President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

We've amended it nearly 30 times.

It is not sacrosanct.

 

You're aware, right, that the Founding Fathers provided the means to amend the constitution, and it's not some sort of evil to talk about potential amendments .... right?

 

No. Of course not.

But it was meant to be an obstacle to the government stripping rights from the citizenry, which seems to be your issue, and Obama's.

"If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay."

"But," Obama said, "The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it's been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted."

Obama said "one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still stuffer from that."

 

Yes.

He's going to get savaged for this by people in his own party, but he's right. Having a major candidate for president call for violence (and whistfully speculate that someone could shoot his opponent) was damaging enough. When America rewarded that transgressive behavior with a victory, it irreversibly lit the fuse. There's much more political violence ahead, and it will be one of the few bipartisan things left.

 

We amend the constitution to ensure citizens' rights are guaranteed, and applied equally.

When we've used it to remove rights, it's been disastrous.

 

They either made a mistake in including the Second Amendment or in how they worded it, we've possibly made mistakes interpreting it since then, or it has outgrown its usefulness, as written and interpreted, in a changed world.

Your defense of it is an abstraction.

 

Totally.

When we used it to remove the right to own slaves, it was disastrous. When we used it to remove the right to be President infinity years, it was horrible.

 

Prohibition?

 

I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.”

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013...d-by-a-system-that-our-founders-put-in-place/

 

That's fallacious logic.

Let's say that the Bill of Rights granted every man a right to slug his wife in the face, once a year. Would you advocate repeal?

The provision either stands on its own or it doesn't.