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The progressive program, as revealed by Louis Michael Seidman
, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, the author
of the forthcoming book “On Constitutional Disobedience.”
A MUST READ… the money idea?
Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?
The appropriations must begin in the lower house - CLEARLY -because it was the purpose of the founders to keep SPENDING authorizations and seminal beginnings CLOSE TO THE PEOPLE by seeing to it that those who are responsible must face the people every 24 months.
DUH
This is what teaches Constitutional purpose and law?
No this is what obscenely DISTORTS the founding ideas in order to ease what is FACILE AND MOMENTARY. If this nation wishes to change the way that spending is started and authorized, then we should be so motivated to so that 2/3 of the House and Senate should begin the process of AMENDMENT. If the sentiment has not risen to this level, then there is no such risible purpose.
DUH
What is used to justified extra and unconstitutional behavior by this person?
JOHN ADAMS’ ALIEN AND SEDITION ACT OF 1798.
The deep-seated fear that such disobedience (of the Constitution) would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition.
Sure, and Sulla marching on Rome did not affect the course of the Roman Republic.
We have been lucky that when SCOTUS was disobeyed and ignored the man doing it was the 15th President, and we saw to it that we RETURNED to the course decided on in 1789 in 1865. No one should doubt that the repeated instances of such actions (Valladigham anyone? Charles Stone?) THOUGH REQUIRED BY WAR, were a component of Booth’s famous and final on stage quote.
We have been LUCKY that when the executive overreached such as the Schecter Bros SCOTUS was ready. We have been both GIFTED and the VICTIM of SCOTUS’ making new law (Brown vs Bd of Educ of Topeka) and KEEPING (Plessy vs Ferguson) both the Constitution and Morality.
We have seen how the EXCEPTION to Congress’ Constitutional responsibility to DECLARE WAR taken over August 2 1965 in the Gulf of Tonkin, has now become the CASE for presidential war-making to our DETRIMENT, especially as the needs of that war-making and national security have spread to internal policies which could easily STILL end up as Orwellian.
The Constitution is no suicide pact, but neither is the PRINCIPLE of junking it when things get dicey the answer.
Madison and Monroe and Hamilton warned over factionalism, and today we have it in spades. It is a huge problem and a huge warning.
But as Churchill’s analogy has made clear over and over… this sucks, but everything else in history has been worse. Usually it has been FAR WORSE.
