North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrives at the railway station in the Russian far-eastern city of Vladivostok, Russia, April 24. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov
WNU Editor: The above picture came from this photo-gallery .... North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrives in Russia (Reuters)
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Something those candidates should bear in mind regarding the Constitution
"When you really think of it, much of our Constitution is held together by a glue of norms, presumptions, gentleman's agreements, and the belief that some things were so obvious that the founders thought that they need not have been written out. It is assumed, for example, that Congress has been implicitly granted the power to carry out the roles assigned to it.
The same assumption applies to the Supreme Court; as the final arbiter of the law of the land, it is presumed that it's rulings on the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of a law or governmental action are legally binding; if the Supreme Court rules a law to be unconstitutional, it is assumed that the law is rendered void and unenforceable. Indeed, Alexander Hamilton noted in Federalist Papers 78-80 that the rights and immunities ensured by the Constitution would "amount to nothing" if the Supreme Court had no power to strike down unconstitutional laws.
By the same token, the idea that a president could pardon himself would have been considered so laughably beyond the pale by the founders that they saw no need to explicitly forbid such an absurdity in the letter of Article 2.
Take away those assumptions, norms, and underlying foundations of common sense, however, and you end up with what the modern right wing is trying to pull off - using the Constitution itself to turn it inside out into an unrecognizable inverse of its manifest tenor.
Today, we have "Constitutional scholars" seriously suggesting that presidents really do have the ability to pardon themselves. Today, we have so-called scholars who insist, with all seriousness, that the Supreme Court doesn't have any power to strike down unconstitutional laws. The late Antonin Scalia himself hinted at that in City of Chicago v. Morales, 1999.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights, as we understood it for all of our lives, was intended, among other things, to protect minorities from persecution, unpopular speech or expression from censorship, and ensure access to the redress of grievances in the courts in the event of such government transgression. The last sentence of the First Amendment practically says as much with respect to redress of grievances.
But today, we have right wing "Constitutional scholars" who study the Constitution for the same reason why Al Qaeda might study a building's architecture - to know exactly where to plant the legal blasting caps so as to send the Constitution crashing down.
At this moment they're trying to spread an upside down interpretive approach that turns the Constitution into something opposite itself: a document that grants invincibility to the powerful, immunity to repressive majorities and adherents of certain religions, king-like powers to the owners of things like infrastructure, and which leaves no avenues of redress for those who are wronged by unconstitutional abuses.
Because of this decades-long orchestrated campaign against the spirit of the Constitution, another gentleman's agreement is in danger of being abandoned: the increasingly uneasy truce that leaves the number of Supreme Court judges at nine.
I thought through a lot of things when I had children, but one possibility that I didn't consider is this country as we know it might no longer exist when they reach my age." RetroPam
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