4 ms·

> Courts are political entities and always will be. That is true. I've come to believe that the ultimate role of the Supreme Court (and not of the lower court

> Courts are political entities and always will be. That is true. I've come to believe that the ultimate role of the Supreme Court (and not of the lower courts) is the prevention of civil war. The role is essentially that of emitting a ruling that will keep the country from splitting so badly that factions square off and start shooting at each other. They goofed that up rather badly once. Their role is to provide a non-violent venue to debate our deepest differences, and forge a consenus of acceptable compromise. If they fail, we fracture. The role of the lower courts is to apply S.C. decisions uniformly. That said, I get rather annoyed at the "living constitution" crowd that wants to use the S.C. to get us all to collectively act like the constitution says something different than the plain words on the paper. If you don't like what it says, amend it for heaven's sake. Even the authors put forth a package of amendments before the ink was barely dry on the original. The way to change the constitution is to amend it, not re-re-re-interpret it.

vqc 9y ago
I think the problem might be that plain words are still really spongy? A simple statement like "no vehicles allowed on public grass" isn't actually all that simple. What happens when the words of the constitution apply to 95% of a given situation? 85%? 10%? Is it better to amend the constitution every time there's an edge case? A lot of time you can just put a catchall textarea to cover all the rest of your input edge cases. For the law, that textarea is where all the action happens.
- astura 9y ago
  >I think the problem might be that plain words are still really spongy? Many people make the argument that that's not a bug, its an intentional feature. As in, the Constitution was left open to interpretation on purpose. You can also make the argument that even if it was an intentional feature, we've taken it too far.
  - vqc 9y ago
    The founders did leave a mechanism for amending the constitution. It is very difficult to use. Do you think they underestimated the difficult of amending the Constitution using the process they suggested? Or maybe they didn't foresee having SCOTUS be the ultimate arbiters of the Constitution?
gnaritas 9y ago
> to get us all to collectively act like the constitution says something different than the plain words on the paper. That is itself an interpretation; those words aren't nearly as plain as you're pretending they are, they're intentionally vague, that's the only reason the constitution is so short. Legalese developed precisely because it's not at all simple to write something that's plain, clear, and not open to interpretation.

vqc 9y ago

I think the problem might be that plain words are still really spongy? A simple statement like "no vehicles allowed on public grass" isn't actually all that simple. What happens when the words of the constitution apply to 95% of a given situation? 85%? 10%? Is it better to amend the constitution every time there's an edge case? A lot of time you can just put a catchall textarea to cover all the rest of your input edge cases. For the law, that textarea is where all the action happens.

astura 9y ago
>I think the problem might be that plain words are still really spongy? Many people make the argument that that's not a bug, its an intentional feature. As in, the Constitution was left open to interpretation on purpose. You can also make the argument that even if it was an intentional feature, we've taken it too far.
- vqc 9y ago
  The founders did leave a mechanism for amending the constitution. It is very difficult to use. Do you think they underestimated the difficult of amending the Constitution using the process they suggested? Or maybe they didn't foresee having SCOTUS be the ultimate arbiters of the Constitution?

gnaritas 9y ago

> to get us all to collectively act like the constitution says something different than the plain words on the paper. That is itself an interpretation; those words aren't nearly as plain as you're pretending they are, they're intentionally vague, that's the only reason the constitution is so short. Legalese developed precisely because it's not at all simple to write something that's plain, clear, and not open to interpretation.