Comment by rayiner
5 days ago
The non-Federalist Society folks think that “emanations from penumbras” is constitutional law. How can right wing judges even compete with that?
I think we may have drastically different understandings of what “the law” is.
Note that the court case that first invoked “emanations from penumbras” involved a Connecticut law banning the the use of contraceptives. Do you believe such a restriction should be constitutional?
If we’re talking about what “should be constitutional,” we’re no longer talking about “the law” but instead policy or philosophy.
Regulating the “public health, welfare, and morals” is the prerogative of state legislatures. So the question is whether there is anything in the constitution that overrides that general power. Resort to “emanations from penumbras” is a concession that there isn’t.
By the way, this isn’t even some U.S.-centric take. The constitutional law in most western democracies leaves regulation of drugs to the discretion of the legislature.
> Regulating the “public health, welfare, and morals” is the prerogative of state legislatures. So the question is whether there is anything in the constitution that overrides that general power. Resort to “emanations from penumbras” is a concession that there isn’t.
Your comments these past months seem to evince an extreme textualist view of the Constitution's limits on government power.
Would it be fair to say that, in your view, a state government can take whatever action it wants, so long as the action isn't literally prohibited by the text of the Constitution? (In other words, for state governments, anything not prohibited is allowed?)
I'm curious: What's your view of the doctrine that under the 14th Amendment, state governments must comply with the Bill of Rights to the same extent as the federal government?
You periodically mock "emanations from penumbras" — is it your view that the phrase has more significance than simply a figure of speech to communicate the underlying concepts? (I have my own issues about Justice Douglas's track record, but that's not one of them.)
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I'm asking about your personal opinion: in Griswold v. Connecticut should the Supreme Court have upheld states right to ban access to all contraceptives, including condoms?
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Yes of course, bringing up a whataboutism while the supreme court runs roughshod over current law is totally the point right? We need these stout champions of conservatism because the left is so crazy that we need to check them, that's why we need to rewrite the constitution to fit whatever trump is doing this week, right?
Bringing up the boogieman of the left while the right is literally doing their best to bring the law under their heels permanently is pretty rich.
After we have 60 years of Federalist Society judges looking for what they can find in the “emanations from penumbras” of the second amendment and INA, maybe then I’ll care about the accusation of hypocrisy.
While I, too, think that Trump has gone off the rails, pre-Trump history is very different from what you're implying.
Historically, it's been the position of the Left that the Constitution should be treated as a "living document" to be interpreted in context of the needs of the times. It's been the Right who have rejected such interpretations and insisted on "originalist" or "textualist" interpretations of the document.
Now, Trump and other politicians are bags of wind who say whatever is expedient. But if you look at the Courts and what they've done for the past half-century, it should be clear that the work of the Federalist Society and the justices they've cultivated really has been in that originalist/textualist vein, and it's been the Liberal justices who have strained interpretations of the Constitution.
The Left idea that we need to hew to the Constitution is a VERY new change in American politics. And from where I sit it seems rather disingenuously targeted solely at defeating Trump. I'm not seeing anybody on the left saying, "you were right about the 2nd Amendment, and we should all be critical of California and Illinois and NYC for trying repeatedly to circumvent the courts' orders."
> bringing up a whataboutism
This is red-baiting.
> while the supreme court runs roughshod over current law
This is question-begging.
> We need these stout champions of conservatism because the left is so crazy that we need to check them, that's why we need to rewrite the constitution to fit whatever trump is doing this week, right?
This is straw-manning.
Yeah, those crazy woke judges that think that the government should not be able to bust into your bedroom and arrest you because you used a condom.
“The law” as most people understand it allows the government to regulate the sale and use of medical products. There’s a libertarian reading of the constitution under which Griswold makes sense. But under it, the FDA is probably unconstitutional.
Thanks for saying more concisely what I was trying to convey here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44514202
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