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Originally Posted by dksuddeth
lets think about this, k? The US government, and at least 3/5ths of the states at that time, ratified both of those constitutional amendments. That should have been enough, right? Yet 100 years later, the federal government needed to make new laws to enforce parts of those amendments? in order to enforce the laws more vigorously? If we're only paying lip service to the supreme law of the land and need to actually create new laws just to enforce the constitution of the united states on it's own governments, what are we doing wrong?
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Misunderstanding what a Constitution is, perhaps?
A Constitution isn't a body of law. In a general sense it can be said to be "the law of the land", but what it really is is an articulation of principles that GUIDE the law. You can't enforce the Constitution because there's nothing to enforce. What's the punishment for infringing on someone's right to peaceable assembly? The Constitution doesn't say. What exactly constitutes "infringement" or "peaceable" or "assembly"? The Constitution doesn't say. It's up to lawmakers and judges to INTERPRET the Constitution, and to create (and continually challenge and inquire into) laws that implement the principles of the Constitution.
That was what our founding fathers wanted. They could have just written a bunch of laws and said, "Ok, THERE. Those are the laws." But they didn't do that--they did something much MUCH wiser. They didn't give us a corpus of laws, instead they gave us a place to THINK FROM as we create the laws for ourselves. They didn't want a locked-in system--they wanted a structure that could adapt with the times. Because they had the foresight to know that the one thing that times do is CHANGE.
In this case, it took a long time to interpret the new Amendment into law. But it was a necessary step.
I'll also note that Amendment 14, Article 4 says, in part "The validity of the public debt of the United States... shall not be questioned." So it turns out that Tea Parties are unconstitutional!!!