It’s straight hysteria and intellectual dishonesty to label a difference in spending treason or terrorism. Those words are as overplayed as “racist.” The U.S. Government could, borrow and spend less. Or sell assets. Those are options.
In my point of view, having millions of Americans out of work because they can’t compete with Asian labor or illegal labor due to law and failure to enforce law could be labeled treasonous or traitorous by your standards.
Why even have a farce of a law like a debt ceiling?
You mean the president has a duty to expel those who enter the country illegally?
That’s why Congress has the power to declare war. Then the President would be obligated to defend the country or else he’s in violation of the law.
A very good question. Rep Peter Welch proposed getting rid of it, but that apparently went nowhere.
No, I don’t underestimate the power they have, but you wrongly assume that I support inaction on nominees. The Constitution includes a provision to give the President the ability to fill vacancies when the Senate is incapable of acting, though it is now essentially a useless power, so even our Framers thought that it was a matter of importance to have government staffed.
But if you are against someone being appointed to a position, vote against them. In extraordinary circumstances, I have no problem with a filibuster. I recognize that Congress is busy and can’t dispose of everything before it, but a deliberate pattern and strategy of inaction on scores to hundreds of nominations is inexcusable, especially when the reasons for the dereliction typically have nothing to do with the nominee themselves.
Doesn’t apply in this case
First of all, Obama is not a bad president. He’s not outstanding, but he’s middle of the pack at worst. Just because you don’t like him doesn’t make him bad at his job.
Tangentially related to Obama, and the failure of the GOP to actually try to work with him, I’m reminded of what Richard Mourdock (R-IN. Was a senator at the time) said:
Another example of the Right’s ongoing desire to deny Obama anything was when Senate Majority Leader, and cartoon character most likely to beat Bugs Bunny in a race, Mitch McConnell was forced to filibuster his own bill.
Really? If anything, it would prove to a lot of people that the Republicans’ ardent opposition to Obama was mostly due to race. It certainly would me, not that I need more evidence of it.
Without knowing anything about him? That would be highly irresponsible. Research the bloke, and then make up your mind.
Simply refusing to vote for “anybody he nominated” is extremely bad legislative behavior. That’s obstruction without a valid purpose.
Only if the President is really confused about what an invasion is.
Just stop.
Of course “common good” appears in the constitution:
Of course, that’s the Massachusetts State Constitution. The case involved a claim that a law passed by Massachusetts infringed upon rights guaranteed by the federal constitution.
Justice Harlan undoubtedly remembered that the states have plenary police power, which they can certainly use for the common good or indeed any reason they wish. The power of Massachusetts to pass a law for the common good is of course not found in the federal constitution! It derives from the plenary legislative sovereign power of each state, and is memorialized in Art VII of the state constitution.
The federal constitution is of course supreme where it might conflict with state law, so the Supreme Court had to answer the question, “Does this exercise of Massachusetts law conflict with the federal constitution – specifically, with the preamble, and with the Fourteenth Amendment?”
As to the preamble: no, because the preamble is not a source of substantive rights or powers.
As to the Fourteenth Amendment: also no.
So ignoring politically inconvenient law is governing and proper execution of duties? I can’t blame Congress for acting in their best interests when that’s the name of the game.
Good thing that hundreds of thosands of people have been removed from the US in the last year - Obama is on the job!
Except under Ryan, they made a budget deal that gave Democrats most of what they wanted, and are still willing to push TPP through for the President.
Sure, the REpublicans are confrontational and there is an element in the party that doesn’t want to give Obama anything. But there have always been enough votes to pass good legislation along with the Democrats.
People entering the country illegally is generally a crime not an invasion.
Could you expand on this point because it seems like the key point and I’m not seeing how Justice Harlan reached this decision.
My understanding is that Jacobson’s argument was that he was entitled to due process. Justice Harlan’s decision was based on the argument that the common good trumped due process. My assumption was that Justice Harlan was finding the common good in the federal constitution, but you say that isn’t so. So my question now is how can common good, as established in a state constitution, trump due process, as established in the federal constitution?
You’re not allowed to say that either. It’s an “act of love” now.
Sure, although I want to be clear that we’ve now moved afield; the initial issue was the applicability of the federal preamble language to any substantive legal right or remedy. As Jacobson made clear, there ain’t none such, and this conclusion remains untrammeled by subsequent law.
Also unchanged was the conclusion – not unique to Jacobson but echoing a wide line of prior cases – that states had plenary police power: that is, a state can legislate on any matter within its borders, subject only to areas where the federal constitution places some limit.
But what has changed dramatically in the last 110 years since Jacobson was written is the width, depth, and breadth of the Fourteenth Amendment.
So it’s not surprising that you read Harlan’s dismissal of the Fourteenth Amendment as having applicability and wonder just what he’s talking about. But you have the perspective of 115 years in which the text of the Fourteenth hasn’t changed by so much as one comma, but the effect of the amendment has undergone a veritable metamorphosis.
In fact, this case isn’t even close to the nadir of Fourteenth Amendment strength. Consider Black v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court case that upheld compulsory sterilization of genetic undesirables (“Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”) The state’s broad plenary power allowed it to enact sterilization and the Fourteenth Amendment did nothing to shield the targets of this.
Interestingly enough, while the Fourteenth Amendment was not given much power of issues of personal liberty, it was the source of striking commercial liberty – the so-called “Lochner era” rested on a 1910 case in which New York’s state plenary power to require bakers’ employers to not require long working hours was struck down due to a supposed “right to contract,” found in the Fourteenth Amendment.
It’s because your understanding of “due process,” includes both procedural and substantive due process. The latter began its life in Lochner, although it was not named until later; the idea that there was a substantive element to the due process clause can be fairly said to have begun when the Lochner court said that the federal constitution, by its spirit of freedoms, protected the rights of two parties to contract working hours among themselves, free from New York’s legislative reach.
This view, and these laws, survived until the Depression, when they ran into serious conflict with the various social programs that FDR’s government had put in place to combat the economic disaster. Courts, including the Supreme Court, abandoned the economic liberty ideas of the Lochner era and accepted a wide variety of regulations purportedly designed for healing the nation’s woes.
United States v. Carolene Products Company is a good example of the shift. This 1938 case challenged a federal law that prohibited “filled milk,” which was skim milk augmented by non-milk fats, from being sold in interstate commerce. The challenge claimed that this restriction was an unconstitutional restriction of the economic due process rights of the business. The Supreme Court upheld the law, declaring that the legislature’s determination was entitled to presumptive constitutionality, as long as there was some evidence on which the legislature could have reasonably relied…in this case, the public health concerns of “filled milk.”
In a footnote, the Court said that not all government legislation would be entitled to that deference – legislation that targeted politically powerless minorities would need more, stronger justification. This has become known as the most influential footnote in Court history, as it gave birth to what we now know as the various levels of judicial review: strict scrutiny for protected classes and rational basis review for classifications like the merely economic.
Subsequent court cases crafted many personal liberty interests as “fundamental,” and they have grown over the years to include the panoply you know today. You know the cases that have shaped the law: Griswold in 1968, which defined contraception as such a right; Loving, for marriage; Roe v. Wade needs no explanation; Lawrence v. Texas, which placed sexual acts between consenting adults out of reach; and others where the court case is not familiar but the effects are well know.
So the short summary is: the Due Process Clause jurisprudence in 1905, for Jacobson, was correctly applied by Justice Harlan. It just seems odd to today’s eyes because the Due Process clause case law in the intervening 110 years dramatically transformed the landscape.