Flutterby™! : DeLay comes out against liberty 2005-04-15 13:56:11.659912+00

DeLay comes out against liberty

2005-04-15 13:56:11.659912+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

After that contentious Scalia thread down there, maybe we can rile up someone to embarass Tom DeLay, who recently came out against freedom:

The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them.

(Thanks to Lyn). This is wrong for the same reason Scalia was wrong when he said:

The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.

No, what should distinguish our system and approach to the law is that The Constitution needs to be interpreted as setting maximum limits on government, not mininimums on citizens.

#Comment Re: made: 2005-04-15 14:58:38.270391+00 by: mvandewettering

Holy crap. It is embarrasing that the House Majority Leader could be this ignorant. Frankly, I can't imagine that he's this ignorant, but instead is just not at all concerned with upholding the laws and Constitution of the United States.

The separation of church and state is

a constitutional principle. You can find it in Article VI, Section III, in that it precludes any kind of religious test as a qualification to holding any public office. Or perhaps in the First Amendment.

And of course, the Constitution need not (indeed, should not) be interpreted in the strictly literal way that Biblical fundamentalists do, clinging to the words rather than the meaning of the words: http://members.tripod.com/~candst/tnppage/arg1.htm

It's pretty clear that DeLay and his cadre of revolutionaries would like to go back and reverse Marbury v. Madison (1803) so that they could avoid the bother of having to sculpt laws which pass judicial review. It's disgusting.

The Constitution does explicitly give Congress the power to limit which laws and which cases the Supreme and inferior Courts have jurisdiction over. The 'right to privacy' (usually code for 'right to an abortion') is nowhere in the Constitution (The Fourth Amendment prohibits search & seizure, which is much more narrow that current 'privacy' jurisprudence). And 'separation of church and state' relies almost entirely on the Establishment Clause, which may or may not require as much separation as we currently have.

I don't agree with what Delay is trying to do here, but neither he nor Scalia are wrong in their statements. No one is served when the Constitution and the Supreme Court are used to win political battles.