Comments

1
This "no federal law" argument has some pretty nasty antecedents. Until 1951 (yes, NINETEEN FIFTY-ONE) there was no federal law against slavery or debt peonage, and this fact was successfully used by the states of the Deep South to justify their programs of prisoner slavery. Yes, really. The argument was that despite the thirteenth amendment prohibiting slavery, amendments have no standing in a court until a corresponding law has been passed. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida all took advantage of this imaginary loophole.

These strict states' rights constitutionalists desperately want those days back. That's what they're really saying here.
2
Personally, I just want to know why Glenn Beck still hasn't commented about what happened about your credit card # being stolen. It's a simple question, really: did he steal your number and give it to the Russian mob or not?

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archive…

P.S. Great book to read on this subject is The Living Constitution, by David Strauss. http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/su…
3
Oposition? Deomcracy?

Seriously?
4
@1,
Too true.
Another example: Even though the 19th amendment (giving women the right to vote) was ratified by the federal gov't in 1919, Mississippi didn't ratify it until 1984.

Women technically didn't have the right to vote in Mississippi until 1984. Fuck.
5
My understanding was that there are federal laws against murder. Murder is outlawed at the state level, but a homicide becomes a federal crime when it involves the killing of a police officer, a federal law enforcement agent, a federal elected official, any federal official in the performance of his/her duties, or on federal property (parks, fed buildings, fed banks, perhaps also tribal lands if I believe hollywood?). At least that's what I remember from high school civics class about 10,000 years ago. Am I wrong? And to back-up my fuzzy high school memory is another recollection--didn't Georgie B. and his republican sycophants in congress pass a federal law that made the murder of a pregnant woman on federal property an automatic double homicide.
6
Arguments about the original intent of the constitution remind me of arguments about the original intent of the bible.

1. They're mostly made by people who have read neither
2. They rely completely on the arguers selective understanding of what they think someone might have meant
3. They rarely account for history
7
@5--You're right, of course, but strictly speaking, those aren't laws against murder as such, they're laws against interfering with the functioning of the state. Murder on its own only enters the federal jurisdiction if it involves crossing a state line to commit it, but even then, the legal justification isn't against murder as such.
8
@4, the difference is, no one paid attention to Mississippi's failure to ratify, since it had no legal standing. One the other hand, slavery was widely practiced in Mississippi into the 1960s. Real, honest-to-god slavery, with black men being kidnapped off the streets and sold by county courts to businessmen in need of free labor.
9
It's an Oposum Oposition! Atack the opresors!
10
@4, the 19th amendment became legally binding in MS in 1920 at exactly the same time as it became legally binding in all other states. state X does not have to ratify an amendment in order for it to apply to state X; as long as the amendment is properly ratified (three-quarters of states ratify), it is legally binding on all states. it was just a dick move with no legal bearing for MS to not ratify the amendment until 1994.
11
@8, 10,

Ah, ok.

I still hate the deep south.
12
@9, HA

Please wait...

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