We have decided it, it’s clearly indicated in the constitution. What you aren’t understanding is the “right to vote” is actually in the constitution, it isn’t judicial activism.
i was replying to someone else
On this message board your posts are not limited to being responded to only by people to whom you are replying. If you would like to enjoy that sort of feature you’re looking for a private message, not a message board thread.
Yes, we have decided, through the democratic process, to grant the right to vote to all of our fellow citizens.
Why aren’t you understanding that congress past that law.
I mean Congress passed a law and then the States ratified, constitutional amendments extending the franchise to all adult males, freed slaves etc etc. But there was a right to vote in the United States before any of those happened. There has been a right to privacy, in the constitution from day one, through the natural rights we possessed as Englishmen, a concept well established in American law since the time of the revolution.
And your argument would be??? Judicial Activism is good?
I am not trying to defend the more unfortunate events in our history.
My main argument is I don’t think you know what judicial activism means, or rather I don’t think you have a consistent view of it. If you think “right to property” is judicial activism, I’m saying that you don’t know what the constitution is or how it works. There is like virtually no one, in the history of our country, who has seriously denied we have a right to property. The constitution explicitly says that not all rights are enumerated, it’s as simple as that. There is massive precedent for a right to property and clear indicators in the constitution that one exists.
Maybe a more broad argument–is I don’t agree with judicial activism, but I think for it to be meaningful agreement we have to actually know what, specifically, you think judicial activism is. You have indicated a few things (like our democratic form of government and the right to property) should have to be protected by specific legislation, which actually goes against the tenets of our constitution. That suggests to me you define judicial activism quite differently than I, and many others, would.
The Constitution of the United States is not about ‘a society’. It is a contract that spells out the relationship between the power of a federal government and the rights of the states, which are separate societies as far as the Constitution is concerned.
The whole point to the document was to assure the several states that agreeing to a federation with some central authority would not usurp the rights of the States to govern their own people, and for the people of those States to likewise elect their own governments and choose how to select the representatives they want to send to the federal government.
Implicit in this was the desire of the people in almost every state to maintain a significantly different culture within the umbrella of an ‘American’ culture… You eventually fought a war over it.
I support judicial activism in the same sense that I support every single day threatening to destroy the human race.
It seems like a crazy idea, but it’s inevitable given what human society looks like currently and in particular when it comes to America there’s no putting that cat back in the bag. At this point it’s a question of unilaterally giving up the politicization of the court which would result in a court system that is just as political and has just as much power to legislate from the bench, they’ll just be legislating much worse things.
And as has been mentioned in this thread, the 9th Amendment gives the courts cover to protect unenumerated rights as they see them.
Quote me were i ever used the word “property” in this thread
No. For the reasons I just gave.
That’s… one take, sure.
Though I would argue against it; the Constitution is about taking a bunch of separate groups and melding them into one, cohesive society. The original Articles of Confederation were what treated each group as having its own disparate powers… and, *spoiler alert* … that failed. Hence the need to write a Constitution and forge a single society.
Though of course, this is a bit of a hijack.
What if the Court decided it was ok to round up the Jews, Donald Trump was President, freedom of speech meant freedom from speech?
That is my concern about Judicial Activism.
“I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.” -George Carlin
9 old people can’t destroy democracy or initiate a genocide. Only a society at large can do that. Presumably a second amendment supporter would agree with that.
The judicial system is a part of our government and our society and of course the more power we choose to give them the more potential for abuse their is. This is basically an inherent problem with any way of setting up a society, unless there’s actually away to achieve anarchism.
I don’t think pragmatically there is any way to eliminate this problem. If I somehow convinced the entire democratic party to stop nominating ideologically minded judges, that wouldn’t make judicial activism go away, we would just have activist judges who had a consensus even farther away from what I believe.
I do think that one area where America opens itself up to more judicial activism than necessary is that our legislative process is so unbelievably slow and clunky, too many groups eventually figure out that it benefits them to bypass the normal legislative process entirely. So doing something like eliminating the senate and/or switching to a parliamentary system IMO would be a good method of lessening how much law depends on the judicial system. Of course this will never happen so it doesn’t really matter.
I will be watching for the inevitable " why is this Conservative Court doing horrible things" threads.
you made the monster.
I often say the conservative court is horrible. Because I actually disagree with their political views. I don’t naively believe a system with true impartiality is possible, I openly want the highly partial, partisan system we have to support my beliefs.
If they get overturn Obergefell, I’ll be mad at them because I actually think equal rights regardless of sexually are a moral necessity, not because of the process used to deny those rights.
why should they have that power?
The same reason Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping all have the power to initiate nuclear war. It’s the way the world works and taking that power away is much less feasible than working within that existing framework for positive outcomes.