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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (14439)	3/10/2006 10:11:01 AM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 542970

I need to find enough uninterrupted time not only to read the SC decision but to think about it and then go back and read it again before I will have even a glimmer of what's going on. Just not enough hours in the day right now. And my focus is elsewhere. I may find the time when I'm on the road in the next couple of weeks. However, I do enjoy reading these interpretations. And that one was genuinely different.

To: Lane3 who wrote (14439)	3/10/2006 2:59:57 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 542970

I think the government should have broad discretion about what it decides to fund. I also recognize that such discretion creates problems when people and organizations get used to federal funding. In an ideal world much fewer things would be funded by the feds and it wouldn't be much of a problem, but we are far from that and probably moving further away each year. Still, that take that funding wasn't even the issue was just so, er, different. I understand that the constitution allows for things that are necessary ("necessary and proper") to carry our expressed government powers, but if you extend that to anything that is useful to carrying out government powers risks removing almost all constitutional restraint on the government. Sometimes if the government goes to far the courts will throw in some twisted interpretation of the constitution to create a new restraint but I'd rather stick with what is really in the document and limit the powers in the first place. I read an article or blog post somewhere about how as strictly constitutional matter the USSC should let South Dakota's abortion law stand and strike down the federal partial birth abortion ban. The author (who I believe is pro-choice) thought that the USSC would go with an opinion that would be seen as more reasonable, and get more support, in striking down the more restrictive state law, while allowing the federal law to stand, even though the author thought (and I agree, despite our different take on the overall abortion issue) that the feds are not granted any power in the constitution to pass a law in this issue so the federal law should be struck down and the state law should stand as constitutional (despite the authors strong disagreement with it). Tim