The Founders did not believe that the Constitution would be changed over time by the courts, rather than the sovereign people through the Article V amendment process.https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1132086340202504198 …
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Specifically, the Founding Fathers had before them the British example of a living constitution without written constants. They chose, for very deliberate reasons, to write down the rules, first in the states and then for the federal government.
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Replying to @baseballcrank
This view does a huge disservice to the founders. What would “arms” mean 200 years later? “Property”? A “search”? The Constituon is full of words & concepts that indelibly change with time. Women and slaves were “property” when it (& the Declaration of Independence) were drafted.
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Replying to @MsDMcLaughlin
The 13th & 19th Amendments suggest how the Founders thought such things should be addressed.
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Replying to @baseballcrank
OK. That covers voting. Coveture laws existed until the 1920s. Notions of “search” and “seizure” continue to unfold in the digital age. What is an “unusual” punishment in 2019? Proponents of a living Constitution are at least intellectually honest about their end game.
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Replying to @MsDMcLaughlin @baseballcrank
Which is that it would have been misdirected hubris for the founders to carve all of the Constitution In stone. What is speech? Not tweeting, I suppose.
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Replying to @MsDMcLaughlin
Ben Franklin, who operated a printing press, would have seen nothing unusual in a different technology for printing words.
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Replying to @baseballcrank
So now we are speculating. Franklin could have imagined a tweet. Or reddit as “assembly” perhaps. Could he have imagined how the 14th Amendment has been construed? Maybe.
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Replying to @MsDMcLaughlin
He'd been dead for 70 years when they wrote it. But the judicial assault on the original meaning of the 14th Amendment started within a decade of its passage.
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Replying to @baseballcrank
Honest Q - was Marbury v. Madison judicial assault in your view?
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Marshall should have recused, but if you mean the idea that the courts can declare acts of Congress to violate the written Constitution, of course they can; the Founders expected they would. Judicial review is designed to enforce stable, written law.
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