Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (10163)	6/17/2001 2:36:45 PM
From: Mr. Whist	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 59480

The Constitution, by necessity, is being fine-tuned and tested every week of the year by the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government ... and also by "public opinion." The Constitution is an evolving document, not something written in stone, like Charleton Heston's Ten Commandments. If the Constitution were not an evolving document, then there would have been no framework for amendments, either formal or informal. Actually, the closest thing today to "1984" is found in the hallways of Corporate America, not in the federal bureaucracy. I say that having sat through 50-plus bargaining sessions with Corporate America the past decade representing the rank and file.

To: Father Terrence who wrote (10163)	6/18/2001 1:45:45 AM
From: Mr. Whist	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 59480

In my reading tonight, I ran across an interesting observation on states' rights with relation to slavery. "The strongest exercise of national power before 1861 was carried out by Southerners in defense of slavery. This was the Fugitive Slave Law, passed mainly by Southern votes in Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850. This law overrode the legislatures and officials of Northern states and extended the long arm of national law, enforced by the army and navy, into Northern cities to recover escaped slaves and return them to their owners. "When Northern state legislatures and courts invoked states' rights and individual liberties against this federal law, the U.S. Supreme Court, with its majority of Southern justices, rode roughshod over the Northern states and reaffirmed the supremacy of national law to protect slavery. "It was the South's loss of this national power brought about by Lincoln's election, and not the principle of states' rights, that impelled secession." Source: "Images of the Civil War"; text by James M. McPherson, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and a professor of history at Princeton University. **************************************************** In other words, it was the Northern states that embraced states' rights insofar as the Underground Railroad, and the Southern states that embraced the concept of a strong federal government to carry out the Fugitive Slave Law.