Welcome to Hell

Had Hillary Clinton been elected the US House would have already impeached her and the Senate would be debating her removal.

In 2010, NPR's legal affairs goddess, Nina Totenberg interviewed Justice Stephen Breyer on background for his book, Making Our Democracy Work, A Judge’s View.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has sparred for years with Justice Antonin Scalia on the printed pages of legal opinions. The two have even debated about constitutional interpretation in public. And now Justice Breyer has taken his argument to the printed pages of a book written for popular consumption.

In his first interview about the new book, Breyer's targets are the ideas of originalism and textualism advocated by Scalia — the notion that the framers of the Constitution meant what they said and no more — and that the provisions of the Constitution are limited to what they covered back in 1789.

Scalia’s view is much more black and white. “The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead,” he famously said. Scalia contends that the Constitution is not flexible and its meaning cannot change over time. To allow the Constitution's meaning to morph over time, he contends, just allows judges to say it means whatever they want it to say.

Not so, Breyer says.

“People think we decide things politically,” Breyer says, “or that the only way to protect against subjective views of judges is to have something called originalism, which is as if you could reach decisions by means of an historical computer. I don't think any of those things are true.” [History Through A Supreme Court Justice's Lens]

The Fresh Air interview with Justice Breyer is linked here.

It seems important to add that Justice Scalia had been the longest serving member of the Court, resided in McLean, Virginia, and was a devout, traditionalist Catholic uncomfortable with the changes in the Church caused by Vatican II. Scalia prefered the Latin Mass and drove long distances to parishes which he felt were more in accord with his beliefs.

Now, another member of the Church of the Holy Roman Kiddie Diddlers, Brett Kavanaugh, has ruined Christine Blasey Ford's life, his own life, his marriage now he's poised to ruin America.

From Peter Henriques via the Billings Gazette:

One of George Washington’s most important and far-reaching decisions made as president revolved around the question of whether he would sign into law a bill establishing a national bank. Alexander Hamilton, his brilliant secretary of the treasury, argued for such an institution and justified his action by seizing on Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, which endowed Congress with all powers “necessary and proper” to perform tasks assigned to it in the national charter.

In short, Hamilton posited that there were “implied” powers in the Constitution as well as “enumerated” ones. Thomas Jefferson was aghast at such implications and prophesied that for the federal government “to take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn is to take possession of a boundless field of power.“

Washington saw it differently and signed Hamilton’s controversial national-bank bill. With a stroke, he endorsed an expansive view of the presidency and made the Constitution a living, open-ended document. The importance of his decision is hard to overstate, for the federal government might have been stillborn had the president rigidly adhered to the letter of the document as urged by Jefferson.

In seeking to reconcile Hamilton and Jefferson (whose views were every bit as divergent as those of the Tea Party and Obama are today), the president eloquently urged forbearance: “I would fain hope that liberal allowances will be made for the political opinions of one another; and instead of those wounding suspicions, and irritating charges there might be mutual forebearances and temporizing yieldings on all sides, without which I do not see how the reins of government are to be managed.” [History shows Washington saw Constitution as living document]

North Dakota scholar Clay Jenkinson describes himself as an historian who initially thought Jefferson was quirky, mired in the Enlightenment and sided with Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison establishing the principle of judicial review in the United States. Marbury affirmed that courts have the power to strike down laws, statutes, and some government actions that contravene the U.S. Constitution. Jenkinson has rounded back to the Jeffersonian model, believes that Jefferson would be horrified to learn that the US is operating with a 242 year old manual and says we are long overdue for a Constitutional Convention.

This country's founders never expected the US Constitution as written to last more than ten years and most predicted it would be rewritten every generation. Thomas Jefferson wrote that a standing army would lead to military adventurism, would ultimately turn on its own citizens and that has happened. Now, we've become the Hamiltonian Empire Thomas Jefferson warned us about. Anyone who believes America is safer because of a military filled with mercenaries is delusional so thanks to the GOP we are witnessing the end of the republic as we have known it.

Welcome to Hell.