That is my second biggest fear, just a little below him actually winning re-election.

I was discussing this with my wife yesterday because of the comments Trump made about staying in the White House. She isn't at all politically active, but even she hates Trump and sees him for what he is.

I was explaining to her how serious even a comment like that is and how desensitized we have become to his rhetoric. She took the attitude of "no way" that would happen. I told her 40% of the country would support it, and these are the things civil wars are made of. I explained that there is nothing more dangerous for a nation than a questioned leader, especially if the person who lost the election is refusing to give up power. I told her it is plausible Russia and China could team up and destroy, if we have civil unrest no way we could defend ourselves against those super powers, and given Trumps tactics our traditional allies wouldn't come to our rescue.

She basically dismissed it as not being able to happen. I think this kind of complacency is what could potentially doom us. I am far from a conspiracy person, but I think there is a legitimate shot we find ourselves in a really bed situation whenever Trumps run ends.

The DOuble Jeopardy decision today is another good example. I actually side with Gorsuch that federal and state charges on the same act is a double jeopardy problem, but there's not a good originalist argument there.

How can it be a mockery of the idea of law, when this is how the English Common Law has existed for centuries (and which our system of jurisprudence is based off of)?

Can we not agree that democracy in tribal states does not work. Why do we have to have borders?
You globalists, are borders not your worst enemy?

Your wife is right on this one. Freaky right wing people were saying Obama would never leave office. This isn’t some 40% thing. It’s maybe a 4% thing where they would want him to hold office at all costs. Not all of his 40% is bonkers and insane.

Maybe 15%? 4 seems low.

You can't compare the two.

Obama, to my knowledge, never suggested he should stay in office.

Trump has done countless terrible things since he took office, yet he has maintained his 40% base. They have been unwavering. Do you honestly think they would all of a sudden stop supporting him or would they just convince themselves it is what is best for 'Merica!

I'm not saying it will happen, I am saying we are in some really dangerous territory, perhaps the most dangerous time in our nations history, and I am not using hyperbole.

I'll believe it when I see it.

May be too late by then.

Those internal polls that all showed Trump winning?


Attention Required! | Cloudflare


Even saw a Fox News poll today that had Biden up by 10.

Dont forget that the polls had HRC winning.

I think those polls miss a large portion of Trump voters. I could see a 10 point advantage for Biden with a +/- of 10%.

Come on Lathum. You dont usually wear a tin foil hat, but that one is a little out there.

HRC did win the popular vote just like the polls predicted.

Good point.

Thank goodness for the Electoral College

Well, my belief in it happening won't stop it, so... :shrug:

Two aspects to my response here. Firstly, the matter of some basic historically-informed logic. What even is law, or the rule of law? Answer: an attempt to order society in a better more enlightened manner than 'might makes right'. That's been it's clear contribution I would say since King John signed the Magna Charta in 1215. And while that attempt largely failed in its goal, devolving into war anyway shortly thereafter, the idea eventually took more hold, for which we can and should be grateful. If law has any meaning, any positive force and effect whatsoever, it has to be found in its ability to restrain power, especially political power from being misused. It's a set of boundaries beyond which we are not allowed to go, and the codification of those boundaries. If the meaning can simply be changed when it is inconvenient, law no longer has that power and is useless. We can no longer speak of the rule of law, because it doesn't rule at all - it is impotent and what really rules is the whim of the moment, precisely what law is meant to restrain.

Second, as to the origins of our legal system, here are a few people who I think would take issue with your assessment. In this matter I think their opinions are more important and relevant than either of ours.



A judicial branch with no force or will. Oh, how I wish it were so.







Webster, known mostly for the dictionary by the same in our times but also a significant voice in the era of America's founding, went on to warn of 'injurious' mistakes that would result.

I'm going to refrain from discussing either of the specific amendments you brought up here, not by way of dodging in any way but to avoid tangents not germane to the much more important issue. Probably worth pointing out that I'm not here trying to carry water for any particular amendment or even the general structure of the Constitution as a whole - it's the underlying rule of law that is paramount in my mind.


I don't think this is clear at all. In fact, I'd say it is unambiguously false. You are certainly correct that a living constitution can make faster desirable progress. But the converse is also true; it can reverse desirable progress already attained. A court that can invent rights out of whole cloth can also eliminate long-established ones. Consider the rights you hold dear, whatever they may be. Do you really think it's a good idea for them to be freely eliminated at the discretion of the court and not the amendment process?

Regarding that process, I also don't think there's been a particularly low amount of them enacted either. Throwing out the bill of rights, there has still been on average multiple amendments enacted each generation, one every 12-15 years. But I would also stipulate that one could very credibly argue for a lower bar for the process if that is a major concern. It would be infinitely better in terms of preserving the proper integrity of the system to have a more easily achievable passing of amendments, then to permit the changing of existing law without it.

Appreciate the discussions. The nuances are above me.

Will say I am watching HBO John Adams (finished Ep 4) and its a great series so far. I will do more research re: accuracy on Adams seemingly close relationship with Jefferson; and how Jefferson, Adams and Franklin debated emancipation.

I think it's naive to think that the intent of a law is always easily understood. Take the 2nd, that text is unclear. Eventually a court is going to have to make decisions as to what the text of the law means, and those decisions will always be largely based on what those modern justices want it to mean.

This is a very peculiar way to speak of the legal system of the United Kingdom (since roughly the Norman Conquest of 1066) and of much of the United States (Louisiana, IIRC, uses the Napoleonic Code as its basis - a Civil Law system that conforms more to your desire for the law). Especially in the vast majority of cases a lot of us know how the Supreme Court will rule on a law due to precedential decisions.

The ones that we don't know, or that change, are generally due to the fact that words are ambiguous and intentions when it comes to new facts are hard to suss out (imagine having a conversation with George Washington about gay marriage).




All politicians who were fine with the English common law being in use. Most (aside from Jefferson and probably Madison) who were fine with the Supreme Court taking on decision making authority as to whether laws are unconstitutional (Marbury v. Madison) even though the Constitution does not that specifically say that it can (which was the reason Jefferson and Madison were pissed off).

In addition, their opinions matter to some extent, but not to others. The Supreme Court justices quoted were fine with common law jurisprudence when they were on the bench and would have likely said that was perfectly consistent with trying to find the intentions of the parties. With new facts come new considerations that the original law makers did not consider, so they must be applied differently.

(though as Justice Scalia would have pointed out, intent is fraught with peril as how can one know the intent of all the legislators who voted for a law and what happens when one group who voted for a law has a different intent than another group who voted for a law - Scalia, was an originalist who was strongly opposed to trying to suss out legislative intent).

Besides, they are all dead and we can't ask them what they meant. So we have to guess. There is also the view that the framers wrote the document in broad terms in order to create a living document. If they wanted it to be more strictly applied, they could have done what Napoleon did and wrote a far more specific code.

There's always cases of ambiguity but I think they are quite rare, and the 2nd Amendment I don't think is unclear at all. The debates on what it means that I've seen, and I've seen quite a few, really point that up. They always devolve into whether or not we should care about what it meant, whether or not its archaic/outdated, not difficulty in understanding what it actually says. I also always wonder at this perspective that justices must impose their desires on the text. I've read a lot of legal decisions that clearly don't do that. A good example from a while back is the Elian Gonzalez case, where lower-court rulings focused (properly) on what the law actually says about what rights a person has, at what age, etc. There was a lot of opinion in there that referenced the idea that look, some of these age markers are arbitrary, it may well be that it doesn't make sense to have these rigid divisons in place, but ultimately concluded that none of that mattered because the law says what the law says, and therefore here's the application. I totally reject the idea this can't be done as a consistent approach, there are far too many fine examples of it actually happening from judges who believe in it.

Why is the militia part included? Why is it first? Why does it say people and not individual? etc.

There's a ton of ambiguity in this amendment and anyone on either side of the gun debate should be able to see that. Eventually these questions have to be answered by judges because the text is unclear. When you talk about age limits, the text there is clear. If it says under 18 or over 21 or whatever, that text isn't ambiguous.

It's a fantasy to think laws are written in ways that are always perfectly clear and that apply to every situation clearly.

Do you really think that it's a good idea for Constitutional rights to only apply to people who were understood to be people at whatever arbitrary point in time those rights were enshrined?

The Second Amendment was written at a time when blacks were understood to be property. The Founders didn't intend for them to have the right, either individually or collectively, to bear arms, since they might then turn those arms against their masters.

Therefore, under a strict constructionist argument, the Second Amendment doesn't apply to them, regardless of what the Thirteenth through Fifteenth did for their citizenship and legal personhood rights. The Founders didn't intend for it to.

That's the same nonsense argument, by the way, that gets made by Christian Religious Liberty people about why the government should be allowed to do things to benefit Christianity without the Equal Protection clause requiring them to make those benefits available to Islam, Judaism, or any other non-Christian faith; Because The Founders Only Meant For It To Apply to Christianity, Damnit!

Militia - self-evidently a reason given for the right, 'being necessary for the security of a free state' makes that clear
First - I don't see how it matters what is first, but it's highly logical to provide the reason for something before stating the right. You could reverse the order without impacting the meaning.
People - Because that's the world the constitution uses for individual citizens, people being the plural of person and being the third word in the preamble and used repeatedly throughout the entire document.

This is really quite basic and none of the questions listed are in the least thorny. There are to be sure many debatable questions in constitutional or any other type of law. These aren't among them.

This is nonsense. If something applies to all citizens, then it applies to those who are later added to the group considered citizens. Calling this argument apples to oranges is being quite generous.


And I've had some fun discussions with said people, primarily on facebook, who I see making this kind of argument. My point is always that everyone gets freedom of speech, religion, assembly, etc, not just the ones one might happen to agree with. So its not an argument I'm making. At all.

If it's so basic, why did it take two hundred years for the Supreme Court to say the 2nd amendment applies to individuals?

Because for most of our history it wasn't questioned. The whole question is still quite bizarre. Nobody suggests that the first amendment rights of assembly and petition aren't individual rights, or that the 4th amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures can't be claimed by individuals, and so on. Those are phrased exactly the same 'right of the people' way.

It was a 5-4 decision and the law it overturned was passed in 1975.

And in the 1st, "the people" is used in a separate clause from freedom of speech and implies group activity, to assemble. An individual can't assemble.

I'm not trying to argue Heller was wrong, just that the text is unclear and eventually was going to be interpreted by justices having to rely on something other than the clear meaning of the text.

Untrue. Or, rather, misleading. The Supreme Court didn't find an unrestricted individual right to bear arms until 2008. Hell, court rulings didn't even bind states to respect the Second Amendment until the early 20th century.

The jurisprudence on the issue before, like, 1980 is significantly more limited, and in that sense, "wasn't questioned" might be accurate...but it's misleading.

Because the reason it "wasn't questioned" is that the Supreme Court repeatedly, beginning with Cruikshank in 1875, found that there was no inherent absolute right for individuals to keep and bear arms separate from the State's interest in a "well-regulated militia." Did it again like a decade later.

It wasn't until Heller in 2008 that SCOTUS found that the Second Amendment contains an absolute individual right to bear arms. There is nothing "originalist" about that, when 225 years of jurisprudence following ratification repeatedly came back with "nope, that's not a thing."

That's conservative wish-fulfillment that finally paid off after about 25 years of intense lobbying and Republican judicial appointments.


Except they aren't phrased "exactly the same way." The Second Amendment places the 'well-regulated militia' clause in supremacy to the 'right of the people to keep and bear arms.'

Neither the First nor the Fourth places any sort of contingency on the "right of the people." There is, linguistically speaking, a significant difference between the First/Fourth and Second Amendment.

The First says "this particular outcome is desirable, and the preservation of this right is necessary to that outcome."

The First and the Fourth are straight up "thou shalt not."

Now, realistically, that matters exactly as much as the conservative wing of SCOTUS wants it to matter. Originalist doctrine is a thing that's used to hammer liberal ideas when convenient, and cast aside when the logical outcome of originalism would yield an inconvenient result.

Heller didn't find an absolute right to bear arms. But more on point, I think your argument here is misleading vis a vis Cruikshank. The issue there is that case came well before the doctrine of incorporation came to be. Prior to that, the bill of rights was understood to bar only the federal government, not the states as well, from taking certain actions. I.e., the whole 'states rights' issue. Or to put it another way, the 10th Amendment had not yet been de facto annulled. It was considered to be beyond SCOTUS' authority to tell any state what to do vis a vis guns (and a great many other things), but no federal imposition was allowable.


No it doesn't. It states both clauses but does not in any way state the militia clause to be supreme. The distinction being made here is one without a difference, and is also a red herring - even if that were so, it would still have nothing to do with whether 'right of the people' signifies an individual right or not.

Demons!

Trump spiritual adviser says 'demonic networks' have aligned themselves against president | TheHill

Language matters, dude. It doesn't HAVE to say "Okay, all you people with a Donald-Trump-level reading level, this clause is supreme to THAT one, now pay attention."

If the Second had been straight about individual gun ownership, the bit about militias being necessary to the preservation of a free State wouldn't even have been in there. As I pointed out previously, the First and the Fourth are full of "thou shalt not." They stand in marked contrast to the Second in that way.

The First Amendment doesn't bother with any preamble about why free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, assembly, or petition are important. It just says "hands off." Same with the Fourth, which crams a whole lot more "thou shalt not" in, but doesn't waste any time with justification.

So if the Madison took the time in the Second to say "this outcome is desirable, and this is why that outcome is desirable, and this action is necessary to protect that outcome"? That's supremacy.

Any writer will tell you that you lead with the shit that's IMPORTANT and back it up with the supporting elements.

To Madison, what was important was the security of a free State, and the necessity of a well-regulated Militia to the preservation of that security. The right to keep and bear arms was in subservience to that necessity.

And for two hundred years, American courts said that the Second restricted the federal government, not the states (which had significant gun control measures on the books even in the post-Revolutionary years).

There is zero rational argument for any "originalist" reading of the Second Amendment that aligns with the NRA and the conservative wing of the Roberts Court. To the extent that you're railing against the Court being able to fashion law out of whole cloth through convenient interpretation of the Constitution as a "living document," your finger is pointed squarely at conservative activists, if you're being at all intellectually consistent.

(You aren't.)

Welp, this is pure hogwash inasmuch as I never said I endorsed the NRA's vision of the Second Amendment or 'conservative' politics. I said right at the outset my concern is more fundamental than that. Just to make things clear (although it is totally irrelevant to what I've actually said), I favor at minimum a revision of the amendment and as written I don't see any justification that there can't and shouldn't be limitations on gun ownership - and neither did the decision in Heller.


Right, that's the same point I made in my last post. Not sure who you are arguing with on this issue.

Trump talking about how the downing of the US drine by Iran must have been by accident:


No sense of irony at all :D

Not necessarily.

+1

This isn't a term paper we're talking about.

Trump approved a strike on Iran, but may have pulled back.

This isn't going to go well.

Yeah, I'm quite confused by this. Especially since Iran has been boasting about downing the drone and the US has claimed that Iran has been targeting drones.

I'm sure the Generals & Admirals are too. Hopefully they can keep things in check and "measured".

It scares the shit out of me that someone so erratic could declare war on a whim.

Not to get too far back into the previous subject, but that fear exactly is one of the reasons I think it was a pretty darned good idea that Congress was initially given that power - and still technically retains it, though we've allowed the executive to take over a lot of it in practice.

So someone correct me

Obama brokers multi nation nuclear deal with Iran, which they have been honoring.

Because Trump hates Obama he pulls us out of it.

Iran then says screw it, we aren't sticking to the deal and starts stockpiling uranium. somewhere in there Trump puts sanctions on them.

Nation destabilizes and shoots down US drone and now the only thing keeping us from war is Putin doesn't want it.

Technically, the sanctions were levied immediately because t-dump said they were already violating the treaty and the sanctions were deserved. Normally, I'd believe the govt on the location of the drone, but his administration isn't believable on this one. But I think you're on track about Putin.

It's possible that both sides are telling the truth as to where the drone was. Iran expanded it's claim on the waters in the Gulf years ago, but we don't recognize the expanded claim. It's possible, maybe even likely, that according to us the drone was in international space and according to the Iranians it was in their territory.

If that's the case, it's hard not to see the mission as partially about provoking the Iranians into an act that would justify a strike.

Somewhere in there Trump also got mad about other Nations and their corporations keeping to the agreement that they helped broker and signed and started threatening them.


Also, siding with Israel and Saudi Arabia on everything regardless of how insane and destabilizing it is.

Don't know how credible this is but fat chance this is going to hurt Trump. It'll help sell books but that's about it.

President Donald Trump Faces New Rape Accusation

Its an extremely well written, disturbing and somewhat graphic piece that has a lot of value imo, not because of Trump - we know that doesn't matter to anyone - but just in general. Instead of worrying whether this specific allegation is true, reading things like these and understanding that a frighteningly large number of women have similar experiences that most of us as guys here on this board can never really comprehend. Screw the political side, this is just good for general empathy and understanding of the world.

It seems really out of character for a guy that moves on them like a bitch, kisses without consent, and grabs them by the pussy.

I read a listing of 21 accusations against Trump for all sorts of sexual invasions, from rape to sexual assault to groping to walking in on undressing females to kissing without consent. It is needless to say sickening. Trump of course denies every one of them.