It is always amusing to watch conservatives react to court decisions they don’t like. They were firmly in character last week when Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush administration broke the law and violated the Constitution when it began wiretapping, without warrants, international phone calls between Americans and “suspected terrorists.”Read the rest of this week's op-ed at The Future of Freedom Foundation's website.
She’s a Carter appointee, they said. She’s a liberal. What did you expect?
It doesn’t take much to see that this is not a refutation of Judge Taylor’s ruling. It is misdirection.
Proudly delegitimizing the state since 2005
"Aye, free! Free as a tethered ass!" —W.S. Gilbert
"All the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and . . . the State should be abolished." —Benjamin Tucker
"You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." —James Madison
"Fat chance." —Sheldon Richman
"The historian Merrill Jensen noted that Alexander Hamilton, a staunch nationalist, and Thomas Jefferson, a staunch decentralist, looked at the same Constitution and saw two contradictory things. Each saw a plan of government consistent with his own predilections."
ReplyDeleteMaybe so. But I thought Madison's vision for the nation was similar to Hamilton's in 1787, and that he became a "Jeffersonian" because of his interpretation of the Constitution. That is, I thought Madison went against his own predilictions. So viewing the Constittuion objectively can be done.
How do we know his interpretation of the Constitution didn't change after the change in his predilections? Isn't the standard account that Jefferson changed Madison's mind on some things? Even if there is reason to be skeptical about that, if it happened, then predilections led interpretation, not the other way around.
ReplyDeleteGiven the intentional vagueness of the Constitution's wording, what does it mean to view the document objectively?