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Politics : The Supreme Court, All Right or All Wrong? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (2746)	2/11/2012 5:23:09 PM
From: Jim S	1 Recommendation Respond to of 3029

After WWII, European nations, with some input from the US, pretty much imposed the parliamentary system on Germany. What to do with Japan was cause for some serious policy wrangling. MacArthur, not especially shy about anything, advocated a parliament. HS Truman, and his near-lackey in the State Department, Dean Acheson, didn't really have any better ideas, but they didn't want to give in to MacArthur, so there was a lot of infighting. The upshot was that MacArthur won, but wasn't given credit. Anyway, ever since, parliaments have been the poison of choice. Old Mac would have been proud, it meant that other folks wouldn't have to have a political commander in chief like he did. But, to the original point of the discussion -- I don't object to what Ginsburg suggested as to the form of the Egyptian Constitution, I DO object to the examples she cited as models, South Africa and Canada. Specifically the reasons she selected those examples. S Africa lists about anything you can imagine as a GOVERNMENTALLY PROVIDED right. Food, medical care, housing, etc. People aren't supposedly endowed with rights because they're people, they get the so-called rights because they're under the jurisdiction of a particular government. So the GOVERNMENT hands out rights like MREs, and I assume they can be taken away, too. Compare that with the rights we have, to express an opinion, to go to church or not, and to tell some politician where to go. The Bill of Rights says we have those rights because we're people, not because some official gave them to us. In Canada, once again, it is the government that dishes out rights. A good example there is the constitutional provision against so-called "hate speech." It isn't defined, but it's against the law, and people go to jail for saying things deemed offensive by some judge. And a Supreme Court Justice thinks those are admirable values to include in a constitution? Ginsburg and I have some serious disagreement about that.