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Thread: The Left’s Guide to Reclaiming the Constitution

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    The Left’s Guide to Reclaiming the Constitution

    I can't tell if this guy is writing parody or really means it. Rather than reclaim a Constitution he fails utterly to refer to, he seems to be advocating rewriting it. Is he serious?


    The Left’s Guide to Reclaiming the Constitution

    With Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, progressives see a dystopian future: a judicial gavel pounding down for decades on voting rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights and more. But rather than despairing or scheming for 1930s-style court packing, what progressives need most is a constitutional vision of their own, a vivid picture of what judges should do with the power of the courts.

    ...The centerpiece should be a constitutionalism of strong democracy. Fighting against the vote-suppression efforts of a Republican Party that dominates national politics despite being in the minority in presidential and Senate votes, Democrats are recognizing the extent of disenfranchisement — of former felons, incarcerated people, Puerto Rican citizens and those whose jobs and family responsibilities keep them from the polls on any given Tuesday.

    ...Second, progressive candidates and activists are pressing for a new conception of economic citizenship: universal health and family leave, free higher education, access to union membership and other workplace protections against the power of owners and bosses. That would inform a constitutionalism of economic citizenship.

    ...Third is a constitutionalism of just criminal justice. Activists are raising a new generation of questions about policing and the prison system: who gets stopped, the system of money bail that keeps arrestees locked up simply because they cannot raise the cash to get out, the ways prosecutors’ offices set priorities, and the widespread and highly unequal incarceration that results.

    ...Fourth is a constitutionalism that respects the rights of noncitizens. Spurred by President Trump’s nativism, a new wave of mobilization and solidarity with migrants has highlighted the extreme legal, economic and sexual vulnerability of millions of undocumented residents and workers.

    ...Every political movement has its constitutional visions, from Great Society liberalism to Reaganite economic libertarianism and cultural conservatism. The work now is to define a jurisprudence of economic citizenship, strong democracy and inclusive justice that will help a resurgent left reclaim the Constitution.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Claptrap.
    Liberals are a clear and present danger to our nation
    Pick your enemies carefully.






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    Yeah, the left does not want a court based on law.
    When Donald Trump said to protest “peacefully”, he meant violence.

    When he told protesters to “go home”, he meant stay for an insurrection.

    And when he told Brad Raffensperger to implement “whatever the correct legal remedy is”, he meant fraud.

    War is peace.

    Freedom is slavery.

    Ignorance is strength.

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    do all conservatives live in fantasy-land

    Are you righties so naive you believe there is some magical formula in the constitution that answers all complex issues and problems even now after over two hundred years? The constitution can mean just about anything dependent on the reader or interpreter and what they are trying to adjudicate. Check out the 14th Amendment sometime. Oddly the Reagan administration recognized the complexity and put out guidelines, see italicized excerpt below.

    "Judges are bound by the text of the Constitution and cannot rely on their own notions of desirable public policy to strike down legislative or executive actions. Where the Constitution does not specify the value to be preferred, there is no principled way for courts to discern and provide preferred treatment for such a value. Whether such a value should be accorded protection, and how much protection it ought to receive, are political matters, reserved by the Constitution to the democratic majorities in the states and the political branches of the federal government."

    From book author, "The Guidelines, in other words, set aside the old doctrines that enforced conservative orthodoxy by judicial fiat, in favor of an almost Rooseveltian vision that would largely just get the courts out of the Reagan administration's way. Earl Warren's sixteen years in the Court's center chair, combined with the shock of decisions like Roe v. Wade, had convinced the Republican Party that they had something to fear from the judiciary after all

    By the Reagan years, even the men behind Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act had walked away from many of their most radical claims about the Constitution. In his 1973 confirmation hearings to become Nixon's solicitor general, Robert Bork repudiated his decade-old article claiming that bans on private discrimination are rooted in a "principle of unsurpassed ugliness." Fourteen years later, during his unsuccessful nomination to the Supreme Court, Bork tried to downplay his opposition to the Civil Rights Act as a kind of youthful indiscretion."


    p211 'Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted by Ian Millhiser
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22715946-injustices

    'Let’s start telling the truth about what the Supreme Court does.' 'The answer is simple and has to do with the fact that law is not anything like science — and that what the Supreme Court does has little to do with the dispassionate application of clear laws to clear facts.'


    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...4e0_story.html


    Any resolution to the issues in dat old doc? No, ah shucks.

    "Asylum seekers arrested. Families separated. An order to reunite them, only to find that many of them can’t be matched up. And while we were fixated on that (and rightly so) a bill to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, to “balance the budget” barely six months after a huge corporate tax cut." John Beckett

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/johnbec...ere-lying.html
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    ^^Sounds just like the author in the OP according to whom the wisdom of the ages is foolish and what abstract perfections liberals can dream up will save the world.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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