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It’s true in at least a dozen States, so the “present state of law in the U.S.” is not inconsistent with the common law notion of a right to use proportional force against an illegitimate arrest.
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But so what? The fact that various states have (but other states haven’t) since 1789 tweaked their law on when you can use force against peace officers doesn’t really, in any meaningful way, affect the proposition that the Framers of the Second Amendment, cognizant of the then-applicable common law view of self-defense against police abuses, thought the Second Amendment could have a useful role in curbing governmental excess by supplying a right of self-help. That states have curtailed this right in some specific instances doesn’t mean that the general principle no longer has historical or constitutional foundation. It just means that States have exercised their generally-plenary police powers to circumscribe the situations in which you can legitimately use your lawfully-possessed gun (or your lawfully-possessed nunchucks or fists, for that matter) against a rogue cop.
Dang. Forgot my cite for No. 1.
I owe it to the OP to answer the OP, given that I’ve played out the slight tangent.
No, the philosophy of the Constitution applies to foreegeners as well.
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It’s provided stability. That alone should say something to, say, the French or Ities who have endured dozens of governments/forms of government since 1789.
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It’s founded in realism. Other schemes of government have attempted to codify every aspect of life (e.g., the French Revolutionary attempts to re-make the calendar et al.). How did that work out, again? The Constitution understood that people are perverse, diverse, and will want to wrangle things out locally.
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It’s modest in its aims. The Constitution spells out a limited number of “musts” and “shall nots,” and leaves the rest to subsequent state or federal legislation. This makes it flexible.
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It contains mechanisms for additional correction. Recognizing that things could change, but not wanting to make every election a referendum on altering the foundational principles of the Republic, the Framers provided a ready-made way of altering the Constitution. It’s worked, as recently as five or so years ago, when the amendment regarding congressional pay was passed. This is the pretty much the slam-dunk argument against those who querolously warn of the dangers of “dead hand control” and being “unable to right the anachronistic notions of the dead white male founders.” The Founders were actually realist enough to understand that circumstances and political needs changed.
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It’s empowering to local communities. The Constitution (as drafted, not as perverted in the post-incorporation, post-judicial-activism era) vested States and subdivisions thereof with plenary legislative power. Thus, people could create, or move to, havens of legislation that accorded with their (or the local majority’s) prevailing ethos.
I owe it to the OP to answer the OP, given that I’ve played out the slight tangent.
No, the philosophy of the Constitution applies to foreegeners as well.
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It’s provided stability. That alone should say something to, say, the French or Ities who have endured dozens of governments/forms of government since 1789.
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It’s founded in realism. Other schemes of government have attempted to codify every aspect of life (e.g., the French Revolutionary attempts to re-make the calendar et al.). How did that work out, again? The Constitution understood that people are perverse, diverse, and will want to wrangle things out locally.
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It’s modest in its aims. The Constitution spells out a limited number of “musts” and “shall nots,” and leaves the rest to subsequent state or federal legislation. This makes it flexible.
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It contains mechanisms for additional correction. Recognizing that things could change, but not wanting to make every election a referendum on altering the foundational principles of the Republic, the Framers provided a ready-made way of altering the Constitution. It’s worked, as recently as five or so years ago, when the amendment regarding congressional pay was passed. This is the pretty much the slam-dunk argument against those who querolously warn of the dangers of “dead hand control” and being “unable to right the anachronistic notions of the dead white male founders.” The Founders were actually realist enough to understand that circumstances and political needs changed.
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It’s empowering to local communities. The Constitution (as drafted, not as perverted in the post-incorporation, post-judicial-activism era) vested States and subdivisions thereof with plenary legislative power. Thus, people could create, or move to, havens of legislation that accorded with their (or the local majority’s) prevailing ethos.
Personally, I don’t consider altering the very nature of these United States of America to be a modest aim. As I have already stated, “Rather than some imaginary golden age I would say that a more accurate interpretation was that replacing the decentralized federation with a strong central government with unlimited war powers was the first step toward our current imperial pretensions. Indeed, one of the accusations the Antifederalists leveled at the Constitution was that it would forge the US into an empire.”
The 27th Amendment wasn’t passed recently. It was passed over 2 centuries ago and hung in limbo because it wasn’t ratified by the required number of states until recently. It became part of the Constitution in 1992 and, of course, it is completely useless. Congress, because of the political difficulties involved, no longer considers pay raises. Their pay is raised automatically. To consider this a success story is bewildering.
The amendment process is made so difficult that, outside of the extraordinary Civil War amendments, no controvertial change can be made. So long as even marginal opposition is maintained any amendment can be refused. Belief in the idea that women should have equal rights was so strong that politicians opposing the Equal Rights Amendment had to claim to support the concept and find other flaws in the specific proposal. Yet it failed. A child labor amendment failed as well. The most common amendment proposed in Congress are alterations of the manner in which the president is selected. Every poll I have seen from 1950 up to last year show a majority of Americans in favor of abolishing the “Electoral College”. Yet it remains. The amendment process is a failure. And that is why we turn to alternative mechanisms.
The main alternative method of changing the Constitution is, of course, the very judicial-activism you bemoan. Yet this is the source of the flexibility that has allowed the Constitution to maintain for so long. The bare bones of the Constitution, even as amended, just doesn’t provide enough authority to run a modern state. Just look at monitary policy alone. It not only doesn’t authorize a central bank, it doesn’t even give the federal government the authority to print money. ( No, coining money isn’t the same thing. Notice that the Article One lists them seperately when denying authority to the states. ) If we need a New Deal, then we just find some justification for it.
Just because we have the same constitution for so long doesn’t mean we have the same governmental system. What you seem to consider the perversion of the Constitution is instead a change in the reality of government even though the form stays the same. It is easy to act superior about other countries that change their constitutions multiple times. But we have changed as well. If our transitions are done more smoothly theirs are done more honestly. They don’t pretend to have the same government as they did 2 centuries ago.
They understood that circumstances changed but they were still pre-modern thinkers. They lived in a Copernican universe where things moved around but only in steady patterns. They didn’t, they couldn’t, understand that nothing is universal and permanent. And so they built a government upon their prejudices which they thought of as eternal laws of nature. They did what they could to insulate the government from popular control. The Constitution is deliberately antidemocratic. The realities of government can be changed by interpretation but the forms themselves are more difficult to alter. So we are stuck with a bicameral legislature, a malapportioned Senate with long terms, judges with life terms, and a people lacking the right of instruction and recall and other devices to shape policy. This all is unamenable so long as there remains even marginal resistance. All because so many of the Framers believed that a people were incapable of governing themselves. Here are the “anachronistic notions of the dead white male founders” we are unable to right because the amendment process is a failure. Though in truth there is little political desire to do so even if we could.