them, and their budget is dependent on it. Think of it this way, if crime goes down, police departments will be downsizeed. The police have a vested interest in crime. The best and simplest way to increase crime is to write new laws, and if you dig you'll find that police groups are perpetually lobbying for the creation of new laws restricting personal freedoms. Don't get me wrong, they're not driving this truck ride (these guys hate trains :( ) to hell, by any means, it's just another mechanism which allows police states to happen.
Here's the way I see it. The constitution itself is a federalist plot. The original founding document, the articles of confederation, did not provide for a king of america, and the federalists, who themselves wanted to be king, didn't like that. They also hated the idea of peasants rights. So they created the constitution, creating a position of king, two houses to make legislating difficult, and the bill of rights was stripped completely. When it became clear that the bill of rights was going to make a comeback, the feds added a supreme court to prevent the states from interpretting the constitution, not under fears that it would be misinterpreted, but for fears it would be literally interpreted. The federalists real goal for the supreme court was to abolish the bill of rights, which they have now done.
Intersting side note on this: If you read the about the confederacy they rant about this stuff a lot, more in fact than they do about slavery. The Civil War was about three things: 1. federalism vs. anti-federalism, or confederatism, 2. the proposed partition of the west into states, which was done by a GOP congress to intentially marginalize the south (as I believe it was jefferson davis who said who would want to be part of a union in which you were completely marginalized? or something to that effect.) and 3. it was about slavery, which is unfortunate. I'm not a confederate battle flag person by any means, but I think it's an interesting subject. I get that it doesn't mean 'yay slavery' as a symbol, I suspect to the people who fly it, it means states-rights mostly.
To get what's going on here legally, I think you really have to examine the federal concept. The New England Confederaion (1643) was our first political entity. After that there was a Confederacy of United States (1781) which lasted eight years, until it was superceded by the Federal Govt. of the USA. (1789)
The new concept changed the idea. Federalism was geared around a a federal entitiy, a govt which has as its members, other govts. The union is a strongly binding one, the member states essentially are bound to it, like an empire being make of kingdoms, only in democratic terms. There are very few federal systems out there in the world. The creation of a strong independent entity contrasts with the loose confederacy idea, which would be something more like the UAE, an alliance of willing members seeking mutual protection.
Originally, of course, the US was set to be more like the UAE in structure. But the federalist intervened to create this large imperial body, similar to the soviet union. Todays federalists are trying to do the exact same thing to the EU right now.
As for criminal code, this is not a matter for a federal govt. The constitution of the united states is not a basis for our criminal code. Criminal codes traditionally are the purview of a municipality, and the creation of the nation state sought to make a universal legal code to reduce confusion among travelers. But the laws against killing one another are a matter of municipal or state, and not of federal importance. The federal govt. in washington is not the evolution of the nation state. Our own nation states have been suppressed through the union to the point where they're merely member states. the federal govt. is a separate entity, which for all practical
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I thought about the last part of your question and here's what I came up with
A lot of legal opinions know as 14th amendment cases, regardless of how little some of them bear on the actual text of the 14th amendment, seek to define the relationship of consumer to producer. It's not really a charter agreement of the sort that we need. In a system which was truly designed with capitalism as a core principle, there should be a defining document, like the constitution, equal in stature, but not connected in process. This 'trade charter' would then set down all the key principles upon which the legislative rules of commence could be based. I think it would help a lot.
Another interesting side note is that the bill of rights itself came from England in 1689. The title of the document was the "bill of rights" and it contains some language which made it into our own constitution verbatim, such as item 10: "That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;" which is very similar to our own 8th amendment: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/england.htm
I think ideally, there should be separate documents for the constitution, which defines the process of government, and the bill of rights, which defines the rights of the people. An over arching legal code might be less of a great idea, as people vary by their culture, etc. and also, laws can be written to favor one side, such as our national tax code which essentially does one thing very well, which is siphon off dollars from NY and CA and give them to TX. Except now when it gives them to Saudi Arabia, Israel and sometimes China. But politics aside, I think that founding documnents are meant to set a basis for rules, rather than the rules themselves. So an item on a legal basis document created to inpire the creation of a criminal code might say something like 'each citizen has a right to live provided that they are no threat to another life' or something. that lets you know you're going to outlaw murder. The thing is, you have to have good and careful people design these things, or you end up with something like the ten commandments, which has some good pieces in it like that but some other ones like no false gods, which has led to many genocidal campaigns.
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Quote:
Cool. So this is my question - if the Consitution only protects people from the Federal government, and the States can pass whatever laws they like that devolve to them - how can the Supreme Court rule on the Constitutionality of any state law?
Rue,
This is the crux of the problem. Under the original design there was no supreme court, it was created to prevent the states from interpreting the constitution. I guess, in theory, it creates a sort of universal similarity of laws. In practice, whoever is represented up top starts slanting the whole country toward their own bias. I suspect this question is somehow connected to the SD abortion thing, but with any luck we can avoid that particular debate like the plague.
Anyway, the key thing here is that the states have lost their sovereignty, and the supreme court is a central element in that. It was the other part of the plan of the federalists, who wanted an empire, so technically I should have said they wanted to be emperor, but at the time several senators commented that the federalists would someday create a king george (look, and here he is.)
Federalism was done a huge blow by the creation of the demomcratic republican party, which had more jeffersonian principles, but after the split, the debate became democrat vs. republican, and gradually things got more and more federalist as people were focusing on the left-right and not on the federalist-antifederalist. Post wwii the federalists got a new lease on life, and if you look particularly in the post watergate period, every administration is more federalist than the last.
Sygnym,
Hey. Sorry didn't see you there.
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The constitution trumps state law. The rights protected (NOT GRANTED!) by the constitution are for all citizens of the United States.
In your example of the murder laws, the Supreme Court has ruled the death penalty constitutional. States can enact it or not as they choose, but no state can force a defendant to testify against himself (5th amendment).
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Friday, August 11, 2006 07:51
Auraptor,
You're still making up people's positions. Nobody said the threat wasn't real.
It is very real to us. What is not very real to us is this administration's ability to capture actual terrorists, or for that matter, its ability to be honest and unmanipulating of the information we receive from it.
this scares the crap out of us, because we know these attacks really can happen and we think this government is politicizing the threat even while it fuels it, not combating it in any meaningful fashion.
We aren't the ones being naive. Our government has long since lost our trust on this because it has failed at every turn to do anything but use scare tactics.
what can I say? I hope they really caught some real terrorists, but even if they did, I'd like to know how 4 years after the original attack, fighting them over there has helped us, if they are still able to mount an attack at us over here? Where is the ultimate success at curbing this extremism? And isn't it likely then, and please admit it already, that all we have done in the middle east is to fuel more Jihadists willing to kill us at home and abroad?
At no time has my Gov't politicized the terror issue. To date, the jihadist have scored an absolute zero attacks on the US. But the same can't be said of Spain or England.
The threat is real. The thrust of those who want to kill us all isn't going away.
Why the FUCK can't you see that?
People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy. - Joss
" They don't like it when you shoot at 'em. I worked that out myself. "
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Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
Cool. So this is my question - if the Consitution only protects people from the Federal government, and the States can pass whatever laws they like that devolve to them - how can the Supreme Court rule on the Constitutionality of any state law?
First, You're making quite and assumption when you state that "...the Consitution only protects people from the Federal government." I would think that the Constitution defines the rules under which the Federal Government operates, and some specific conditions relating to the rights of the people.
Second, the Supremes can rule on the Constitutionality of state law when they believe that the state law contravenes either the Constitution or federal laws passed under the provisions of the Constitution.
Do you have a particular point you're trying to make? Just curious.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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