Attorney General Barr is one of my favorite government officials. He keeps giving interviews describing what sounds to me like straight-up common-sense Constitutional analysis. I remain confused what his critics believe about how the law is supposed to work.
On the subject of the federal government's proper role in policing state governments, Barr states mildly that state governments have very broad police powers, but they are nevertheless subject to some federal Constitutional boundaries. When citizens file suit in federal court to protest that a state government has trespassed those boundaries, the DOJ looks into it and, if it agrees, takes the citizens' side.
How this became either excessive federalism or a betrayal of federalist principles, I have no idea. The only common thread seems to be abysmal ignorance of the Constitution. Lately almost every day someone tries to argue to me that in a contest between state and federal governments and citizens, either the citizens always win, or the state always wins, or the federal government always wins. None of those statements has ever been true.
5 comments:
The second paragraph basically explains how the 14th Amendment uses Federal courts to restrain state incursions on basic constitutional rights (and other things included in ‘privileges and immunities’).
I wonder how they do think it works. Or ought to work.
Ezra Klein made the Left's view explicit.
[Y]ou can say two things about [our Constitution]. One, is that it has no binding power on anything. And two, the issue of the Constitution is not that people don't read the text and think they're following. The issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago....
Read the present uproar through that framework, and your confusion should disappear. Laws, including our supreme Law are mere guidelines and are to be ignored whenever convenient.
Eric Hines
"The issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago.."
I don't know.. I dropped out of school at 15 and it seems perfectly clear to me. Maybe he had too much education and it infected his brain- it seems like a fairly common affliction.
The problem is, it means what it says, and not what people like Ezra Klein want it to say.
Personages like Ezra Klein don't care what our Constitution says; it's not binding on anything, so its words don't matter.
Eric Hines
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