Actually we just interpret that piece of paper differently.
Do progressives read it a as a charter delegating powers to a central government from sovereign states and individuals? The fundamental purpose of the paper seems to be lost on the left.
With the benefit of hindsight, I get why most of you chose the Bush v Gore. But I don’t think any of us standing in the polls that day realized the importance.
I think the subsequent election was more important. It was the people of the USA saying, “We’re cool with the way things are… more GWB!” or “GWB’s made a mess… we need to change things”.
And when we ask this question in another 20-50 years, I hope that Obama’s election gets high marks for starting the country down the path to fewer rich, white guys as POTUS.
In some ways, yes. In other ways, “It’s like, a hundred years old! It’s just guidelines!”
This. Of the past elections, it’s a tough call but I picked 2000 because of Iraq and general malignancy and incompetence, and the fact that it led to a subsequent four years and the economic meltdown. I still shudder when I recall some of the players – Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Michael “heck-uv-a-job” Brown … (ETA: Not even counting the fact that a different president would have paid attention to the PDB warning about bin Laden instead of going on vacation and there’s some chance 9/11 might have been prevented.)
2016 has the potential to be even worse, even without the prospect of replacing Scalia. When you consider that the best choice among this gang of crazies is the brother of the one I just finished describing, it pretty much illuminates how critical the situation has become. GWB, arguably the worst president in history, is practically a great statesman compared to Trump, Cruz, or Rubio.
The purpose from the perspective of 18th century aristocrats is unimportant to me. The purpose as I see it now is that of a blueprint for a work constantly under construction. I think the liberal positions of reproductive freedom and the right to gay marriage is much more in line with the spirit of a limited government than is the so-called conservative position.
I agree. What is not consistent with limited government is a reading of the Constitution that allows the federal government to pass any law they want under the interstate commerce clause.
Do you acknowledge that, since 1789, the scope of interstate commerce itself (not just the Supreme Court’s interpretation of what constitutes regulatable interstate commerce) has grown exponentially? That goods and services that used to be made, sold, and consumed in one village are now sold all over the world? That the U.S. is a single market for both labor and capital; that is, that workers move, and investors move their money, across state lines routinely? 
While conservatives remind us endlessly of the Supreme Court’s “switch in time that saved nine” and the broad interpretation of interstate commerce that arose during the New Deal, the preceding commerce clause doctrine was to the other extreme: manufacturing was deemed not regulatable interstate commerce, no matter how far afield the products of manufacturing were sold or pollution flowed. :smack: For example, the Supremes in Hammer vs Dagenhart in 1918 struck down a federal law banning from interstate commerce items produced by child labor; it wasn’t enough to save the law that the Feds weren’t actually regulating factories. :rolleyes: Not quite in the interstate commerce vein, but how was Lochner v. New York (1905) – a State with plenary police power :smack: could not set a 10-hour work-day – any less conservative judicial activism than Wickard v. Filburn (1942) was expansionist liberal activism as conservatives complain?
(Can you tell this issue is a pet-peeve for me? Pro-business conservatives rightly praise the prosperity that big business has brought in the 20th and 21st Centuries but then (IMHO) condemn as nothing but over-reach any effort at regulation that didn’t exist during the Founding Fathers’ time.)
Bernie 2016?
What was known at the time.
I know of no legal scholar who believes that Lochner v. New York was a good decision. It is routinely cited among the worst in history.
I disagree with your basic premise on interstate commerce. When those goods actually enter the interstate stream, the feds can regulate them. So, of course, there will be more regulation than in 1789, but if the goods are kept entirely intrastate, there is no interstate commerce.
It only makes sense that manufacturing is not interstate commerce. If I make something in South Carolina and then sell it into North Carolina, only the sale is interstate commerce. The manufacturing took place only in South Carolina. To call any regulation of that manufacturing to be one of interstate commerce is a bastardization of the English language.
I went with Obama vs McCain for 2 reasons. McCain may well have plunged us much deeper into a recession that Obama pulled us out of, and … Sarah Palin didn’t make it to within a heartbeat of the presidency.
I’m fine with commerce that is interstate in nature being regulatable. What I wasn’t fine with prior to the Lopez and Morrison decisions(thanks conservative justices!), when the jurisprudence was that anything that could possibly remotely affect interstate commerce was within Congress’ jurisdiction. That was basically a blank check, since everything affects interstate commerce. The Lopez and Morrison decisions at least set some boundaries.