Thanks for the insight guys…keep it up!

Great point. Liberty and permission to act are a far cry from each other. That’s why even though I support the Tea Parties in concept, it seems odd to me that so many of these modern tax protesters were asking permission from their government to protest their government.

Would the founding fathers have done that?

Personally I think the public education system in America does more to make Americans dependents than any other single entity. The benefit to dependent selfs is the permissiveness that’s dangled in their faces. They think that liberty is the same thing as license, and that is what they’re after.

This I cannot understand. What is the benefit to the self of destroying the foundation of personal individuality? Why did people raised without chains come to accept and even demand being put in “safe” cages? The particular irony is that the cages turn out to be not so safe after all, but the certainty of future injury is mere insult compared to the loss of freedom.

The lemmings march into the sea because they have no choice, a matter of population dynamics against limited resources. They must try and swim across the ocean because their native land has insufficient to feed their numbers. Insanity, but at least it has a reason I can understand. But what has driven the majority of Americans into the mass insanity of Socialism? That’s supposed to happen to ignorant, starving peasants. And yet it has crushed the hope of the wealthiest and most inventive nation in human history.

Perhaps the truth is something too simple and terrible to accept. But if it is the truth, I cannot reject it.

This is something of a pet peeve of mine. Now, that’s my problem and I own it. But let me just say that the average guy isn’t a lawyer, nor is he a Constitutional Scholar by any means. If he’s ever read any portion of the Constitution with any interest (not to mention the explication of it in the Federalist Papers), he probably quit reading after the first section of the first article when boredom set in, or when he found his mind wandering, as it were. What he knows of the Constitution, therefore, is what he hears from others.

The very best way I personally know of for error to creep in is to quote a passage out of context. I mean, “hath God said?”

“While giving that authority to the (properly) directly elected representatives of the people would certainly increase the probability of removing obnoxious officials, I’m not confident that this power would be used wisely.”

Neither am I, which is the reason that provision of the proposal has always concerned me. In fact, I’m almost certain it wouldn’t be used wisely. Not to mention that a simple majority vote as sufficient to remove a judge from the bench seems to me peculiarly unjust. Not that some of the scoundrels we call federal judges particularly deserve justice or equity. But anyway…

As to the fourteenth Amendment, I do not regard the language of the amendment to be particularly unclear or subject to abuse. The problem is that the Court has flagrantly abused the plain sense of the language by using interpretations which rely on inferences about intent or utility. Thus revisiting the fourteenth is no remedy, the judges are not dependent on what it actually says in the first place.

I’m not enthusiastic about the proposed modification of the impeachment authority. While giving that authority to the (properly) directly elected representatives of the people would certainly increase the probability of removing obnoxious officials, I’m not confident that this power would be used wisely. However, enthusiastically or not, I suppose I’d support such a measure. It at least seems less radical than open denunciation of nearly all Federal authority. Though I’m sticking with that as a matter of principle.

Why not simply return to the original mode of selecting U.S. Senators? The pathway to the ultimate destruction of the federal principle was opened up via the alteration from the original in the way we select Senators, no? And our Senate does act in the role of advisory to the executive branch on appointments to the federal courts, does it not?

What we really need to do is to re-examine the fourteenth amendment; not just its intent, but also the way in which it has been abused by the central government. Good intentions aside, the fourteenth amendment is arguably the most destructive piece of legislation ever added to the U.S. Constitution.

Nonetheless, Article V was included in the Constitution for a reason. Your suggestion for altering the constitution of the federal judiciary is interesting to me because, of course, even Thomas Jefferson declared that the (threat of) impeachment is rarely a scarecrow. Among other more radical statements he made about the federal courts and the restrictions which would ultimately have to be placed on that body of miscreants. So, no, your exploration into how we might effectively go about checking the abuses of the constitution which emanate from the courts does not sound silly at all. It sounds, rather, like a concerned patriotic American seeking a proper, viable solution to a major problem which, coupled with liberal dominance, is destroying this country.

Here is an amendment proposal you may not have seen before which seeks to rectify the situation with the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, not by changing the conditions of their tenures “during good behavior,” nor by altering the way in which they are selected, but by re-asserting Constitutional Supremacy over the federal judiciary. I was around when the proposal was first introduced some years ago, and up until recently I’ve been an advocate for some version of it. I’ve never thought much of the “by [simple] majority vote” provision which places the whole of the impeachment process (when it concerns federal judges) in the hands of the lower house, but at the same time I’ve always thought there was meat in the proposal.