LOL

Text of Judge Vinson's decision:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/47905280/vinsonruling1-31-11

The Bulletstorm walkthrough with CliffyB is more funny.

So good

@magicalclick: The United States Constitution... to quote part of the ruling:

Or what if two of the purported “unique” factors [of the health-care market] — inevitable participation coupled with cost-shifting — are present? For example, virtually no one can opt out of the housing market (broadly defined) and a majority of people will at some point buy a home. The vast majority of those homes will be financed with a mortgage, a large number of which (particularly in difficult economic times, as we have seen most recently) will go into default, thereby cost-shifting billions of dollars to third parties and the federal government. Should Congress thus have power under the Commerce Clause to preemptively regulate and require individuals above a certain income level to purchase a home financed with a mortgage (and secured with mortgage guaranty insurance) in order to add stability to the housing and financial markets (and to guard against the possibility of future cost-shifting because of a defaulted mortgage), on the theory that most everyone is currently, or inevitably one day will be, active in the housing market?

Alas... this comes too late for those who have or are scheduled to lose their insurance as a result of the law in the first place... but still a good step along the way.

I wrote a guest editorial on this subject, http://www.theatlanticright.com/2010/03/26/the-constitution-and-taxes/

Republicans are focusing on the 10th amendment problems because they want to make a more general argument about the Constitution since they think its been abused regularly by Congress and the Court. But its actually the more difficult argument to make -- the easier argument with it boils down to the fact that our Constitution limits the way in which the federal government can enact taxes.

Congress can't just pass any tax they want, thats why the Sixteenth Amendment needed to be ratified to allow the income tax. A fine for failure to buy healthcare be prohibited for the same reason that an income tax was at that time.

I explain why at the link.

I see.

However, there is a big distinction though. I can do a "fixed rate" housing mortage by choice while I do "NOT" have the same choice to health insurrance. The example is not compatible when medical bills and health insurrance increase their rate by 20% every single year and all the government people don't care as they don't use private insurrance companies. Having a choice in private health insurrance is an illusion, because there is no such thing as, "we are not paying for the poor people who intentionally freeload on emergency services that cost 10x of regular visits".

While I agree the argument is sound, but, we are already in that hole with an illusion that we have a choice.

This was the problem with even the 'public option'. Why introduce a single new competitor which has a super advantage compared to any others... when you can introduce hundreds of all sorts of different sizes. Simply allowing out of state buying would have done more to lower the cost of insurance and return the market to something closer to an actual free market than anything the law did or could do.

*bah*

Anyways, I prefer taxes/fees that can be closely associated with activities; for example, look at tollroads. I have no idea how this idea could be extended to health care. The best thing I can think of would be an array of sales taxes, taxes on food and risky behavior. But the last thing I want is to encourage the establishment of a nanny state or the collection and misdistribution of other people's money, even if it is in their own self interest.

If you take 312,000,000 people and take about $3,200 per person per year, you get about a trillion dollars. I'm not sure how high you would have you make a sales tax, but it could be figured out. At the end of the fiscal, if there is anything left over, send everyone a check proportionate to their annual receipts. If at any point, the money runs dry, start a ASPCAish pledge drive with pictures of pathetic looking faces on every newspaper and or website until we've got enough to cover sister sue's knee surgery and the associated costs of the campaign.

-Josh

38 minutes ago, JoshRoss wrote

@brian.shapiro: The 16th amendment wasn't even legally ratified. You really don't need a constitutional amendment, you just need hundreds of million of sheep, in order to keep the grass level in the pasture.

Don't tell me you are going to play the Ohio card... ignoring all of the states that ratified it beyond those necessary.

5 hours ago, dahat wrote

 Simply allowing out of state buying would have done more to lower the cost of insurance and return the market to something closer to an actual free market than anything the law did or could do.

Not sure what you mean by this. The same American drug sold cheaper outside of USA. It has being done and I envy those out of state people who bought cheaper American drugs.

Short version... we have an insurance system which in response to WWII price controls, employer provided insurance has such a favorable tax situation that the individual market has a hard time competing... also you also have 50 states which each individually regulate insurance plans to the point that it is virtually impossible for someone in the individual market to shop around for a plan... let alone receive similar tax benefits.

Think about it... today you can hop in the car and drive to the next state to buy a car or tv, or even order that same item from an out of state vendor and have it shipped to you. Why can't you do that with insurance (of almost any kind)?

The answer is in large part because of state mandates and authority on policies. Even under Obamacare... your only option (on the individual market) will be to buy insurance from state run 'exchanges'... most of which will be offering a fairly narrow band of insurance plans from in-state providers... rather than allow consumers to shop around and get the type of policy they want, with those covered items that they care about.

Many things could have been done to improve the health insurance/care/etc system in this country... alas they took the chance they had and made things far far worse instead.

@JoshRoss:

To go back to what I said... even if you remove Ohio from the list of states that ratified the 16th amendment... Delaware would no longer be the 36th, New Mexico or Wyoming would... both of which ratified it on the same day as Delaware. Not to mention New Jersey the next day, and Vermont 2 weeks later... all before the proclamation of it having passed.

Healthcare and Health Insurance has never been a 'market' in the way that purchasing widgets is a 'market'.  The providers would reject predisclosure of costs as they have done for decades, so it's disingenuous to suggest that a 'free market' is somehow the better option.

So my boss says next year we may end up on a cafeteria plan instead of the great health coverage we have now. Why? Because each and every year the costs go up 15-20%. That's a great system as long as your on the side that makes money off the sick & injured.

The sad truth is that a vast majority of Americans (a.k.a. Joe six-packs) out there are stupid enough to believe the rederick from either side or from the news media which gets us absolutely no where. Hate & fear are the easiest hooks to motivate people. It works just as well for Osama Bin Laden getting recruits as it does for politicians and the news media in manipulating us. Just scream "It's Un-American!" and wrap it in a flag and you've got most people believing you hook, line and sinker.

I am a free-market libertarian. I believe the federal government should stay out of anything that the Constitution doesn't explicitly give them the power to do.

HOWEVER, healthcare just doesn't work in the free market system. If I want an apple, I can shop around and buy the apple that gives me the best value. If I'm lying in a bed about to die if I don't have surgery, I really don't have the option. I would pay any price. Therefore, the only real solution to healthcare is a system like the UK has, where the costs are paid through taxes and everyone gets "free" care.

Since that will never happen in the US, I think the only real solution here is to detach health insurance from employment and to allow interstate competition from insurance providers. A larger pool of people and increased competition will lower costs. Don't mandate coverage, but do keep health insurance premiums as untaxed. In essence, make it much closer to automobile insurance. If I choose to not get coverage and get in a big accident, then I'm stuck paying out of pocket. Make it the same with healthcare.

There was a thread about this here earlier, and my main point about public health care systems is that its a tradeoff, you're trading weakenesses in a market system for weaknesses in a public system. Public health care systems have to find ways to control costs, and different governments manage it in different ways. Whether its queues, or controlling doctor pay, or rationing (more rationing than would occur under a functioning free market system). Giving it to the government isn't a magical solution.

When we're talking about reforming the US health care system, however, I think we have to recognize that we already have government involvement, in areas like Medicare and Medicaid and free clinics. So I think the goal with the US system should be twofold : improve the public side of the system so that works better, and improve the market side of the system so that works better. On the public side, we should work to make sure it covers everyone who can't afford care. On the private side, we should do some reforms that add more competition. If more competition on the private side lowers costs, it'll also lower the costs of public care.

Anyway your insurance rate is based on city, not state. In California, my mom insurance is cheaper if she moves her address to an other city some miles away. It is like car insurance, the car model is a major factor, not which state you are in. It is much more local than state wide.

Btw the out of state drug price is like Canada or Taiwan.  I thought you mean out of united states . Same American drug , same brand, same drug, is cheaper in other country.

Frankly, this could all be avoided by eliminating for-profit insurance and healthcare.

1 day ago, spivonious wrote

I'll put in my two cents.

I am a free-market libertarian. I believe the federal government should stay out of anything that the Constitution doesn't explicitly give them the power to do.

HOWEVER, healthcare just doesn't work in the free market system. If I want an apple, I can shop around and buy the apple that gives me the best value. If I'm lying in a bed about to die if I don't have surgery, I really don't have the option. I would pay any price. Therefore, the only real solution to healthcare is a system like the UK has, where the costs are paid through taxes and everyone gets "free" care.

Since that will never happen in the US, I think the only real solution here is to detach health insurance from employment and to allow interstate competition from insurance providers. A larger pool of people and increased competition will lower costs. Don't mandate coverage, but do keep health insurance premiums as untaxed. In essence, make it much closer to automobile insurance. If I choose to not get coverage and get in a big accident, then I'm stuck paying out of pocket. Make it the same with healthcare.

I wholeheartedly agree with you about healthcare not working in a free market system. However, I have doubts that allowing interstate coverage is the solution.

http://bit.ly/b1sfdO

I think the best solution given this country's unfounded fear of "socialized medicine" is to take the Medicaid approach and open up coverage up to everybody. The way Medicaid works in most states is that management of the program is contracted out to a private insurer. They have to competitively bid to win the contract, but they have monopoly power for X number of years. It's single payer at the state level, but it's not managed by the government. The government simply has oversight of the program. It would essentially be run day to day like a public utility company, but the entity that gets to run it is determined by free market competition. The program could be funded by corporate and individual income tax.

The total Media Price = Sub Medical Price * roughly 1.6 insurrance bargin ratio adjustments.

Even if you don't have any insurrance, you are still gonna pay for all these. If you don't pay at all and have no house to be liquidated, you can enjoy the service for zero price. But, since we are typically middle class here, we will pay all that regardless.

You think you have a choice? Guess again. They don't hand you a menu on each item cost before you use the service, this is not a restaurants that you can just leave if you realized the menu is too expensive. And there is no well-known franchise like McDonald that provide consistant pricing and service to poor patients. Even if they hand you a menu on service pricings, you simply don't have time to shop around.

Whether it is unconstitutional or not, we never have a choice to begin with. I am either for/against the health care. I just wanted to point out that we don't have a choice to begin with.

5 hours ago, Cream​Filling512 wrote

Obamacare also creates a moral hazard where it becomes cheaper and more advantageous for the individual to NOT enroll in a health insurance plan, pay the federal penalty, and then obtain coverage on the day they turn ill and require treatment.  And, of course, they can't be denied.  That's just completely broken.

Ok, you got all libertarian when you thought you were being 'coerced' into buying health insurance and then you complain about the alternative.  Heaven forbid we just make health care another line item on our paychecks.

What, exactly, do you have to offer as a solution? 

Oh, wait, that's right, you offer nothing.

Because I'm way better at managing my money and paying for health care than the government is?  I have an employer-matched HSA plus a high-deductible insurance plan for the unexpected emergency.  I find most insurance plans to be far too risk averse and a extremely poor investment of my money. 

Health care costs are high for a large number of reasons, such as World War 2-era wage controls, abuse of legal system (lack of tort reform), lack of transparency.  These issues should be addressed first (and they're not).  You think Democrats would ever take on tort reform?  They're in bed with trial lawyers.

Central planned statist health plans are a very bad fit for the United States.  No one ever understands the scale of these things.  Obamacare, which has little to do with health care, transfers one sixth of the entire US economy to federal government beaucracies.  That's equivalent to the entire UK or France, or two Indias.  No one has ever attempted central planning at this level before, not even in the Soviet Union.

1 day ago, magicalclick wrote

@spivonious:it is free as long as you don't pay and you don't have any property to be liquidized. in USA of course . You do have a choice to not pay and they have to save a live.

Only in the emergency room.

1 day ago, Cream​Filling512 wrote

If individual states want to implement public health care systems they can go ahead and do that (and some already do).  But it's unconstitutional for the federal government to coerce people into buying insurance.  They were never granted the authority to do this.

Agreed, but if you go that route then you have to cut all sorts of other programs. Education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment, Federal Reserve, National Parks, Endowment for the Arts, FCC, FDA, FAA, FBI, CIA, NSA, the list goes on and on.

16 hours ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

I wholeheartedly agree with you about healthcare not working in a free market system. However, I have doubts that allowing interstate coverage is the solution.

http://bit.ly/b1sfdO 

I would take that document with a grain of salt. Of course insurance companies don't like the idea of interstate competition - they'd lose a lot of money.

1 hour ago, spivonious wrote

*snip*

Only in the emergency room.

That's why 70% of patients in emergency room is not really in critical conditions. And did I emphisized emergency service is expensive, more than 10x typically?

5 hours ago, Cream​Filling512 wrote

@ScanIAm:

Because I'm way better at managing my money and paying for health care than the government is?  I have an employer-matched HSA plus a high-deductible insurance plan for the unexpected emergency.  I find most insurance plans to be far too risk averse and a extremely poor investment of my money. 

Let's see how you feel when you are 50.  Or when you're working for minimum wage.  I know that it's fun to think that the world should revolve around you, your issues, and tailor itself to your environment, but a plan of this magnitude has to cover lots of people who don't fall into the creamfilling mold.

Health care costs are high for a large number of reasons, such as World War 2-era wage controls, abuse of legal system (lack of tort reform), lack of transparency.  These issues should be addressed first (and they're not).  You think Democrats would ever take on tort reform?  They're in bed with trial lawyers.

Health care costs are high because health care costs a lot of time, money and resources.  Period.  I don't know of any Democrat (with a capital D, no less) who likes frivolous lawsuits, but the concept of tort reform means different things.  Businesses would love to see lawsuit caps because it would alleviate some of the risk involved in breaking the rules.  Insurance companies (your folks, by the way) love the tort system because they can point to that when they continue to raise malpractice insurance rates. 

I'll tell you what.  Let's eliminate all civil suits for malpractice and instead prosecute them criminally.  That means when a pharmaceutical kills someone, a CEO is taken out and shot.  If a doctor makes a mistake, he goes to jail.

How serious are you, my creamy type filling person?

Central planned statist health plans are a very bad fit for the United States.  No one ever understands the scale of these things.  Obamacare, which has little to do with health care, transfers one sixth of the entire US economy to federal government beaucracies.  That's equivalent to the entire UK or France, or two Indias.  No one has ever attempted central planning at this level before, not even in the Soviet Union.

I disagree with your opinion and what you believe to be facts.

 

8 hours ago, Cream​Filling512 wrote

@ScanIAm:

Because I'm way better at managing my money and paying for health care than the government is?  I have an employer-matched HSA plus a high-deductible insurance plan for the unexpected emergency.  I find most insurance plans to be far too risk averse and a extremely poor investment of my money.

You are (or rather, you see yourself as that kind of person) but the rest of the country probably isn't. That's the point of "social" systems: people need protection from their own stupidity for the benefit of the state and all of us.

"Thank you for helping us help you help us all" pretty much sums up how things should work.

Now I can see why the idea of being legally mandated to procure insurance is unconstitutional (of course I'd like to remind everyone that the constitution itself is not perfect, and I'm not of the opinion that it's wise to found a country on the basis of a piece of paper in the first place). I don't know why the administration didn't just classify it as a federal tax and do a revolutionary takeover of the health insurance industry. Le sigh, a man can dream.

Also, can we stop with the labelling and name-calling? "Obamacare" is just childish. You don't see me calling the 2nd Amendment as "NRA Erotic Literature" every time I discuss it, do you?

9 minutes ago, ScanIAm wrote

@phreaks: But you have to admit, that "NRA Erotic Literature" is funny.

(It helps if you read this in Duke Nukem's voice)

Yeah babe, would you like to see the barrel of my gun? When you pull on the trigger out comes a bang!

Oh yeah, I bet you wanna grab my grenades too. They go boom, ahh yeah. Oh, what's that? You'd like me to set up a defensive position in your foxhole?

23 hours ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

I wholeheartedly agree with you about healthcare not working in a free market system. However, I have doubts that allowing interstate coverage is the solution.

http://bit.ly/b1sfdO

I think the best solution given this country's unfounded fear of "socialized medicine" is to take the Medicaid approach and open up coverage up to everybody. The way Medicaid works in most states is that management of the program is contracted out to a private insurer. They have to competitively bid to win the contract, but they have monopoly power for X number of years. It's single payer at the state level, but it's not managed by the government. The government simply has oversight of the program. It would essentially be run day to day like a public utility company, but the entity that gets to run it is determined by free market competition. The program could be funded by corporate and individual income tax.

How will you control costs?

Long queues like in Canada? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/13/world/long-lines-mar-canada-s-low-cost-health-care.html

Strict rationing like in the UK? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1263223/NHS-rationing-body-denies-15-life-saving-drugs-cancer-patients.html

Controlling doctor pay and work hours like in France? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1776719.stm

The way Medicare/Medicaid works even now is that its insustainable, adding more and more to our debt every year without a way to control costs. http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges/medicare-and-medicaid/ Unless we put restrictions on care, or doctors, or patients, or use other methods to control costs like they've done overseas it'll be even worse if its opened up to everybody.

If you substitute a free market -oriented system for a public -oriented system, you're just trading problems.

But there's no reason to have to choose between the two, in the first place its a false debate thats being created by politics. Currently in the US we have both a free market part to our health care, and a public part, its already a mixed public-private system. But both parts have problems with them that can be addressed, and addressing the problems in one part of the system will benefit the other.

We can make sure Medicaid covers those who need it, allocate state funding for free clinics, this can help lower insurance costs by making sure people get preventative care. Increasing competition and doing things like tort reform for the market half of the system can lower costs also.

The link you provided on interstate competition makes a lot of statements that really are vague an insubstantive. It says that insurance companies will choose their regulators, but saying this is a problem is assuming that states will badly regulate insurance companies, that bad regulations from other states will infect your state somehow, or that insurers won't try to make a profit in your state because they don't like your regulations. None of those assumptions make any sense at all.

Also. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_savings_account

Yeah, it's all pretty funny

1 hour ago, W3bbo wrote

Also, can we stop with the labelling and name-calling? "Obamacare" is just childish. You don't see me calling the 2nd Amendment as "NRA Erotic Literature" every time I discuss it, do you?

Don't you think it odd... that a man who calls for an end to name calling... is himself name-calling?

Not to mention a person who has called groups like the RIAA or MPAA "MAFIAA" in past?

More so... what should we call it? By it's official name of 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act'? or perhaps as PPACP?

Oh yes... both roll off the tongue so well in casual or serious conversation.

Should we not honor the man who fought so long and hard for such a plan, starting early in his campaign for president (in large part because Hillary was pushing for something of her own and he couldn't be seen as not having an answer)... then let the Congress go and write their own bill a few times, argue amongst themselves for a while, the entire time speaking in generalities about what he wanted to see, but overall staying out of the process... only to swoop in at the last moment, have a bi-partisan meeting, continue to demonstrate a willingness to ignore the opposition party, but ultimately take credit for what was eventually passed and that he had little actual insight/influence into?

What pray tell would you have us call it that would not offend you so?

Strict rationing like in the UK? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1263223/NHS-rationing-body-denies-15-life-saving-drugs-cancer-patients.html

I can't speak for the other countries listed, but I feel the need to defend our NHS from, what I feel is, an unreasonable and largely unfounded criticism.

First off, the Daily Mail is not a reputable newspaper. They're a tabloid, our equivalent of Fox News, if you will. They often get many things wrong, for example they claim that Brian May's PhD is in astrology, their science reporting is often off too, they like to lump things into a "causes cancer or cures cancer?" taxonomical system.

Now on to the specific article you linked to:

I'll start off with saying that NHS care is not "rationed" as you imagine food supplies were during World War II. There are no quotas of what kind of treatment you are entitled to. The story over these cancer drugs is that it was determined that the cost/benefit ratio simply wasn't worth it: these drugs are only useful for extending the lives of terminal cancer patients by a few weeks at most but at a disproportionate cost.

In the UK you can still get private healthcare (yes, really) and if you can afford it, or if your private health insurance scheme covers it, you can get these drugs. The article is about the NHS reasoning that it isn't worth it to provide them, for free, to these patients, especially as the money would be better off being spent elsewhere. This kind of utilitarian budgeting (no matter how grim it is) happens under every system.

The situation would be no different than in the USA, except that instead of a non-existent federal (or state) agency deciding it isn't worth it, it would be the cancer victim's insurance provider, and they would probably decide it wasn't worth it (since most of them are for-profit, after all; and the person's going to be dead soon anyway). Except this happens all the time so much that you don't even hear about it in the news, so much there's an eHow article about it.

The NHS is not inherently or systematically "broken" or somehow a flawed system. No system is perfect, and many systems are arguably better than others (by many different measures, such as "number of people driven to bankruptcy" or even "lives saved as a proportion of the population"). My own, personal, complaints about the NHS largely relate to the very drab interior decoration and styling of many of the older 1960s hopsitals (namely my local A&E).

1 hour ago, W3bbo wrote

"Thank you for helping us help you help us all" pretty much sums up how things should work.

... in your mind. Not all agree with you to the extent you think.

(of course I'd like to remind everyone that the constitution itself is not perfect,

A) Who said it was? B) Would you please refrain from insulting what you clearly do not understand, as evidenced by:

and I'm not of the opinion that it's wise to found a country on the basis of a piece of paper in the first place

<shaking head>So is it you support tyranny eh? Or is it you just don't understand the civil society and/or a social contract?

It's either one or the other. Not none of the above. Not "well I think".

Pick one.

I don't know why the administration didn't just classify it as a federal tax and do a revolutionary takeover of the health insurance industry.

A) That would violate the President's (already broken) pledge not to raise anyone’s taxes who makes less than $200k a year.

B) The American people have time and time again rejected the idea of a single payer health care system in this country.

C) That would have been too much of a straight forward way to achieving the end they want, something that would be slowed down by B.

Le sigh, a man can dream.

Odd that you have dreams regarding the way another country such as the US chooses to organize itself in such a personal way.

I understand all that, but from what I've seen more treatments are covered by private insurance in the US than public insurance in the UK, and also more are covered by other European health care systems simply because they control costs in other ways.

That would simply make sense, because you're working with a limited pool of money to cover everyone; whereas in a private system you're only covering people who pay what you ask.

Additionally, I fully believe that insurance costs in the US can be lowered by market reforms and increasing competition, which should add to that by allowing more treatments to be available than are available now. 

Presidents and others are sworn to uphold it, yet it can be amended; if it's a living document then what happens if an amendment is made that a person who made a sworn oath cannot consciously abide with?

I can't tell if "So is it you support tyranny eh? Or is it you just don't understand the civil society and/or a social contract?" is you making a strawman argument or a false-dichotomy, but you don't need a written constitution to establish a social contract between the government and the people. Lots of democracies and nations have an unwritten constitution, like the UK, NZ, and Israel.

A) That would violate the President's (already broken) pledge not to raise anyone’s taxes who makes less than $200k a year.

B) The American people have time and time again rejected the idea of a single payer health care system in this country.

C) That would have been too much of a straight forward way to achieving the end they want, something that would be slowed down by B..

I did not have the tax-rise pledge in my mind, thank you for bringing that to my attention.

Odd that you have dreams regarding the way another country such as the US chooses to organize itself in such a personal way.

It's not like people don't develop designs on other nations. During the Cold War a key precept of contemporary conservative thought was how to subjugate Russia and the Soviet Union to their will.

11 minutes ago, W3bbo wrote

No-one one here has, but the general rhetoric of many "constitutionalist" politicians and socio-political movements implies connotations of a kind of inerrancy in the constitution. Note that I'm not citing anyone in particular over this.

The problem in our time is that the side which has said the Constitution is vague and flexible has been using that as an excuse to find whatever they want in it, even when its not there. Whether finding positive rights in the text nobody knew were there, like the right to have an abortion or the right for same sex couples to marry, or on the other hand ignoring language that was written in, like we have with the individual mandate or gun control laws.

The Constitution can also be read in an overly strict, reactionary way that adheres to the letter of the law but ignores the intent, but that was a more common problem in the court system 100 years ago than it is today. You'd have a hard time finding a reactionary justice today; even the conservatives are activist on their own issues (Citizens United, or Scalia saying its fine for the federal government to ban personal posession of marijuana ).

But some adherence to an objective reading of the Constitution is necessary because if officials are allowed to ignore it in some ways, they'll ignore it in other ways. One thing that annoyed me is people who argued the Constitution should be interpreted subjectively later being the loudest to protest that Bush was violating it. You can't say its subjective and complain about it being violated at the same time, you're contradicting yourself. You also can't support liberal justices interpreting it subjectively and complain about conservative justices interpreting it subjectively without being a hypocrite yourself.

Trying to use the court to create law has also been the source of most of the deep divisions in US politics today. If all of these issues were dealt with through legitimate processes it would lead to a lot less anger and emnity.

13 minutes ago, W3bbo wrote

No-one one here has, but the general rhetoric of many "constitutionalist" politicians and socio-political movements implies connotations of a kind of inerrancy in the constitution. Note that I'm not citing anyone in particular over this.

I was unaware that you followed commentary in the US so closely. Please support your assertion or withdraw it (and the related point in the previous post) in full.

Presidents and others are sworn to uphold it, yet it can be amended;

You will notice that the amendment process is *gasp* part of the Constitution! See Article 5.

if it's a living document then what happens if an amendment is made that a person who made a sworn oath cannot consciously abide with?

Oh my head is hurting from this continued inanity. Hang on... I need to go grab a beer.

mmm...

Now then... 'living document' is not something you hear from anyone with a true respect for the Constitution, those who say that it's an old and hard to understand document, that must be interpreted in our more modern era to deal with things that the founding fathers never could have imagined.

On one side you have those who support 'strict constructionism' or 'originalism', who seek to understand what the founders and framers (two rather distinct groups) would have intended. What the language at the time meant and to work from there to understand applications today (if any).

They support the social contract and the civil society and wish to preserve it.

On the other side you have those who see the constitution as a hindrance at worse, or as something to be molded and new found rights/interpretations to be discovered (or invented out of whole cloth) from emanations and penumbras (words I have not chosen at random) from other rights (either real or implied).

They reject the social contract and the civil society.

As an example... regardless of ones view on abortion... it was the ‘living and breathing’ mentality that was behind the famous Roe vs Wade decision... one that any honest legal observer/scholar/expert/etc will admit is rather poorly grounded (as written/ruled)... so much so that if a law student ever turned in a paper arguing similarly, they would almost certainly fail the class.

If you want to find/create an absolute right to abortion... fine. Either use the legislature (or amendment process) for that or base such a right on solid precedent... don’t try to convolute legal precedent to try to apply in a way you want it to.

I can't tell if "So is it you support tyranny eh? Or is it you just don't understand the civil society and/or a social contract?" is you making a strawman argument or a false-dichotomy,

Your attempt to deflect the question is... laughable and obvious I fear. To answer your poorly thought out question though...

Neither. It is a simple choice. You are either advocating for a system where there is little chance of consistent and predictable rule of law... or there is.

Pick one.

but you don't need a written constitution to establish a social contract between the government and the people. Lots of democracies and nations have an unwritten constitution, like the UK, NZ, and Israel.

Nor does one need a written will, a written business arrangement, or a written report card... and yet... all tend to come in rather handy when there is a disagreement over something such a thing might address.

You again forget one of the key aspects of the United States Constitution... it specifies the specific, enumerated powers that the Federal government has. It sets out to explicitly limit the scope of government. Without such a written constitution... it becomes significantly harder to enforce a predictable rule of law. Otherwise... what do you fall back on? What a few lawyers in black robes decide on their own?

It's not like people don't develop designs on other nations. During the Cold War a key precept of contemporary conservative thought was how to subjugate Russia and the Soviet Union to their will.

Seriously... you need to think about some of your arguments a bit more and either base them on fact (and comparable examples)... or just not make them at all.

You compare... your desire for the US to have socialized medicine... to the desire for the western powers to not face a rather large and powerful adversary which is constantly trying to expand it's sphere of influence around the world and often directly threatening those same western powers?

Pray tell how the United States having predominantly having a a private health care and private insurance system threatens the existence of the UK or the NHS? Or even creates a fear of the similar in the minds of those in the UK?

but you don't need a written constitution to establish a social contract between the government and the people. Lots of democracies and nations have an unwritten constitution, like the UK, NZ, and Israel.

I'm sorry I didn't directly address your point.

First, if you do have a written Constitution, justices should respect it -- if you don't have a written Constitution, then that's another matter entirely.

Personally I think the process is good, and its good that a society has an ongoing debate about what government should be.. and the US Constitution happens to be a good start because a lot of thought went into creating it and a lot of blood spent defending it. We should have respect for that heritage, and if we move away from the original document, we should have a good reason to...  and if there's a good reason to you, should be able to win an argument in your favor by convincing the public.

Complaining about not being able to pass an amendment is a concession that either you don't have an argument, or that the public that the government is supposed to be representing is stupid and incapable. Or, I guess the government could be corrupt, but if it is, I don't know why you'd want to give it more of a blank cheque.