Patterico's Pontifications

1/14/2006

Boston Globe Editors: Morons

Filed under: Judiciary,Media Bias — Patterico @ 11:20 am



A Boston Globe editorial makes this silly pronouncement:

Alito declared his overarching constitutional philosophy of originalism: a strict adherence to the actual written text. In deciding court opinions, he said, ”We should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption.” Given that, at the time of its adoption, women could not vote and slaves were considered three-fifths of a person, such a philosophy is outdated, to say the least.

Ed Whelan does the honors in slapping the editors for this ridiculous statement:

Note to Boston Globe: Originalists do not look only to the original Constitution. They look to the original meaning of all the provisions of the Constitution, including those amendments that abolished slavery, guaranteed “the equal protection of the laws,” and provided voting rights to women. That you evidently don’t understand this — or the fact that it was pro-slavery interests that would have preferred to count slaves fully (rather than as 3/5) for purposes of apportionment of House of Representatives seats and electoral-college votes – is a compelling reason why no intelligent person should pay any attention to your opinion on this matter.

I couldn’t have said it any better.

13 Responses to “Boston Globe Editors: Morons”

  1. It isn’t that they don’t understand, it’s that they can’t stand it.

    Boston Globe editors, like most other MSM editors, can’t stand the fact their monopoly on public opinion is gone. They no longer control the flow of political debate, or set the national agenda. It’s a whole new game, and the old print media can’t compete in an electronic world.

    Now, when they print silly, uninformed, nonsense masquerading as “opinion,” they get called out, exposed and ridiculed, and it all happens rather more quickly than they can fathom.

    Black Jack (d8da01)

  2. Given that, at the time of its adoption, women could not vote

    That’s not true. Women voted in New Jersey up until 1800.

    Steverino (0a4303)

  3. I can’t believe there are still people bringing up this 3/5ths thing. I always love informing the liberal who brings it up that it was the slave-holding states which wanted slaves counted fully. Usually they change the subject after that.

    sharon (fecb65)

  4. Sharon may have suggested a new definition for “liberals.”

    A liberal is someone who knows that even when he’s wrong, it doesn’t mean he has to alter his opinion.

    Black Jack (d8da01)

  5. Black Jack may have come up with the best line ever:

    It isn’t that they don’t understand, it’s that they can’t stand it.

    I wish I’d written that!

    Second best line award also to Black Jack:

    A liberal is someone who knows that even when he’s wrong, it doesn’t mean he has to alter his opinion.

    Patterico, if’n you are ever going to have a “best commenter’s line of the month award,” I hereby nominate the Jackster!

    Dana (a90377)

  6. The 3/5 argument is one example of the lack of historical depth of the left.

    Another is the second amendment use of “A well regulated militia” in guaranteeing the right to bear arms. Who were the militia ? They were the electors, males aged 17 to 45 in most accounts. The “militia” was the chief support of Andrew Jackson when he ran for the presidency after “The Corrupt Bargain” denied it to him. What is the significance of the militia in owning guns ? They were not the national guard.

    One explanation you will never see coming from the left is that the group who were male and 17 to 45 in age who were NOT in the militia were the slaves. The “militia clause” in the second amendment may have been added to bar the ownership of guns by slaves.

    Mike K (6d4fc3)

  7. “Given that, at the time of its adoption, women could not vote and slaves were considered three-fifths of a person, such a philosophy is outdated, to say the least.”

    I prefer to call it a pre-9/11 mindset.

    “: Originalists do not look only to the original Constitution. They look to the original meaning of all the provisions of the Constitution”

    And the original meaning is going to be the meaning of the likes of people who counted blacks as 3/5ths and did not let women vote.

    actus (ebc508)

  8. They look to the original meaning of all the provisions of the Constitution

    Just to get this straight, the comment refers to all of the provisions of the constitution. Only someone who is actually obtuse or who “plays one on TV” would suggest that the phrase does not include the amendments thereto as “originalists” do.

    Otherwise, what do we have – a “living” constitution? If so, does that apply to the subsequent decisions of the court? If so, why are we so wrapped around the axel WRT what this or that nominee would do with Roe? After all, if the constitution itself is “living”, then so must be the precedents established by the court.

    As Scalia has argued, if the constitution is “living” then the rights enumerated therein mean whatever the majority says they mean, and if that is the case, since they are there to protect the minority from the majority, then they mean nothing at all.

    Harry Arthur (b318a5)

  9. Mike K, is that just speculation, or do you have support for that interpretation? I thought your first explanation was all there was to it — that the militia were under the control of the states, not the national government, so they provided a measure of security for the states against the central government. The Bill of Rights as a whole, and the second amendment in particular, was not originally intended to limit the power of the states, so that explanation seems to provide a complete answer. Support for the second amendment doesn’t seem to be limited to slaveowners or those who would be sympathetic to them. Historically, it would seem to have much support in New England, where slavery had the least support, as it was the colonial militia that made Massachusetts ungovernable by the British even before the formation of the Continental Army.

    Anyway, if you accepted the rationale of the Dred Scott decision, which of course is necessary if slavery is to be justified at all, you wouldn’t need to worry about construing any provision of the Bill of Rights to exclude slaves, because slaves were property, not persons, right?

    There is a strong argument that the post-civil War Amendments were intended to apply the second amendment against the states, so that former slaves would be permitted the means to defend their new freedom. It’s completely ass-backwards to suggest that the due process clause of the 14th amendment incorporates the guarantees of amendments 1 – 8 except 2, because the second amendment was more important to preserving the lives, liberty and property of the former slaves than any of the other 7.

    TNugent (6128b4)

  10. Harry, actus is playing the part of the facts-won’t-interfere-with-my-leftyworldview-driven-opinion liberal foil to the thinking conservatives here. Which is kind of surprising, since actus, although frequently having left-leaning opinions, usually isn’t impervious to contrary facts. I wouldn’t have expected actus to make such a silly, uninformed statement about originalism. Maybe that was just Howard Dean or Teddy the Hutt pretending to be actus.

    TNugent (6128b4)

  11. “Just to get this straight, the comment refers to all of the provisions of the constitution. ”

    Of course. Its not to say that the original meaning is that slavery exists and that hasn’t changed. It’s to say that the original meaning is the meaning of the types of people who wanted slavery to exist. A slaveholders view of hte 4th amendment, or of whatever. Because that better secures our rights, to be bound by the words of slaveholders over what we know today.

    actus (85218a)

  12. Actus, still making your ad hominem argument (it’s still an ad hominem argument, even though it’s directed at dead slaveowners)? If that’s ok, I suppose Democrats’ arguments can be fully refuted by pointing to their association with the likes of Michael Moore, Howard Dean, Moveon.org Kos, and others from whom we can draw connections to the remote fringes of the anti-American left, including Dem Underground, Cindy Sheehan and International ANSWER.

    Or, we might stipulate that we don’t get to disregard actual language of a document or actual ideas included in arguments just because some of the authors of the document owned slaves or those making the arguments associate with people who are a few degrees of separation removed from Stalinists.

    Even if you’re not considering the rest of the constitution, including the Bill of Rights, in light of the post civil war amendments (which would tend to undercut your assertion that the Constitution is to be interpreted from a pro-slavery perspective), your position is based on a couple of flawed notions: first, that original meaning is to be gleaned from the subjective understanding of particular citizens or groups of citizens at the time of ratification, rather than a general understanding of the meaning of the words at the time of ratification; and second, that a slaveowner would not be capable of writing a document that destroyed any justification for the continuation of slavery. The fact that Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner, wrote the Declaration of Independence, sinks the second notion.

    The first can be refuted fairly easily as well.

    Like the Declaration of Independence, the language of the Constitution, apart from passages that contain the specific compromises regarding slavery, is inconsistent with the idea of slavery. It was only the rationalization that a slave was property, not a person, that purported to resolve the obvious conflict between the guarantees of the Bill of Rights and the institution of slavery (the inapplicability of the Bill of Rights to the states might have let slavery off on a technicality, if the states themselves had not included similar provisions in their own constitutions). Slaveowners and non-slaveowners alike understood clearly the conflict between slavery on the one hand, and the promise of the Declaration and the words of the Constitution on the other — for the non-slaveowners’ part, Lincoln (among others) wrote and spoke of this conflict; for the slaveowners’ part, see writings which portrayed slavery as paternalistic and which made ridiculous assertions of the inherent inferiority of blacks (which were easily refuted by contemporary abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass).

    So, far from being a document whose provisions had a pro-slavery slant, it was a document whose provisions made slavery stand out as “the one of these things not like the others”. If you’re not willing to give the conflicted slaveowners among the founders any credit for that language, then credit those founders opposed to slavery, including Hamilton. Regardless of who was responsible, the words of the Constitution reflect attitudes consistent with abolition, not with the justification of slavery.

    Once the Constitution was amended to overturn the Dred Scott decision — that is, once it was acknowledged that the former slaves were persons, not property, then the document itself was purged of anything you might consider to be a pro-slavery influence.

    TNugent (6128b4)

  13. actus, your argument seems to be that since we are so enlighted at this point in history that we can, or should, ignore the constructions of those who have gone before who were not sufficiently enlightened to be worthy of determinative consideration. As TNugent argues, the ad hominem “argument” fails to make your case against originalism.

    TNugent, might I suggest you add to your list “the likes of people …” such as George Wallace, Bull Connors, and the rest of the enlighted democrat gang that largely ran the South in the post civil war era up through the early 70s.

    Aside from the fact that I might choose to disagree with actus’ basic premise (that we are somehow morally the founders’ betters), I would suggest that our opinions are thus rendered equally meaningless based on the fact that those who follow us sufficiently far in the future will most likely view us equally unenlighted.

    Perhaps in 100-200 years the people of the United States will come to the scientific and philosophical conclusion, that unlimited abortion rights, or even elective abortion itself, were as wrong as we now view the institution of slavery? Perhaps they might come to similar conclusions regarding the death penalty. Perhaps they will decide that euthanasia is appropriate for seniors beyond a certain age. Who knows? I certainly don’t think they will be justified in arguing that our viewpoints were unworthy of consideration simply because some of our judgements were flawed.

    Harry Arthur (40c0a6)


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