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Originally Posted by roachboy
original intent means what conservative activist judges say it means. this in the name of preventing judicial activism, which is basically conservo-code for "decisions we don't like."
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well this is just a ton of malarkey. I'm original intent and strict constructionist, yet i'm far from a conservative activist judge. What you're trying to do is take Scalias so called position of strict constructionism and original intent and turn it in to a wrong headed attempt at something, but the problem is that Scalia is nothing more than an activist judge changing the constituiton as it was written in to something that he wants to see done. His bullshit opinion in Gonzalez v. raich is more than proof of that.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
even if ultra-rightwing militia types dont like the current precedent-based legal system that the constitution they claim to defend put into motion, the fact remains that you can read law and read court decisions and find in them interpretive arguments concerning previous statute and constitutionality. and you--or a proxy--can appeal those interpretations. the mobility of case law presupposes interpretations. if you seriously believe in this fiction of "original intent" all that disappears.
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right, because one would THINK that private property rights would be sacred, until tyrannical judges decide that a larger tax base is preferable to a individual being able to hold on to his own property, so black robed tyrants decide that 'public use' definitions should be broadened to include 'public benefit', i.e. Kelo. Or that we'll go ahead and forge out exceptions to the bill of rights, specifically the 4th Amendment, by stating that YES, DUI checkpoints are indeed violations of the 4th Amendment, but I, as a supreme court justice, feel that drunk driving is such a HUGE problem, that we'll overlook unreasonable search and seizure requirements for this problem.....until the next one comes along. This attitude of 'stare decisis', combined with the liberal position of a living document theory, places YOUR inalienable rights in the hands of 9 people and allows them to determine whether or not your rights can be violated for their own ideology.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
what's funny is that an immediate consequence of strict construction becoming the legal philosophy of the land would be a constitutional crisis because the constitution is not written as the sort of document that the strict constructionists want it to be. look at the difference in the way the german constitution is written---civil law is made with an assumption that law can be fashioned to more or less eliminate the space for interpretation on the part of judges. it's a **fundamentally** different approach.
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Again, this is not strict constructionism. It's strict Scalia-ism and not worth the effort to explain. it's just wrong, and doubly wrong to continue to accept scalias definition of himself as a strict constructionist when he isn't.