Sitting federal judge Richard Posner says there is absolutely no point in judges studying the Constitution. I arf you not. Here's the direct quote: "I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation...the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the post–Civil War amendments (including the 14th), do not speak to today."
It's already true that law students don't actually study the Constitution itself in law school - they study nothing but court rulings and never grapple directly with the meaning of the text itself. They don't even read the Federalist Papers anymore. The Federalist Papers were written in 1788 by Founders James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay to help New Yorkers understand the Constitution which had just been drafted and was before the voters for ratification.
I once heard a lawyer with a leading First Amendment law firm describe a speech he had given to students at one of the nation’s premier law schools. He asked the class how many of them had taken a course on the Constitution during law school. Every hand went up. He then asked them how many of them, in their Constitution class, had read the Federalist Papers, the best source for understanding the Constitution as the Founders intended it to be understood. Not one single hand went up.
Immediately after the lecture, a student came up and said, “Instead of asking us whether we’d read the Federalist Papers in our class on the Constitution, you should have asked whether we’d read the Constitution in our class on the Constitution. You’d have gotten the same result.”
Posner, mind you, is a sitting federal judge who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, but now informs us he thinks the whole thing is irrelevant. Posner is not telling us anything we did not know about the judiciary's contempt for the Constitution - he's simply removing all doubt.
And speaking of judicial ignorance of the Constitution, a federal judge in Mississippi, Carlton Reeves, has shredded what is left of religious freedom and the First Amendment by striking down a conscience-protection provision in Mississippi state law that would protect county clerks like Kim Davis from being thrown in an 8x10 cell for exercising their right to the free exercise of religion.
What this means, bottom line, is that it is no longer the KKK which is squashing civil rights in the South. It’s now renegade, out of control federal judges. It’s Judge Reeves who symbolically is standing in the door of the county clerk’s office with a bullhorn, a firehose, and police dogs, daring Mississippians to exercise their constitutional rights, under penalty of being thrown in jail cells formerly occupied by civil rights workers in the ‘60s.
Bonus bytes
- A wall for me but not for thee: more liberal hypocrisy on parade. Facebook founder and open-borders advocate Mark Zuckerberg builds ANOTHER big wall around one of his homes. He thinks a wall to keep bad guys off his property is peachy, but a wall to keep bad guys out of America is horrible.
- Spanish Inquisition, Green-style: Democrats actually want us prosecuted for believing the science about warming. You know, the actual scientific data from NASA satellites which says there has been no global warming since 1978. Now we know why judges don't want to study the Constitution. It has that pesky provision about freedom of speech and the press.
- A renowned climate "scientist," Michael Mann, says we don't actually need any, you know, science. Actual data, he says, is "increasingly unnecessary." We can make it up as we go along. So a liberal federal judge says the Constitution is irrelevant, and now a liberal scientist says science is irrelevant. Welcome to the Dark Ages.
- Cracker Barrel has thrown in with the radical homsoexual agenda in Nashville, serving as one of the official sponsors of the “gay” pride parade. Cracker Barrell is vendor #62 on the list. http://www.nashvillepride.org/2016-vendor-marketplace/
