I believe that recently the Virginia legislature upheld citizens’ rights to carry firearms into places of worship. That means no church can put up a sign saying “no guns allowed in here.”
One’s sex life was not the basis of the Roe v. Wade decision, nor the laws it changed.
Are you sure that on private property (the church) they couldn’t say that? Or is the ruling that the state can’t prohibit it? I remember when concealed carry came into effect in Texas that the state allowed places to put up “no guns” signs, but didn’t try to impose it itself.
I’m not going to get into a discussion on the merits and arguments of Roe v. Wade, but it’s clearly based on the right to privacy suggested in Griswold, and the privacy in question had to do with one’s sex life, specifically, decisions regarding procreation.
My point is that there should be no reason to glibly wonder “how it all happened.” It happened because people argued that there were fundamental rights involved, including, for all of us, the fundamental right to contraception as expressed in Griswold. Whether or not it came out the right way or whether the reasoning presented was sound is a different matter.
I’ve been thinking about the expansion of Federal power since this came up. I’ve checked out Gibbons v Ogdon and McCulloch v Maryland. Any of you experts send me to a better place to go??
Law school.
–Cliffy
Cite? I find no such news story.
Code of Virginia:
Sorry, sorry, just kidding. However, the best resources for understanding the federal/state divide that I know of are going to be Constitutional Law or Federal Courts texts. I don’t know of any popularly-available works that would serve to give you a full overview.
That said, the greatest expansion of federal power came as a result of the Depression and there’s been a lot writen (both scholarly and popular) on the Court in that period. To give a basic overview, FDR and the Democratically-controlled Congress were implementing all these welfare plans and price controls to try and end the Depression. The Supreme Court was striking them down as either over-reaching Congress’s powers enumerated in the Constitution or inappropriately delegating Congressional power to the President. When the states tried similar programs, the Court was striking them down as impinging on the due process rights of private businesses. Many of these decisions were 5-4 splits.
This was an increasingly untenable situation, and FDR took a drastic step – he announced a Court-packing plan which would greatly increase the size of the Court. Since Congress was friendly to FDR, this would have led to a bunch more FDR-appointed justices. The lan was roundly criticized, but nonetheless, shortly thereafter Justice Owen Roberts started voting to uphold FDR’s programs. Although scholars are divided as to whether the Court-packing plan was the reason Roberts switched sides, his voting pattern is known as the Switch in Time to Save Nine. After the Switch, most of the New-Deal programs got up and running wthout too much trouble.
As I said, there’s a lot written about this period. you can start off by researching the Switch in Time to Save Nine, FDR’s Court-Packing Plan, The Four Horsemen (four justices who’d made up the rest of the bloc that struck all this stuff down), and Wickard v. Filburn, one of the early Switch cases which shows just how dramatically Congress’s power over “interastate” commerce had been expanded.
–Cliffy
Thanks for all the input. This has been fasacinating.
ooops …fascinating.
Nope… check this out, it’s the real deal.
From: http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/two/texannex.htm
which is the text of the The Annexation of Texas Joint Resolution of Congress March 1, 1845 (U. S. Statutes at Large, Vol. V, p. 797-8).
Texas, has another weird thing other states don’t have- the mineral rights to all lands/waters 3 leagues off the coast, due to their previous claim on them prior to Statehood.
Note in your quoted portion: “which shall be entitled to admission under the provisions of the federal constitution.” This means that such subdivision must be approved through the normal constitutional process. So your assertion that it could be done “without needing Congressional assent” is entirely false.
And it also means that this provision is functionally identical to the provision of Article IV, Section 3, of the Constitution that provides for similar subdivision of any state. So Texas has nothing that any other state doesn’t also have, except maybe a limitation on subdivision (“not exceeding four in number”), which doesn’t apply to any other state.
I think I’m going to start looking for a bumper sticker that says “Texas, Get Over Yourself.”
Even if this provision didn’t exist and the Resolution read the way the Texans always pretend it reads, I’m not convinced such an Act would be constitutional.
–Cliffy
Get ready. A few years ago I started a Pit thread with that title, and you wouldn’t believe the venom that came back. Some Texans really think that everyone else is jealous because they don’t live in Texas. One woman even started saying that other states have ugly shapes.
Well, Florida does look like a penis. Is that a good or a bad shape?
–Cliffy
While the Articles of Confederation accorded less sovereingty, responsibility, and power to the central government, it was also explicitly a perpetual union - secession was off the table.
I wasn’t referring to the power of secession. I was referring to Article II of the Articles of Confederation:
Still, it’s interesting how that association of fully-sovereign states was entered as a “perpetual” one. The Constitution as adopted states as one of its aims to form “a more perfect union”, with the states surrendering unto the Federal Government the key appurtenances of recognized nation-state-hood (power to conduct foreign relations, declare war, outfit a Navy, mint currency, issue patents, naturalize citizens, run the posts, etc.).
BTW re: Texas, part of the reason why that article was included may have been, if you recall, that Texas was a recognized independent nation and ally prior to incorporation, and it was to become a state right off the bat, with no Territorial Administration period; and that at the time of the Joint resolution (1845) the Republic of Texas claimed a large piece of Mexico (essentially everything NE of the Rio Grande all the way to its source) that it did not really control (nor did the Mexicans do so effectively either, most of the time). So you had to state exactly what you intended to do with this annexation which was not of Indian wilderness, but of a sovereign ally. The idea was that multiple states would be formed out of that “Greater Texas”, but that it would not be a total dismemberment that would erase the former republic (and thus reveal it for a land-grabbing sham).