Article 3, Section II of the Constitution says that each State legislature is in charge of choosing its federal Senators. One rationale for this is provided in Federalist #9, which claims that it makes the states "constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate." The 17th Amendment reversed this, however, making Senators subject to a direct popular vote.
Why was the 17th Amendment passed? What might the Founding Fathers say about it? How were the politics of the Senate changed as a result of it?
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Colbert w/Laurence Tribe on the Constitution
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Definitely relevant to recent class discussion on the Constitution. Besides the "beer before liquor" clause (Amendment LXIX, I believe), I'd have to agree my favorite aspect of the Constitution is the artful way in which the Framers left loose ends, e.g. (per Laurence Tribe's mentioning) in the IX amendment-- not to mention the various ambiguous wordings throughout the document. This extra care that the Framers took added so much vitality to the Constitution as a functioning document. The Constitution was not a written to serve as a jumping-off point to be filed away as "archaic"-- the Framers meant for it to stick around for a while, as it has.
Monday, January 30, 2012
The Constitution
The Articles of Confederation.
The Great Compromise:
Read these provisions from an actual constitution. How would you appraise them?
ARTICLE 118. Citizens have the right to work, that is, are guaranteed the right to employment and payment for their work in accordance with its quantity and quality. ...
ARTICLE 119. Citizens have the right to rest and leisure. The right to rest and leisure is ensured by the reduction of the working day to seven hours for the overwhelming majority of the workers, the institution of annual vacations with full pay for workers and employees and the provision of a wide network of sanatoria, rest homes and clubs for the accommodation of the working people.
ARTICLE 120. Citizens have the right to maintenance in old age and also in case of sickness or loss of capacity to work. This right is ensured by the extensive development of social insurance of workers and employees at state expense, free medical service for the working people and the provision of a wide network of health resorts for the use of the working people.
ARTICLE 121. Citizens have the right to education. This right is ensured by universal, compulsory elementary education; by education, including higher education, being free of charge; by the system of state stipends for the overwhelming majority of students in the universities and colleges; by instruction in schools being conducted in the native language...
ARTICLE 122. Women are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life. The possibility of exercising these rights is ensured to women by granting them an equal right with men to work, payment for work, rest and leisure, social insurance and education, and by state protection of the interests of mother and child, prematernity and maternity leave with full pay, and the provision of a wide network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens.
ARTICLE 123. Equality of rights of citizens irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life, is an indefeasible law. Any direct or indirect restriction of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of direct or indirect privileges for, citizens on account of their race or
nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law.
ARTICLE 124. In order to ensure to citizens freedom of conscience, the church is separated from the state, and the school from the church. ...
ARTICLE 128. The inviolability of the homes of citizens and privacy of correspondence are protected by law.
Contrast the US Constitution with the Confederate Constitution.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Declaration, Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship
Deliberation
- What does it mean to reason on the merits?
- How does deliberation differ from bargaining?
Democracy: the people rule themselves
- Who are the people?
- Limited government v. unlimited scope of power: "everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Cows and Isms
Citizenship
Monday, January 23, 2012
The Declaration and the American Political Order
The Declaration (hyperlink versions)
Lincoln-Douglas Galesburg debate (forward to 1:01:30)
From the Cornerstone Speech by Alexander Stephens:
The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."Deleted Paragraph:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidels powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
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