Strongly agree.
Wanna bet? I’d take that bet any day of the week.
Except that we have numerous SCOTUS that allow some intermingling of religion and state, but we have none that say that sneaking across the border is sometimes legal. This cross may or may not cross the line (yet another pun!) of what is allowed, but you’re statement that it is, on the face of it, illegal, simply shows that you don’t understand how constitutional interpretation in this country works.
I don’t bet, ever.
Just because the court was wrong then doesn’t make it right now.
Given the absurdity of many of your statements, that’s probably a wise move. 
Again, you misunderstand the role of the Supreme Court. It cannot be “wrong”, even if it might reverse an earlier decsision. You might as well say that my parents were “wrong” in naming me John.
My view on this is twofold:
-
It should already be out, as has been legally mandated.
-
It’s unconstitutional. If it’s appealed all the way up and the Supreme Court says it should stay, well, them’s the breaks. I’ll still feel that it should go, because it’s unconstitutional. It won’t change my opinion–but my point was that the people who want it taken down are being accused of getting their panties in a knot and wasting time and money, but the time and money wasting and the panty-twisting is really being done on the other side, who I feel should concede in the name of the Constitution on which our country was founded.
YMMV.
Oh, please. The court is wrong when it lets religious intrusion into government slide, it was wrong when it allowed the sterilization of thousands of poor people, wrong with the Dredd Scott decision, and it’s wrong now. They do not define right or wrong.
You’re right that they don’t decide right or wrong. They decide what the constitution means. You are conflating the two. The constiution can very well be wrong, in a moral sense. But it can’t be wrong in a legal sense. It is, literally, the supreme law of the land. The Supremes have the authority to decide what it means. That’s a fact.
You seem to be confusing the Supreme Court with a collection of God-Kings. If they decide to ignore facts or logic or the law and just declare the law to be what they want for ideological or religious reasons, they are wrong. They aren’t acting as judges then, but just making things up to suit themselves. They can be wrong.
Not to mention that the OP is "Should the Mt. Soledad cross stay or go? ", which is a moral question as well as a legal one.
Now you’re misrepresenting my position, so I’m not going to debate this further. We have institutions in place to override SC decisions, so no, I don’t consider SC justices to be God-Kings.
Fine. And I can agree that, morally, the right thing to do is to remove the cross. You, however, are also claiming that to be the legally correct thing as well. We won’t know that until and unless the SCOTUS rules on this. You’d be hard pressed to find any jurisprudence more complicated or confusing than that surrounding the establishment clause. In that atmosphere, claiming to know the “correct” answer absent a ruling from the SCOTUS is pretty far fetched.
So is claiming to know the “correct” answer morally. Can’t we all have opinions on both, though?
I don’t think there is any objectively definable morality, so when I say “morally”, I’m referencing my own moral code. I should have been explicit about that, but I just think it goes without saying. When it comes to constitutional issues, we can certainly have our own opinions, but they don’t mean much.
About the only thing we can say with certainty about the establishment clause is that it does not require a strict separation of church and state, contrary to what some on this board would have you believe. And I can assure you that if the SCOTUS ever decides that it does, we’ll have a new amendment within months that allows at least cerimonial deism if not a lot more. As an atheist myself, I wish we did have a strict separation of church and state. But that’s not what the vast majority of Americans want. (And by “vast majority” I mean easily enough to vote in a new amendment if necessary.)
There is no objectively definable morality–and there’s only one ultimate objective definer of US federal law, SCOTUS, and none of us here have access to it unless/until they rule on the issue.
Can the Supremes make typographical errors (regarding Constitutional matters)? Or does their every utterance alter the (constitutional) fabric of space-time? What if they over-rule themselves?
Oh, and where in the Constitution does it say that the Supremes are the ultimate arbitrator? (Ya, ya Maybury vs. Madison…)
Now I should admit that I have some sympathy for John Mace’s position, in that a poster can’t simply assert constitutionality absent an investigation of prior Supreme Court decisions. And it’s worth bearing in mind that, “… we have numerous SCOTUS that allow some intermingling of religion and state.” I’m just saying that JM’s characterization seems a little categorical.
Surely there is a distinction between the Supremes deciding the operational interpretation of the Constitution and asserting that their interpretation is the only conceivable one with any degree of truth-value. And it is the latter that, conventionally speaking, would imply that the Supreme’s interpretation can never be wrong.
But hey, IANAL.
I’m not sure what happens when a typographical error is found in a SCOTUS decision. But it’s not something I lose any sleep over.
But we’re not talking about “truth”, we’re talking about interpreting the constitution. There isn’t any truth value in a SCOTUS opinion, just as there isn’t any moral value (except in as much as one might consider it immoral to disobey the law).
If you agree that, operationally, the constitution means what they say it does, then how is that different from saying they can’t be “wrong”? “Wrong” meaning the way the law is interpreted, not the way anyone might want or think or hope the law should be interpreted.
I’m not trying to make some statement about truth or morality or anything other than what the law is, or in this case what the constitution says. Whether or not you accept Maybury, it’s still a fact that the SCOTUS is the ultimate arbiter of the constitution. I suppose one might argue that they would have gotten things “wrong” if their decision resulted in a popular uprising that overthrew the government. Outside of that, I just don’t see that a statement that they “got it wrong” has any operational meaning. If it has no operational meaning, then what meaning does it have?
And keep in mind that we live in a democracy that allows us to revoke that power from the SCOTUS if we so choose. If we, as a people, decide we no longer want the Supremes to be quite so supreme, we can offload that authority onto someone else or some other institution. So there isn’t any intrinisic “rightness” in giving the SCOTUS the power of judicial review, other than that we have given it to them.
Allegedly, the doctrine that Corporations are persons can be traced to a clerical error.
Snarks aside, law journals discuss the validity of SCOTUS decisions all the time, don’t they? As I think I noted, “They got it wrong” has little operational meaning (except insofar as bad SCOTUS decisions can be hemmed in by the lower courts, according to an aside in an Economist article I once read). But that doesn’t make discussion of the validity of a majority SCOTUS decision nonsensical: surely discourse on the underlying constitutional issues has merit. If it doesn’t, then I’m not sure what to make of a good portion (not all) of SCOTUS analysis.
Make that “an overreaching court reporter”. Cite. (Not that this contradicts John: I’m just clarifying the record.)
And no one has made an effort to correct that? Color me skeptical.
Not the validity. The wisdom, maybe, but not the validity.
Look at it this way. Does it make sense to say: The American people elected the wrong person president. Well, as long as there wasn’t voter fraud, what can that possibly mean? In a democracy, you get what people vote for. If you don’t accept that the people elected the “right” person (ie, the person they wanted), then your issue is with democracy, not with any particular president who was elected. You might say that democracy produces undesireable results, but it doesn’t produce the wrong result (again, as long as the vote is fair). “Wrong” isn’t applicable. The person who gets elected is “right” by definition.
Same thing for SCOTUS decisions.
The problem is that if the court allows this one to stay that sets a precedent. Considering the uses precedent has been put to in the matter of who can be held without charge or trial, precedents can lead to really bad effects.
Well, it’s a strange (and unusual) situation: see the Straight Dope article I linked to.
Of course it does, provided you are speaking in a normative context and not a positive one. What you are really saying is that the American people shouldn’t have elected [fill in blank here].
Same for SCOTUS decisions. It is meaningful to discuss what is actually the law of the land (positive) as well as what the Supremes should have decreed (though I’d argue that the latter should follow from legal reasoning, as opposed to justifications based on sound policy).
Of course there is value in us discussing alternative interpretations. I’m just saying that a statement that the SCOTUS got it “wrong” is meaningless.
And questions concerning interpretation of the constitution are not normative. There can be plenty of very, very, VERY bad things that are perfectly constitutional.