Is that not the whole point? "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
So the federal government is essentially taxing the state's citizens, then giving some amount of it back to the states in exchange for rowing the boat in the right direction. States that increase their own taxes to compensate for refusal of federal funds would become noncompetitive to other states who don't.
The biggest handout of all is small states getting two senators despite having 1/50th the population. SALT deductions are nothing in comparison, you could always redirect federal money to make sure red states are net beneficiaries of federal money… and whaddya know, even with the SALT deduction they were.
It's antithetical to the federal nature of the US that the overwhelming majority of tax dollars are paid to the federal government and not to state and local governments. The federal government's share of taxation should be limited to support its constitutional mission, and more should remain at the state and local level to achieve state and local missions, including things like social services and infrastructure.
That way, some states may choose to have an expanded role of government with high levels of social services and infrastructure spending, some may choose the opposite, and none are left sucking on the federal teat -- the milk from which, may I remind you, are collected from people who live in every state, not just the ones with "better infrastructure".
In the end government money is just people's money taken by taxation. When you let the federal government take most of it, you allow it to browbeat the states into doing whatever the federal government wants, conveniently escaping the limitations that the Constitution placed on it.
To summarize:
“Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all. And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage.”
Excerpt From Allow Me to Retort Elie Mystal https://books.apple.com/us/book/allow-me-to-retort/id1549926... This material may be protected by copyright.
The framers were well before the Industrial Revolution; if they intended a right-libertarian bias, the economy they wanted unchecked was a smaller and tamer beast than this one. But anyway, they did give us the Commerce Clause.
They were well before radio, TV, internet, trains, automobiles, airplanes, nuclear power, and many other things that do not strictly respect state lines. "Leave most decisions to the states" made a lot of sense in 1789 but we live in a different world now.
It makes sense if you sort of skim over the idea that Germany, Sweden, and Spain are just "states" in a federation. But obviously, they are not.
Maybe a US state is something legally different than an EU country, maybe not. I would say the two weren’t intended to be different, and whatever trends have produced such a difference were a mistake. Either way, that doesn’t address the practicality question.
Of the 27 amendments that have been ratified, the most recent was one of the twelve submitted as the Bill of Rights, so there are literally none that have come later. Sixteen have come in between (one from the BOR was never passed.)
Also, the most relevant amendment to the issues upthread, for most purposes in US law (since things like defamation law and most of the cases where the evidence differences matter are state, not federal) is the 14th, which is not part of the BOR.
A lawyer once said that "show me a contract that's one page, and I won't be able to break it. Show me one 20 pages long, and I'll break it."
You are missing the point. The point is comparing it to a hypothetical constitution that is 20 pages long, instead of 1 page long.
So, the 20 page long constitution, is probably easier to break, despite you misleading focus, on the irrelevant point, of the exact way the statement was phrased.
How?
While it is in many ways the main provision that gives meaningful impact to rights both in and beyond the BOR (though the 13th Amendment competes with it on that front, since if people can be treated as property instead of people, they have no rights) by applying them to the main locus of government authority, the states, which the BOR itself neglected to do, the 14th Amendment, which was at issue in Dobbs, is not part of the Bill of Rights.
So Dobbs doesn’t illustrate an assault on the Bill of Rights so much as its irrelevancy in the absence of subsequent amendments.
The founders understood the nature of power, and thus the importance of decentralization and diversity.
But also consider that nobody has yet been put in jail for harshly criticizing the President. And you can still buy a gun.
You call out Article III, for example, so I'll focus on that. It doesn't say "we should have a Supreme Court and other courts Congress may establish." It says the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in them, and that judges shall be appointed. It isn't magisterial or clerical power. It clearly establishes the United States as a common law system. That's further reinforced by the use of the term jurisdiction — literally the power to say what the law is. It's clear that any and all courts established by Congress are "inferior" to the Supreme Court, which is a significant protection of judicial independence. It's also clear that Congress can't reduce their pay as retribution - ditto. And that's just the first section.
It's a much richer document than your previous comment gives it credit for.
Congress should not get to seat its own checks and balances, and it doesn't particularly matter if Congress is only allowed to establish and ordain inferior courts to that of the Supreme Court, if they already effectively establish and ordain the Supreme Court's delegations - and thereby its power.
WTF do they even let people online
Supreme Court Justices are, "nominated by the President and confirmed by the United States Senate". The President is appointed by Congress through the Electoral College. Congress seats its own checks and balances by direct and proxy.
You should allow people to think of you as an idiot, rather than vomit on your keyboard and remove all doubt.
I'm not going to ban you right now because (unlike with the other account) I didn't see a lot of this in your history—but please don't do it again.
Is it that you don't see the linkage between the text of Article III and Marbury's famous line, "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is"? Because jurisdictio literally means "to say what the law is"
The fact judicial review is not in the constitution is not controversial.
Here's what Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts web sight says:
"The best-known power of the Supreme Court is judicial review, or the ability of the Court to declare a Legislative or Executive act in violation of the Constitution, is not found within the text of the Constitution itself. The Court established this doctrine in the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803)."
https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-re...
In my experience, programmers do the same with law. Just because technical people operate in a world of constraints does not mean they are experts in the law. A little more humility would be helpful.
The website is intended for a lay audience, and doesn't constitute persuasive or binding authority in any case.
But the fact of the matter is that judicial review is found within the text with any amount of close reading. There is exegesis required, yes, but that exegesis is extremely straightforward and clearly delineated in Marbury, which I would encourage you to read.
But even without relying on Marbury, what exactly do you think "appellate jurisdiction ... as to law" means if it doesn't implicate judicial review?
The Framers clearly thought it meant judicial review when they wrote it, and they said as much when they enacted the Judiciary Act of 1789. Section 25 thereof: "a final judgment ... where is drawn in question the validity of a treaty or statute of, or an authority exercised under the United States ... may be re-examined and reversed or affirmed in the Supreme Court of the United States." The procedural posture is a bit different, due to the then-current presumption of parity between state and federal courts, but the fact of the matter is that the Framers clearly knew what "appellate jurisdiction ... as to law" meant, even if it's trendy for some people today to claim that they, themselves, do not.
It's a trendy take to say that judicial review isn't in the Constitution, and that may be superficially true, but it ignores two important facts that contradict that take:
(1) Article III's explicit grant of "appellate jurisdiction ... as to law"
(2) The Framers' own words in the Judiciary Act of 1789, which explicitly anticipates cases "draw[ing] in question the validity of a treaty or statute of, or an authority exercised under the United States, [where] the decision is against their validity" and reaffirms that such decisions may be "reversed or affirmed in the Supreme Court of the United States."
It is very clear what "appellate jurisdiction ... as to law" in "cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made" means. And for anyone who has any lingering doubts, just look to how the Framers implemented it in the very first Judiciary Act, less than seven months after the Constitution went into effect.
Concise to the point of vacuous. It says practically nothing. It describes only the barest outlines of government, and effectively all of the actual implementation has been a matter of legislation, judicial decisions, and tradition. Individual words are scrutinized as if they will somehow be unambiguous if we stare at them long enough, or bring in enough cherry-picked outside context.
The section on the courts is especially hilariously short. It basically says "We should have one". Everything after that -- included the vaunted ability of the Supreme Court to "interpret the constitution", is a matter of them deciding that it was something they were going to do and everybody else going along with it.