Quote:
Originally Posted by Willravel
As a proud living constitution bullshit artist, I feel I should remind everyone that the amendment process is part of what makes the Constitution alive. That, combined with legal, Constitutional judicial decisions, are how the Constitution stays a relevant document for people in 2010 just as it was in the late 18th century. Of course it's risky to allow the Constitution to be amended and reinterpreted, but it's a necessary risk. America in 1780 is not the same country as America in 2010. The Constitution of 1780 wouldn't work in 2010.
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to allow, even encourage, judicial interpretation and decisions to 'evolve' as the years go on, you realize that, as is stated in an above post, that it is a double edged sword with the very real possibility of the courts removing rights as well?
For example, John Bad Elk v. US, which acknowledges the right of a person to resist an unlawful arrest, decided in 1900, because liberty of the individual was that important. Now, move forward to 1998, in the case of State (WI) v. Hobson, where the state supreme court decided the following -
"[C]ourts and legislatures have terminated the right to forcibly resist unlawful arrest because legal and societal circumstances have changed dramatically since the inception of that right. In the early development of the common law, physical resistance used to be an effective response to the problem of unlawful arrest. There were few if any means of effective redress for unlawful arrest. None of these reasons remains valid today."
Now replace that right to resist unlawful arrest with the right to free speech and use terrorism as the excuse, or the right to be an American citizen even though your parents are not, add in a sympathetic supreme court and a living constitution theory, and now congress can indeed make a law that prohibits free speech or prevents you from being a citizen even though you were born here.
Is that the kind of republic the founders intended?