Dangerous metal object for all you subversives to carry in your pocket. (Link from Lenny Foner.)
Eugene Volokh invites you to write the constitutional amendment of your dreams. (Do people on other shores play this game too?) Here’s mine. ( . . more . . )
L’affaire du Pen provides an occasion to trot out one of my hobbyhorses.
If you mark your ballot as favoring more candidates than can be elected, your ballot will be discarded as ‘spoiled’. Why? What is illogical about saying, “I like candidates A,B,C better than candidates D,E,F”? What is the advantage in throwing that information away? Is it democratic to appoint a large faction’s first choice (no matter how despised by other factions) over everybody’s second choice?
The alternative is called ‘approval voting’. I would propose this: The candidate with the broadest approval is elected; if no candidate has 2/3 approval, the winner has reduced powers and a shorter term; if no candidate has 1/2 approval, think about whether you really want such an officer.
“. . . unless it would inconvenience the Government.”
Moussaoui said he has $30,000 and wants to hire a Muslim lawyer to act as an adviser — but cannot do so because the government has frozen his money.
Precht said he knew of no case that would allow Moussaoui to allege a violation of his rights because of a government asset freeze.
Of course not, because that trick is only used on really bad guys, to whom the Sixth Amendment does not apply.
Recent reading: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Prima/Forum, 2002). Despite the title, this book is less about Lincoln himself than about his ambition, Republican policy in general, and the conduct of the war.
It needed a better editor; certain phrases turn up several times in a chapter, such as “at the end of his rope militarily” (Lincoln in 1862). But such tics fade in the second half.
The author’s libertarianism is embarrassingly shrill at times. On the other hand, given the thesis — that the leader of the pork-barrel party broke every clause of the Bill of Rights, murdered thousands, left a legacy of corruption, and got a halo for it — it’s not surprising that he should take Garrison’s attitude:
I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation.
Some questions never addressed: If the legitimacy of secession was never seriously questioned before Lincoln, and was standard doctrine at West Point, why are no officers other than Lee mentioned as questioning the invasion? If the secession was (as this writer argues) all about taxes, why did the seceding parties say it was all about slavery?
But I did learn a thing or two: lots of juicy quotes here; and this is the first I’ve heard that, before the Fort Sumter incident, Davis sent Lincoln a delegation to make a deal for purchase of Federal property in the South and for the Southern share of the Federal debt — and Lincoln refused to see them.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
Necessity is a dangerous plea for the privilege of power; especially when the sole judge of it is the power pretending it.
what the Fourteenth doesn’t say
Bill Quick comments:
I wonder if these people have heard of the 14th Amendment? It extended the provisions in the Constitution and Bill of Rights to the people of the individual states. Of course, that only happened in 1868, so maybe word hasn’t filtered out to Chicago yet.
It doesn’t matter here what provision of the Bill of Rights he’s talking about, because I’m only using this item as a hook to gripe about the goofy doctrine of ‘incorporation’.
Apparently, each provision of the BoR applies to the several States only if the Supreme Court gets around to saying it does, i.e. ‘incorporating’ each clause under the Fourteenth. There is obviously no textual support for this in the Fourteenth itself.
One may respond that there is no explicit Constitutional ground for the judicial veto at all (and I won’t touch that one just now); but by 1866, when they wrote the Fourteenth, Congress was acquainted with the practice and might have provided for a special procedure if that was their intent. Congress did not.
To put it another way: with its Fourteenth Amendment practice the Court went beyond its earlier practice of judging the validity of legislation, to insert itself as an active participant in making legislation valid or invalid.
Can someone explain this to me?