amigo_boy
join:2005-07-22
Tempe, AZ
 ·Cox HSI
 ·magicjack.com
| reply to Vindithor
Re: Fair enough..
said by Vindithor :
Suspending the ability to appeal a sentence is not the same as finding reasons to indict. The Fourth Amendment protects against "unreasonable" searches. So, I'd say that the Constitution's grant of power to suspend Habeus Corpus is very much the same as the Fourth Amendment's non-absolute protection. They both provide for inabsolute rights.
said by Vindithor :
Authoritarianism does not and never has. Machiavellians are anathema to a free society and the enemies of free people. Again, I'm not arguing an absolute position (freedom or authoritarianism). I've already established that we made a big step toward what you would call authoritarianism 220 years ago when the Articles of Confederation were abandoned in favor of a stronger federal government. This resulted in the kind of pragmatic, inabsolute treatment of individual rights mentioned above.
Ironically, that event took was precipitated by someone exercising their rights too freely, quoting the founder's rhetoric from just a decade earlier. Just a few years after the founding of this country the Articles were abandoned in favor of the kind of pragmatic grant of power to the government (at the expense of an absolute view of individual rights).
Whether what's happening today is right or wrong, it's very much the same as what has happened for the past 220 years. Much less of an intrusion on individual liberties than ratification of the Constitution was 220 years ago.
So, it's very ironic that the purveyors of liberty use the Constitution to define liberty in absolute terms, conveniently forgetting that it was a huge step back from the more absolute rights that existed at that time. And ironic that they can't see the reality that rights are very much dependent upon the society that recognizes them and protects them. They do expand and contract based upon society's views of how those rights are being abused. Which is why the Constitution provides for limits on the protections of those rights.
said by Vindithor :
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." -Abraham Lincoln
"The means of defense against foreign danger has historically become the instrument of tyranny at home." -James Madison
Remember, President Lincoln suspended civil law in the territories, Habeus Corpus in the states, and forced majorities of people in states to remain in the Federal union against their will.
Madison supported the creation of the new Federal government (with all it's reductions in personal rights), and authored the Bill of Rights as a sop to the anti-Federalists (who wished to remain under the Articles of Confederation), protecting rights from Federal infringment but not State and private infringement! The rights protected by the BoR were regularly infringed by states. It wasn't until the 1920s that the BoR began to be applied to State and private infringement through selective incorporation of the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment would have been hugely rejected by the Founders (both federalist and anti-federalist).
So, it's odd that you speak of rights in an absolute sense, quoting historic leaders as if they didn't engage in their own pragmatic reduction in rights.
Mark |
