11-09-2016, 09:47 PM
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#755
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The new goggles also do nothing.
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Calgary
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This seems kind of extreme it couldn't go this far could it? I mean despite wanting a conservative supreme court, the majority of people still support same sex marriage (for example).
Unless Trump goes off-script (always a possibility), that justice will also be cut from the ultra-conservative, "new federalist" cloth of Justice Thomas. Trump has already used the Right’s standard language of “interpret[ing] the Constitution the way the Founders wanted it interpreted” but his picks from the Heritage Foundation list are to the right of the usual “originalist” figures. In fact, it is Justice Roberts, as a judicial conservative, who will be the swing vote between three or four liberals and three or four ultra-conservatives.
It’s important to be clear about what this means. Yes, particular issues will be affected. The federal right to marriage equality will almost certainly be overturned. So will Roe v. Wade. We will return to a country in which many rights are vastly different from state to state. (The exception is gun control, most forms of which will likely be banned nationwide under a broad reading of the Second Amendment.)
But the real impact is far more profound. Justice Thomas’s judicial philosophy would roll back most of the federal government as we know it today. According to his understanding of federalism, civil rights laws, environmental regulations, labor rules—anything that relies on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution for its basis—would probably be unconstitutional. If the Commerce Clause really means “regulate interstate commerce, but only in a narrow sense,” all those laws fail.
Take, for example, laws prohibiting racial discrimination. The constitutional basis of those laws is that businesses and other organizations are always involved in interstate commerce, even if they’re local, because that’s how capitalism works today. But in Justice Thomas’s stated opinions, that’s not good enough; the Commerce Clause only allows Congress to regulate commerce itself, not business activities related to it. Civil rights laws, therefore, are beyond the federal government’s constitutional power.
A similar theory applies to the First Amendment. For Justice Thomas, not only should the First Amendment be read narrowly, so as to permit prayers in school, aid to churches, and religious displays on public property, but he has written that the Establishment Clause only applies to the federal government, not to the states. That would mean that, say, Mississippi could officially become a Protestant Christian state, or a Southern Baptist state, or whatever its legislature chose. (There may, of course, be state constitutional barriers, but they could be amended.)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...overnment.html
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But certainty is an absurd one.
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