🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct30.164906.27222@tessi.com|, george@tessi.com
(George Mitchell) writes:
| leichter@zodiac.rutgers.edu writes:
||In article <1992Oct29.020013.5458@shearson.com>, pmetzger@snark.shearson.com
||(Perry E. Metzger) writes in response to an earlier message of mine:
||| [. . .] The ninth amendment means that the
||| mere fact that the framers could not enumerate every possible
||| disgusting horrible invasion that the engineers of government might
||| devise some day does not mean that we have no protection against said
||| machinations.
| 
||I claim the right to shoot anyone who disagrees with me on the net.  I
||challenge you to find me anything in the Constitution that allows the
||government to interfere in my sacred Right of Revenge.
| 
| Aargh!  Once again you are missing a crucial distinction.  You and I are
| both people.  Obviously, if we wish to live together in peace, we will
| each have to forego our putative "Right of Revenge," or else our children
| will be left with an ugly mess to clean up.

Oh, stuff and nonsense.  Read what I wrote, and what I was responding to.
Mr. Metzger claimed the Ninth Amendment said that I had any right not
specifically taken away by the Constitution.  Nothing in the Constitution
says that a "wish to live together in peace" or a desire to avoid "an ugly
mess" enter into what "rights" are.  If you have an argument, it's not with
me, it's with Mr. Metzger.

| 
| However, when our rights conflict with Government's rights, the Bill of
| Rights says WE WIN!
| 
||(For those who willing to think rather than dream, the government's
||right to enforce bans against murder and other nasty things are implicit
||in what's known as the "police power" of government.
| 
| There is no "police power" in the Constitution.  Quite the contrary!  The
| Fourth Amendment is all about *restraint* of police power!

There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the government the right
or power to outlaw murder!  Find it, anywhere in the text.

The Constitution is NOT the sole source of our laws; in fact, it's the source
of only a very small fraction of them.  You are right, it's mainly about
LIMITATIONS on government powers.  Most of our law draws on the precedent of
Common Law, going back some 1000 years in England.  The "police power of the
state" is a Common Law concept.  It isn't written down in the Constitution
because no one thought there was any reason TO write it down.

The things people don't know about the way their own society functions is
frightening.  Maybe this is why comfortable majorities of citizens, when
presented with the Bill of Rights (or selected amendments thereof) on a
petition, refuse to sign, and characterize the text as "radical trash", or
worse.

Look, you are basically saying something reasonable:  That there are laws,
such as laws against murder, that are a natural component of any civilized
society.  The framers of the Constitution would certainly agree with you.
In fact, they thought that bit so obvious that it didn't have to be mentioned.
They *accepted* the Common Law tradition; they wanted to refine it.

It's Mr. Metzger (and an odd collection of others) who want to claim that
the text of the Constitution is holy writ, and that anything not explicitly
found there, however reasonable and necessary, is forbidden to government.
(Actually, I rather doubt they would really accept this as their position.
They, too, know that you somehow have to find in the Constitution, even if
it's not there in the words, the power to pass laws against murder and such.
However, they conveniently neglect this when they want to complain about some
particular law THEY don't like.)
							-- Jerry