I’ve never understood any argument to keep illegal kids out of school. Only possible result is bored illegal kids on street corners, that can’t be good for anybody.
School is cheaper than jail, and possibly more beneficial to the kids and to society.
Stolen from Dave Barry. IIRC.
One of the main reasons majority of Americans “accept” illegal aliens is the understanding that in that way laws such as minimum wage, work safety regulations, healthcare costs can be circumvented and since they are “aliens”, morally justified.
The whole thing - as is the way in American zeitgeist - is being sold as a human rights issue but we all know bar for human rights in US is pretty, pretty low.
No, by 1689 it was clear that the law made Parliament supreme. It wasn’t a constitution. The idea that England and Wales and/or the United Kingdom have an unwritten constitution is a sort of back-formation from the tradition, begun by the US, of having a foundational document called a constitution.
The UK arguably has a stronger organic law than any state with a written constitution, but it’s not a constitution in any meaningful sense.*
*Parliamentary supremacy is largely incompatible with the idea of a constitution anyway; the whole point of a constitution is that it’s not something the legislature can change at its pleasure.
You may wish to call them “invaders”, but that isn’t in the constitution, either. They are certainly not “enemies” and so there is no treason in granting them certain rights.
Last I checked, we are not at war with any Latin American country.
We need legislation to ban walk-behinds.
And leaf blowers! Now, anyone using a leaf blower is definitely an enemy and should be tried for treason!!
I must say I’m not well-educated in politics, but this seems to me to be the opinion of an American raised under the assumption that the US Constitution is the archetype. Considering that the only place I’ve seen that opinion is on this message board, and that everyone else seems quite satisfied that the UK has a constitution, I’m not entirely convinced by your ideas on what “constitution” means.
It may seem that way, but I was born and raised in the UK and I have a very good understanding of the history and principles underpinning English and Welsh law.
The notion of having a constitution in the US was heavily influenced by the English political tradition, so it is a bit of an anachronism to speak of the UK having ‘backdated’ its constitution in light of the US example.
Really, both the US and UK constitutions grew out of a shared political tradition. In the US, the gradual accumulation of tradition was rejected in favour of newfangled (then) Enlightenment-era notions that everything should be carefully ordered and arranged, and written down. But the notion of having a written constitution wasn’t simply invented by the US - it looked to UK precedents, and tried to rationalize into a single document what was (even then) in the UK a mishmash of historical accretion.
There were several proto-constitutional documents used in the UK dating back to the Middle Ages; some remained ‘on the books’ as it were in part, such as the Magna Carta; others, like the ‘instrument of government’ of the English Protectorate, were expressly rejected (but remained as influential precedents).
The US innovation was locating all of this in a single set of documents.
No, the US innovation was locating it in a document. The UK constitution, such as it is, is not just spread over a number of documents (the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta, Act of Settlement and so on). There are also large chunks of it that aren’t written down at all. Anyway, as I said the underlying principle of the US and other modern constitutions is that there are laws which bind the government. That is not a feature of the English “constitution”.
Excapt, of course, every academic in Politics and History who DO see it as an unwritten Constitution.
John Aylmer wrote in the seventeenth century of the English Constitution, comparing it to the constitutions of Sparta and Athens.
We have already discussed the Glorious Revolution that ensured that the King served only at the will of Parliament.
The Treaty of Union with Scotland laid down many constitutional laws.
Added to which we ow have a Bill of Rights equivalent currently that is even more entrenched than being the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
Are you a Tea Party member or are you mocking Tea Party members? I’m leaning toward mocking, but I’d like to clear that up.
Google does not suggest it is a Dave Barryism. They mostly suggest an unknown named Larry Hardiman. However, the pun goes back to Davy Crockett. Defining Freedom: Understanding True Freedom in Modern Society + Freedom Keys
I’m not familiar with the judicial system in the UK, but I was under the impression that the Supreme Court of the UK had significantly limited powers in judicial review insofar that it did not have the authority to overturn Parliamentary legislation. Does the constitution have any binding effect on Parliament?
This is not correct. The history of America’s revolutionary period is littered with paeans to the Ancient Constitution of the mother country from the founding fathers. A quick check of Gordon Wood finds quotes from James Wilson and John Adams filling the bill. (Creation of the American Republic, Chapter 1, Section 2: “The English Constitution”)
Also not correct. The point of a constitution is to provide a framework for governing your nation. Using a written document to curtail the power of elected legislatures was an innovation by conservatives who misliked and feared the influence of popular opinion. This was new and controversial in the 1780s. (At least the judicial review form of it. The idea of a written set of rights that the legislature should and would restrict itself from violating was a long standing tradition in Whig politics.)
The issue isn’t what powers the constitution has, but whether it exists and existed. A “constitution” is nothing more than a basic law that establishes the framework of government. It doesn’t really matter whether that law is statute-based or not; no-one believes, for example, that the English Common law isn’t really a system of law, simply because it is not contained in a “document” like the Napoleonic Code.
As for binding nature, that has a long history in England. Naturally, “Paliament” can pass any law “it” wishes, but passing a law that (say) violates the rights long held to exist by virtue of the historical aglommeration that is the UK Constitution would have very serious political consequences and so could not (and was not) done lightly. This is really not functionally much different from the political cost of (say) passing a formal Constitutional Amendment in a country that has a written constitution. All of them have amending formulas, meaning that, ultimately, the government can change fundamental rights - it just has to jump through the right hoops.
I just saw that on TV, and my son said “That’s not true: what about Greece?” (He meant Athens, of course.) My reply was that Athens was a democracy but not a constitutional one.
He didn’t have to add the word “continuous” for his statement to say what he meant. If someone says “Joe Schmoe is the oldest person,” it doesn’t mean Joe was the first person, nor does it even mean he’s the oldest person who ever lived. This was a speech, not a legal document, and some amount of ambiguity is forgiven. To say things in a speech in ways that they couldn’t possibly be intentionally misinterpreted to mean what was not meant, would be to speak in a manner as cumbersome as my paragraph here. Or worse. It sure wouldn’t make for a good, clear speech.
Got a cite for any Greek or Icelandic written constitutions?
GB doesn’t quite fit the bill of what I’d call a constitutional anything, since the Constitution isn’t codified. I admit that others may disagree with good reason. However, I think it falls in the realm of ambiguity of what it means to be “constitutional”. If GB does have a constitution, what is the process for modifying it? If the process is the same as for modifying any other law, then I say there’s really not much of a constitution, just a set of laws acting as guiding principles.
I’m not a big Obama fan, but I don’t think he was saying anything ignorant here. It may turn out to be technically debatable, but there is a sense in which it is true. In any case, the accuracy doesn’t affect any the point that he was trying to make.
And yet, one wonders what point he was trying to make. He claims, now, that he doesn’t need authority from Congress-- that he is not constitutionally required to get approval before he starts bombing. So why invoke the constitution then?
He’s not required to get approval from Congress before bombing. It’s in the Constitution.