The deification of a bunch of guys who really just wanted to avoid taxes never made much sense to me. I mean, yeah, the Constitution is cool and all, and good on them for coming up with it, but they weren't the Justice League of America for goodness sake.

Adding to that though, they probably would be horrified to see that instead of going by what they wrote down, some conservative activists want to put words in their mouth and tell us that that's what they really meant.

I don't like "strict anything". And also yeah, I tend to agree with Joe Pesci's little speech in With Honors.

The Republican Party has been committing Orwellian acts of linguistic abuse for decades and politicians only use "strict constructionism" and "original intent" when it is convenient for them. Let's face it, the Founding Fathers only intended for White Male Land Owners to vote. There are things in the Constitution today that made a lot of sense in 1790 but in 2008 are as useful as buggy whips (Electoral College is obvious, but how about the makeup of the U.S. Senate, giving the same two votes to Wyoming's 500,000 and California's 34,000,000, making it the most ANTI-representative institution in a free country's government IN THE WORLD).

Reverence for the "original intent" of the U.S. Constitution is not Conservative, it's Political Steampunk.

but how about the makeup of the U.S. Senate, giving the same two votes to Wyoming's 500,000 and California's 34,000,000, making it the most ANTI-representative institution in a free country's government IN THE WORLD).

I think the original intent still works beautifully today. The point was to balance small state and large states' rights. The reason for this was to not allow Virginia to control the entire colony. Just as we wouldn't want California (or other state with large population) to rule the entire US.

The deification of a bunch of guys who really just wanted to avoid taxes never made much sense to me. I mean, yeah, the Constitution is cool and all, and good on them for coming up with it, but they weren't the Justice League of America for goodness sake.

I wouldn't reduce their motivation down to just being against taxes but I do agree that they were hardly supermen. They were politicians and and the Constitution was a compromise document hammered out after lots of heated argument and negotiation that no one was totally happy with. If they thought that it was a perfect document, they wouldn't have included a detailed process for changing it and wouldn't have had to rush out 10 amendments within two years to include individual rights.

how about the makeup of the U.S. Senate, giving the same two votes to Wyoming's 500,000 and California's 34,000,000, making it the most ANTI-representative institution in a free country's government IN THE WORLD).

I agree with LoriFLA - what you're looking for, proportional representation, is found in the House, and I think it's pretty admirable how the Senate and House were concieved to balance one another while meeting different needs.

It is definitely reductionist to call the founders people who wanted to avoid taxes. What they pulled off was amazing, and if you've ever served on any sort of committee involved with governance of even a piddling little new nonprofit or something, you realize that the structure they were able to hammer out was really pretty cool and difficult to arrive at. At the same time, though, they were people of the late 18th century, a time so different from our own that it is nigh on impossible to try to divine what they "would have" said or "would have" meant about today's politics.

They really hamstrung us with the Second Amendment, which was written in a way that is so very dependent on 1770s technology and 1770s military organization that it's all but useless today, which is why it's such a bone of contention. There's no easy way to map their intent upon today's world of a federally funded, highly organized, highly technological "well regulated militia" ensuring the "security of the state," and yet they were stuck in a time when it was the responsibility of the people, ALL people who were males of working age, to form the militia and to provide their own arms. It sucks that they hadn't more foresight there, but they couldn't have.

Whoopi had it right. Obviously "strict construction" doesn't mean we go back to legalized slavery and 3/5 census counts for blacks.

As Baba says in the clip, it's code for overturning Roe v. Wade, and though it's been applied to other stuff, that's basically what it boils down to. The Roe decision's derivation of a right of privacy from the inherent unenumerated rights (per Article, uh, 10?) is one of the biggest bugaboos for the right and their poster (unborn) child for "judicial activism" of all stripes.

it's code for overturning Roe v. Wade,

Ah, that just became a lot clearer for me.

The Roe decision's derivation of a right of privacy from the inherent unenumerated rights (per Article, uh, 10?) is one of the biggest bugaboos for the right

This is true, and it also drives me nuts. I'm not sure why that Court had to go to such lengths to construe a right to privacy where it's kind of a big effort to show one. I've always wondered: why didn't they locate the right to privacy where the founders actually did mention it -- in the Fourth Amendment, barring unreasonable search and seizure. It always seemed to me that a pregnant woman whose private decisions with her doctors were questioned by a third party would be protected by the prohibition against illegal search (or her medical records, information about her condition, etc) and seizure (forcing her body to be held essentially as a prisoner to a possible child).

Anyone know whether this was ever considered, and if so, why rejected?