{"id":3276,"date":"2012-12-14T12:17:11","date_gmt":"2012-12-14T19:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/2012\/12\/14\/living-constitution\/"},"modified":"2012-12-14T12:17:11","modified_gmt":"2012-12-14T19:17:11","slug":"living-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/2012\/12\/living-constitution\/","title":{"rendered":"Living Constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The very name <em>Living Constitution<\/em> is misleading.\u00a0 It conveys the impression of a system designed to be flexible and adaptable.\u00a0 This quality is touted by the advocates of the system, who speak metaphorically of the Constitution as a \u201cliving organism\u201d that must grow with society or else \u201cbecome brittle and snap.\u201d\u00a0 It is not a living organism\u2014any more than any other legal prescription is.\u00a0 And the notion that the advocates of the Living Constitution want to bring us flexibility and openness to change is a fraud and a delusion.\u00a0 All one needs for flexibility and openness to change is a ballot box and a legislature.\u00a0 The advocates of the Living Constitution want to bring us what constitutions are designed to impart: rigidity and difficulty of change.\u00a0 The originalists\u2019 Constitution produces a flexible and adaptable political system.\u00a0 Do the people want the death penalty?\u00a0 The Constitution neither requires nor forbids it, so they can impose or abolish it, as they wish.\u00a0 And they can change their mind\u2014abolishing it and then reinstating it when the incidence of murder increases.\u00a0 When, however, Living Constitutionalists read a prohibition of the death penalty into the Constitution\u2014and no fewer than four Supreme Court Justices who served during the tenure of your judicial coauthor would have done so\u2014all flexibility is at an end.\u00a0 It would thereafter be of no use debating the merits of the death penalty, just as it is of no use debating the merits of prohibiting abortion.\u00a0 The subject has simply been eliminated from the arena of democratic choice.(24)\u00a0 And that is not, we reemphasize, an accidental consequence of the Living Constitution: It is the whole purpose that this fictitious construct is designed to serve.\u00a0 Persuading five Justices is so much easier than persuading Congress or 50 state legislatures\u2014and what the Justices enshrine in the Constitution lasts forever.\u00a0 In practice, the Living Constitution would better be called the Dead Democracy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>From Chapter 70: <em>The false notion that the Living Constitution is an exception to the rule that legal texts must be given the meaning they bore when adopted. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, <em>Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts<\/em>, 410 (2012).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The very name Living Constitution is misleading.\u00a0 It conveys the impression of a system designed to be flexible and adaptable.\u00a0 This quality is touted by the advocates of the system, who speak metaphorically of the Constitution as a \u201cliving organism\u201d that must grow with society or else \u201cbecome brittle and snap.\u201d\u00a0 It is not a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-constitution","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}