Impeach Kennedy for Being Supremacist Judge?Or Just Kill Him

And the war on poverty has also been an abject failure.
There are just as many poor people (percentage wise) as there was when LBJ started his "war".

mysteryman wrote:

And the war on poverty has also been an abject failure.
There are just as many poor people (percentage wise) as there was when LBJ started his "war".

maybe that's because the world's going south in a handbasket. but anyway, according to Robert Rector, senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation--and Rush Limbaugh's authority on domestic poverty--"Poor' Americans live in larger houses or apartments, eat more meat, and are more likely to own cars and dishwashers than is the general population in Western Europe." abject failure might be overstating things.

yitwail wrote:

mysteryman wrote:

And the war on poverty has also been an abject failure.
There are just as many poor people (percentage wise) as there was when LBJ started his "war".

maybe that's because the world's going south in a handbasket. but anyway, according to Robert Rector, senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation--and Rush Limbaugh's authority on domestic poverty--"Poor' Americans live in larger houses or apartments, eat more meat, and are more likely to own cars and dishwashers than is the general population in Western Europe." abject failure might be overstating things.

There are still just as many inner city poor and poor in the Appalachian mountains as there ever were.
The "war on Poverty" did not eliminate the poor,even though LBJ claimed it would.

Here is an interesting artivle about it...

Debra Law assiduously avoids commenting on Judge Posner 's commentary on the campaign to increase the number of individual rights.

Why?

The source for Posner's quote comes from Posner's chapter- Have We Constitutional Theory? from his book- "Overcoming Law" Anyone who has read Posner who thinks he is of the "mindset that we the people ought to sacrifice our civil liberties in exhange for safety either hasn't read Posner or can't read.

Security Versus Civil Liberties

A distinguished jurist advises us to calm down about the probable curtailing of some personal freedoms in the months ahead. As a nation we've treated certain civil liberties as malleable, when necessary, from the start

by Richard A. Posner

.....

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks have come many proposals for tightening security; some measures to that end have already been taken. Civil libertarians are troubled. They fear that concerns about national security will lead to an erosion of civil liberties. They offer historical examples of supposed overreactions to threats to national security. They treat our existing civil liberties—freedom of the press, protections of privacy and of the rights of criminal suspects, and the rest—as sacrosanct, insisting that the battle against international terrorism accommodate itself to them.

I consider this a profoundly mistaken approach to the question of balancing liberty and security. The basic mistake is the prioritizing of liberty. It is a mistake about law and a mistake about history. Let me begin with law. What we take to be our civil liberties—for example, immunity from arrest except upon probable cause to believe we've committed a crime, and from prosecution for violating a criminal statute enacted after we committed the act that violates it—were made legal rights by the Constitution and other enactments. The other enactments can be changed relatively easily, by amendatory legislation. Amending the Constitution is much more difficult. In recognition of this the Framers left most of the constitutional provisions that confer rights pretty vague. The courts have made them definite.

In Judge Posner's view, September 11 has brought a welcome reassessment of the scope of our civil liberties which, according to Posner, previously "seem[ed] immune from critical reflection." These liberties, Posner asserted, are simply the creations of Supreme Court justices based on brief and obscure snippets of constitutional text. As such, they are appropriately expanded or constricted as "the balance shifts" between our concern for public safety and our concern for personal liberty. In short, as Posner would have it, our civil liberties are relative and contextual--and must be redrawn now as the nation faces what Posner assesses to be the greatest danger to national security since Pearl Harbor.

Posner’s basic pitch is that law is always a matter of balancing competing social values, and that defining the scope of civil liberties is no different. In this particular field, he argues, the balance to be struck is between liberty on the one hand and security on the other. He concludes that since the social interest in security is heightened now after the September terrorist attacks, it only makes sense that the balance should now be shifted toward some restriction of civil liberties.

And to those who ask what freedoms are being restricted? I answer none yet, but you and your minions are trying to scale my back fence with this odd talk of " ...the balance should now be shifted toward some restriction of civil liberties." The sound you hear is not my dog growling, it's me.

restrict an employer's right not to hire blacks,

Thomas: Do you really think employers ever had the right not to hire blacks?

That may have been the circumstance of a particular age, but you don't think such a right really exists, do you? The right to be racist? No, the Court didn't

Quote:

restrict an employer's right not to hire blacks

they said such a right never existed.

Thomas: you're mixing up the right of association with the right to equal protection under the law.

Thomas: Do you really think employers ever had the right not to hire blacks? That may have been the circumstance of a particular age, but you don't think such a right really exists, do you? The right to be racist?

Security Versus Civil Liberties

snip

by Richard A. Posner

.....

snip

The basic mistake is the prioritizing of liberty. It is a mistake about law and a mistake about history. Let me begin with law. What we take to be our civil liberties—for example, immunity from arrest except upon probable cause to believe we've committed a crime, and from prosecution for violating a criminal statute enacted after we committed the act that violates it—were made legal rights by the Constitution and other enactments. The other enactments can be changed relatively easily, by amendatory legislation. Amending the Constitution is much more difficult. In recognition of this the Framers left most of the constitutional provisions that confer rights pretty vague. The courts have made them definite.

NINTH AMENDMENT
UNENUMERATED RIGHTS

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

RIGHTS RETAINED BY THE PEOPLE

Aside from contending that a bill of rights was unnecessary, the
Federalists responded to those opposing ratification of the Constitution
because of the lack of a declaration of fundamental rights by arguing
that inasmuch as it would be impossible to list all rights it would be
dangerous to list some because there would be those who would seize on
the absence of the omitted rights to assert that government was
unrestrained as to those.

Madison adverted to this argument in presenting his proposed amendments to the House of Representatives.

"It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating
particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those
rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by
implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended
to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were
consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution.''

It is clear from its text and from Madison's statement that the [NINTH]Amendment states but a rule of construction, making clear that a Bill of Rights might not by implication be taken to increase the powers of the national government in areas not enumerated, and that it does not contain within itself any guarantee of a right or a proscription of an infringement.

Recently, however, the Amendment has been construed to be positive affirmation of the existence of rights which are not enumerated but which are nonetheless protected by other provisions.

[footnotes omitted]

The Ninth Amendment had been mentioned infrequently in decisions
of the Supreme Court until it became the subject of some exegesis by
several of the Justices in Griswold v. Connecticut. There a statute
prohibiting use of contraceptives was voided as an infringement of the
right of marital privacy. Justice Douglas, writing the opinion of the
Court, asserted that the "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights
have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help
give them life and substance."

The opinion was joined by Chief Justice Warren and by Justices Clark, Goldberg, and Brennan.

"The language and history of the Ninth Amendment reveal that
the Framers of the Constitution believed that there are additional
fundamental rights, protected from governmental infringement, which
exist alongside those fundamental rights specifically mentioned in the
first eight constitutional amendments. . . . To hold that a right so
basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of
privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not
guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the
Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever.

"Moreover, a judicial construction that this fundamental right is not protected by the Constitution because it is not mentioned in explicit terms by one of the first eight amendments or elsewhere in the Constitution would violate the Ninth Amendment. . . . the Ninth Amendment shows a belief of the Constitution's authors that fundamental rights exist that are not expressly enumerated in the first eight amendments and an intent that the list of rights included there not be deemed exhaustive.''

For some odd reason, conservative thinking of late appears to argue that the rights we have aren't really inalienable, but are gifts from the Constitution. It must be that it doesn't fit in with the current crop's agenda.