Comment by applepple
5 years ago
>> in a document delineating what qualifies as states and what qualifies as the federal government with all sorts of text about relations between the two
If those definitions were tacked on afterwards, then it would exemplify exactly the kinds of distortions I'm referring to. I don't know the order in which the US constitution was written but that definitely should affect the intent.
>> Furthermore your example is in a paragraph that starts "No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation"
TBH, I didn't even see this interpretation. I guess some people are focused on the wording to an entirely different level. I used the semicolons to interpret it as "no alliance pertaining to the payment of debt" based on my interpretation, it doesn't say anything about alliances pertaining to other matters.
But this seems to reinforce my point. The words can be ambiguous but it doesn't mean we should disqualify the intent altogether.
ok so, those definitions were not tacked on afterwards, they were really the reason for the Constitution to be written in the first place. What was tacked on afterwards was the Bill of Rights.
The reason for the writing of the Constitution was the Articles of Confederation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation being rather problematic for running a nation.
In fact for any judge familiar with the Articles of Confederation and the history thereof, which I would hope was every judge, the interpretation of the paragraph you cite would be completely obvious and pertaining only to the states, because some of the original problems between the states that caused the Constitution to be written was states doing such things as entering into treaties with foreign nations, coining their own money (making trade between states more difficult than needed), etc. etc.
Basically the paragraph is saying "all the stuff you guys were doing or maybe thinking about doing, stops now!" - I say "maybe thinking about doing" because unsure about letters of Marque although I could certainly see it having been done by some of the more haughty states at the time - say New York or Virginia.
But how do you actually know the intent if you can't trust the words and you weren't there when the text to write down was discussed? This is literally your interpretation of the document versus someone else's.