The US Constitution has been rewritten constantly, almost since its ratification. Eg: Chief Justice John Marshall decided in 1803 that the Constitution allowed SCOTUS to strike down legislation if "unconstitutional." That's a rewrite.
The Redemption Era courts rewrote the 14th Amendment to guarantee only the right to contract. Later courts rewrote the Commerce Clause to expand the power of the Federal Government, or wrote in a right to privacy, or marriage equality.
But it's not just courts. Multiple Congresses essentially erased Congress's sole power to declare war, by ceding the power to the Executive. The current Senate, incl. Ms Blackburn, wrote out the power of the purse when they let Trump fund his wall over Congressional opposition.
And, as I like to go on about, the current Senate also radically rewrote the balance of powers between branches when they acquitted the President for treating Congressional oversight as optional.
This process of continuous de facto revision can be used, and has been used, for good and bad ends. But it is a constant, and as much an essential part of our Constitutional history as any clause or phrase in the document.
[Oh, one more: the entire Bill of Rights, not to mention the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, were rewritten to exclude Black people for about a century.]
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
It’s not nuts. LA is in a floodplain, with historically intense but brief seasonal rains. The LA River, once a mostly dry arroyo, was built intentionally to do just this and channel flood water to the sea. Otherwise, a lot of LA would be uninhabitable.
NB: #Actually, LA is, at least naturally, mostly uninhabitable. Too little rainfall and no aquifers. That’s why it didn’t boom until the city fathers, led by a former mayor named Fred Eaton and William Mulholland, stole all the water from the Owens Valley 100s of miles north.
This happened circa 1910, but was jumped up to the more noirish 1930s to provide the plot of the movie “Chinatown.”
1) A day late but: for many years in the mid-2010s, Father’s Day was hard for me, and I would tweet out a message to everyone else in the same boat, those estranged or alienated from their children, or their fathers, by their own choice or not. You were, and are, not alone.
2) Due to extraordinary and underserved fortune, I have been given a second chance at life. But I still carry scars, and I still think of all of those for whom Father’s Day (or any family holiday) brings only grief.
3) I can’t promise anyone that they will reach the same happy place I found, because, again, I can’t claim to have deserved it. But I do know what’s necessary to make it possible.
Here’s conservative former federal judge J Harvie Wilkinson III on Heller vs DC, which for the *first time in American history* read an individual right to own firearms into the 2A.
The conservative legal movement of which Judge Wilkinson was a proud member called for restraint in the judiciary from interfering in the democratic process. But it became, as he watched in dismay, a movement devoted to producing “conservative” results.
I don’t do much fake Constitutional scholarship in here anymore, but:
1) The people who adopted the 2A have been dead for 200+ yrs and we have no more obligation to accept their views on arms than we do their views of bodily humours…
2) The reading of the 2A to protect the individual right to bear arms is about 15 years old and if you think that is set in stone for all time, beyond any ability to undo, I’d like you to meet my friend, Roe V Wade, and…
3) With a few exceptions, current gun policies were *created* by legislatures, mostly in the states. So yes, these decisions have been legitimately made “by the people.” They can just as legitimately be undone or changed.
For reasons that will be obvious, I've been thinking about an essay by Terry Dobson in the book, "Aikido and the New Warrior." It's too good to paraphrase or summarize, so I will post the whole thing in this thread. Worth the 5 min it takes to read.
Was puzzled by this quote from a council member in a NC town with an AR-15 factory:
“If Nike moved here, I wouldn’t want them here because their politics are so different. I’d want them packing and to send them north."
Nike is woke?
I applaud this sensitive attempt to depict the actual damage these weapons do. I happened to be looking t the graphics of the violent mutilation of 6-yr old Noah Pozner when my own son walked into the room. washingtonpost.com/nation/interac…