I have a question.
How is it that Ronald Reagan, a conservative, can appoint 2 different justices to the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, but those 2 justices can have vastly different opinions on key issues, such as gay marriage?
Is Anthony Kennedy a closeted homosexual? Is he blackmailed? Was he always a traitor? What is it?
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There used to be something to government other than partisan bitching and identity politics.
It was called "public service", an attitude that allowed politicians to some times compromise with others in order to do things that benefited the population.
justices were meant to rule on law, not politics. Also, Reagan's conservatism would be demonized by modern conservatives.
Kennedy is just a moderate, but either him or (((Ginsberg))) will retire within 4-5 years
I'm not an expert but afaik Kennedy is quite based he just completely dropped the ball on the Obamacare ruling. Bribed/blackmailed who knows.
Obama simply could not afford to have his signature policy ruled unconstitutional would be the biggest political embarrassment ever.
Alzheimer's.
Government is never interested in helping anyone.
The only thing government does is use violence against people who don't bend to its arbitrary whims and mandates.
If anyone was ever interested in public service, they'd do so with their own time and resources, and not on those of other people.
Scalia is an originalist textualist which means he has principle and is interpreting the constitution correctly while Kennedy has some other dumbfuck interpretational canon which means he inserts his personal values into his judgements
Scalia was fine with the commerce clause.
He was no champion of liberty - he was just slightly less bad than the rest.
I agree Scalia was too conciliatory. He absconded to precedent much too often refusing to overturn slaughterhouse and allowing gun rights to be incorporated through substantive due process rather than privileges and immunities.
Thomas is great and what every judge should strive to be
I'm not a fan of the SCOTUS period. It's been a horrible tool of corruption and injustice since Marshall.
Kennedy voted no on Obama care it was Roberts who turncoated
Also, a supreme court judge is not supposed to be a "champion of liberty". He's supposed to be a "champion of the Constitution".
The court is an empirical branch. It says what the law is, not what the law should be. Legislators should be the champions of liberty. The job of a judge is to faithfully interpret the original meaning of the text of law.
Kennedy is a lolbertarian. He sides with the liberals on all sorts of degenerate issues - abortion, fag marriage, opposing the death penalty, etc.
He did neither, since the Federalist Papers outlined exactly how the commerce clause was to be treated, and he never gave a shit.
Also legal positivism is complete and utter cancer and a completely modern phenomenon.
Virtually all of the founders were natural law proponents and not a *single one* of the current justices is.
Think about that.
I am not a legal positivist. I am an originalist. It is perfectly fine to consult the history of natural law theory when interpreting phrases in the Constitution since natural law is imperative to understanding the original meaning. But natural law should not be used to overrule a democratically enacted statute. The Supreme Court is a court of Constitutional law, not a court of Common Law. I love natural law and wish for it to be consulted but it is not in this specific court's jurisdiction to do so.
>natural law should not be used to overrule a democratically enacted statute
Absolutely it should. People are not to be dictated how they're going to live their lives by a mob majority, and where any law might seek to impinge on people's liberty it should be shot down on the grounds of the natural law. And those grounds of natural law are right there in the Constitution (the Constitution I'd wager you have an over-reference for).
The 10th amendment would tear down 99% of the currently utilized federal powers and purviews if a single judge since the era of John fucking Marshall treated the commerce clause the way it was intended (as outlined in the Federalist Papers). Do you support that?
The federalist papers are great and they should absolutely be consulted to understand the original meaning of the Constitution and I agree about the commerce clause but we should be careful about using legislative intent to determine constitutional law. I mean, even Hamilton and Madison disagreed about what the general welfare clause meant. Whom's interpretation do you pick? The one you like better? The Constitution holds power because it was ratified by the people. You have to look at what "the people" understood the text to mean.
I can hardly hold that the Constitution somehow proscribes the federal government from infringing on natural rights since the commerce clause even exists. The commerce clause violates the natural right to voluntary contract
Hamilton was scum and along with Marshall is largely culpable for all the government over-reach shit we suffer with every day.
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The Constitution wasn't ratified by "the people", it was ratified by a very few - admittedly not completely terrible - people. And even if it had been agreed to by each and every person within that geographical region at that point in time, the proposition that every person who so happens to be born within that - and since extended - arbitrary geographical region is absurd.
>The commerce clause violates the natural right to voluntary contract
Yes it does. One among many reasons I don't like that document.
I have a principled disregard for any and all human endeavors that propose to mandate to people who aren't harming others how they're going to live by threat of sanction. It's absurd by every notion of that word.
the job of judges isnt to make the positive law coincide with the natural law
its to faithfully uphold the positive law
lobby your representatives
>111999000
GOD DAMN, THOSE DIGITS
The Constitution is not a document of positive law.
Also I don't have any representative other than myself. If you want people to use violence against me because I'm not conforming to their arbitrary dictates - that they simply assert with no actual moral or rational justification that I am bound by - then you're free to hold that abhorrent, unintelligent and conformist sentiment.