Political Wrinkles - View Single Post

cnredd · #2 (**permalink**) 07-01-2008, 02:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by foundit66

I find this fascinating.
It essentially challenges the constitutionality of the federal government action to "bailout" companies and people in the first place.
The federal government's power isn't just assumed.
The constitution states what the federal government can do.
It states some limitations on what it can do. (typically amendments)

Just because the constitution doesn't say that the federal government "can't" do something doesn't mean it should be assumed that is within the federal government's purview.

Unfortunately, that's the way it's been done for quite awhile now...

Would you believe...from 1941!...

Quote:

The old Constitution was dead as a mackerel. Bit by bit over the last four years the Supreme Court had killed it—as man by man Franklin Roosevelt put new Justices on the bench.

As long as the power of the U.S. Government was divided on roughly equal terms between the Judiciary, the Executive and the Congress, a change in the Supreme Court did not mean a sweeping change in the interpretation of the Constitution. But industrialism welded the U.S. people toward economic unity. More & more problems arose requiring national solutions. Nearly everything but the law rode over artificial State boundaries. In the depression the U.S. began to demand that its Executive be more executive; that the Government govern more, assume the responsibility for its citizens' economic security and livelihood. So the New Deal, although it failed in its frontal assault on the Court, in 1937, was able by indirection to get the Nine Old Men out of the way.

Hardly had the President's unsuccessful Supreme Court Reorganization Bill gone to Congress, when the Nine Old Men, themselves abdicating their power to uphold the letter of the Constitution, began scuttling the older Constitution itself—a process practically completed in the past term.

The new Constitutionalists hold that each age of Americans must reinterpret the Constitution in the light of changed social and economic conditions. Throughout the New Deal, the man who has held this belief most firmly has been Attorney General Robert Houghwout Jackson; and on the basis of Jackson's thinking, Franklin Roosevelt made his appointments to the Supreme Court. To do the job he sent up Hugo LaFayette Black (October 1937), Stanley Forman Reed (January 1938), Felix Frankfurter (January 1939), William Orville Douglas (April 1939) and Frank Murphy (February 1940). Liberally interpreted, these men are the new Constitution.

It's this mindset that opened the floodgates to the idea that the Constitution means anything to anyone depending on the day and age...