I Have A Great Idea!

Hey, I gotta great idea! Let's give the federal government even more power over our personal health care, or how much money we can make without being financially raped. They can also decide such things as whether a corporation is a 'person', if and when we can have an abortion, who we can marry and any other shit that comes randomly to mind.

Why, why would anyone trust the federal government with expanded powers over our civil liberties when it has such a shitty record of protecting our liberties? (I ain't even mentioning shit like Abu Ghraib.) Even if your personal favorite douche bags got into office, the next election would inevitably usher in a douche bag from the other party (and we only have two parties in The United States) and they will use their new authority, that you originally supported for your own favorite douche bag, for their own immoral purposes. Anyone who wants to give this institution more power has got to be nuts.

Unethical human experimentation in the United States - Wikipedia

Indian Removal Act - Wikipedia

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery

Rationale for the Iraq War - Wikipedia

 

My right to marry was actually given to me by the government don't forget.

 

No Nose, the government didn't give you that right, it was always justly yours. But the government can sure try to take that right away.

 

Rights are not "gifts" from the government

 

But sometimes the government can make just laws.

 

Should probably let the government tell you all how many cheeseburgers and curly fries you can all eat

Wouldnt really hurt if the answer was 0

 

The "right" that was justly hers may have been a moral right, but the legal right she enjoys came from the government--specifically the judicial branch. The legislative and executive branches previously gave us the Defense of Marriage Act.

 

And sometimes the roulette ball lands on 00...but it's safer just to have an honest job.

 

Moral rights aren't, legal rights definitely are defined and protected by government. Otherwise, they'd be meaningless.

 

That is literally the weakest argument I've ever heard come from you. The government could just as easily change its mind and take that right away from her. You'd be OK with that I guess, seeing as it came from the government.

 

Governments are only as good as the people running them. With that in mind, all the checks and balances the framers built into our constitutional system make sense.

The government did indeed change its mind. More accurately, the legislative and executive branches under Republican control gave us the Defense of Marriage Act, defiining marriage as between a man and a woman, and the Courts gave us the 2015 decision making gay marriage a right. Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide
I wasn't okay with the Defense of Marriage Act; I'm just stating that it was the law. Rights don't grow on trees nor are part of our genes. They're created by legal processes. Paraphrasing John Austin, you may think the law is barbaric, unjust, oppressive, and absurd, and you may be right. But if you think it's not the law, we can prove you wrong by taking your property, ;putting you behind bars, or hanging you up by the neck. That's why we must be very careful whom we entrust with governmental power, and why the choices for 2020 are so truly alarming.

 

OK, that's great. But when a majority Republican appointed Supreme Court decides the states can define marriage any way they want will you be happy? The government, federal or state or local, should have no say in the matter to begin with.

 

No, I'll be sad But that's probably what will happen if Republicans continue to be elected to the Presidency and the Senate. We'll discover how truly ephemeral our rights are if we allow this political pattern to continue.

 

I think you're confusing what is with what should be, and seem to think that when I tell you legal rights are defined by the government, I'm endorsing every stupid restriction the government places on rights. I understand a legal right to be" An interest that the law protects; an enforceable claim; a privilege that is created or recognized by law, such as the constitutional right to freedom of speech. If Noserider wanted to marry a woman ten years ago, would she have had a "right" to do that? No. The law wouldn't recognize any of her claims to marital rights. I wouldn't be okay with that, but my being okay with it wouldn't change her legal status.
There are two senses in which we might say rights are not created by law. Customs and norms of society set limits on the government's effective power to make law. Malinowski found that on the Trobriand Islands there was no government, but people could walk on the beach at night without getting mugged because customary norms served to define and protect their rights. The norms of society still determine the practical limits of government authority. The Volstead Act outlawing booze wasn't really accepted back in the Prohibition era, just as laws against weed aren't today. As a result, those laws weren't very effective. But people still went to jail for violating them. It would probably be incorrect to say people had a "right" to drink alcohol and smoke pot if the courts and the police didn't recognize that right.

The other sense is the notion of "natural rights", which was considered quaint even when Jefferson affirmed them in the Declaration of Independence. These rights were supposedly not created by humans but were rooted in the nature of things and discoverable by reason. Natural rights derive from natural law, or the belief that we can't separate law from morality or determine what the law is without considering what it ought to be. For example, in the twentieth century, Lon Fuller argued that law was the enterprise of ordering human behavior by rules, and that anything which perverted that function by ignoring rules or promoting disorder is a non-law. The Nazis, for all their emphasis on the outward trappings of "law and order" were truly a lawless regime, giving total power to the arbitrary whims of Hitler. Martin Luther King carried this further and argued that segregation laws were unjust laws and therefore non-laws, and could be resisted. The drawback of this point of view is that legal rights become a matter of degree and subjective judgment.

The Natural law perspective was applied in a modern defense of individual rights outside the framework of the written law and assertable against the state was set forth by Ronald Dworkin in Taking Rights Seriously. He argues that if we do take rights seriously, which seems to be the case in our society, we must accept the fundamental right of each individual to the equal respect and concern of those who govern him. I gather the function of a "right", in this sense, is to serve as an exhortation in challenging some alleged usurpation by government. Good luck with that.

It's certainly true the if governments try to intrude into areas where people believe their fundamental rights are being violated, wherever those notions came from, resistance to the government is likely. We have in the United States today, a lawless President who shows no respect for the traditions of legality and constitutionalism that generations of Americans fought hard to protect. The reality is that if we re-elect this man our "rights" may become little more than words which nobody can safely speak about. But the only rights we really have are those created by the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, as interpreted by the courts. So whatever rights we have are created and defined for us by government (including the constitution) , which hopefully we will have some control over through the democratic process. The Constitution, in a very real sense, means what the courts say it means.

 

Cant remember The Trumpster curtailing any natural rights. Consider the recent leashing of the EPA and curtailing of guidance memos.

Any administration will have its abuses. Trump is not a Defense of Marriage type person.

Our politicians are not comic book heros and villans

 

one thing mentioned in the OP is the douchebag turnover effect - that the guy elected, is then replaced; possibly by a person from the opposite party. The current trend has us undoing the progress of the other political party. So it's all pretty meaningless in so far as decisions that can be undone...

 

Ugh, see

Posts like that tell us you are always going to be Partisan Pattie, no matter what the issue is

 

Oh, I'm definitely partisan, based on long and careful observation of the Republicans at work.

 

Any administration will have it abuses, but some are beyond the pale. Trump's assaults on the rule of law have been truly extraordinary.
The Rule of Law: Richard Painter Warns That Donald Trump Must Be Impeached for the Ukraine Scandal
Trump’s Impeachable Conduct Strikes at the Heart of the Rule of Law: Part 2 - Center for American Progress
Trump's Assault on the Rule of Law
Donald Trump and the Rule of Law
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...trumps-assault-on-the-rule-of-law-is-working/
Opinion | How Trump Corrupts the Rule of Law

 

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