(The snow this week made the line for SCOTUS tickets an interesting experience. Image courtesy NY Times).
Things are getting better. I walked a couple miles yesterday- the session with the VA doctor early in the week galvanized me to get out and start trudging, regardless of the lingering chill of winter. It was a brisk constitutional, and I I am raring to go on Spring. I almost feel that I should have gone down to see the excitement on the Hill and been a witness to history.
My old pal the Constitution has been in the news this week. Funny, really, since the chattering classes have made a practice of ignoring the fine old parchment document that codified the relationship between the citizen, the state and the Federal Government.
I have read the New York Times for years, since I was assigned to US Forces Korea and the fat Sunday edition came to me by slow-boat. That was completely OK- that far away from Times Square, a lag of a week or two didn’t really matter, and I could just toss section “A” as irrelevant.
I know pretty much what I am going to get from them and am normally not surprised by the intellectual gymnastics they perform to justify whatever Progressive good idea wanders by. But the Internet changed everything. The “comments” section below the individual articles has revolutionized the concept of the “letter to the editor,” since they are no longer constrained by space or time.
It is amazing. I got lost in the hundreds of responses to columnist Gail Collins skewering of Senator Cruz, who happens to think that Global Whatever It Is is a function of the way a complex climatic system-of-systems operates than a topic to be addressed by the Congress or the EPA.
I know, I know. I believe in climate change. That is what it does. The second a real hockey stick shows up I will pay attention to it- but Michael Man and more recently Oregon State’s Shaun Marcott- are shoddy science projects that mixed apples and oranges in the interest of driving public policy. A massive carbon tax could cost us a working energy infrastructure, and on the whole, I prefer warmth to cold.
The utterances of my fellow citizens are most instructive. We are all freaking nuts, and are increasingly cut loose from the basic social contract that served us pretty well in good times and bad. The 24-oz beverage tempest was fun.
Less fun was Hizzoner Bloomberg’s multi-million dollar campaign to run ads attacking elected officials in other states who have the temerity to think they represent their constituents, not his.
Don’t worry- I am not going to go off on that this morning. My position on the matter is clear. The High Court ruled in DC vs Heller that the Second Amendment means what it says. That suggests to me that the only reasonable course of change is to draft a Constitutional amendment and get on with it.
Of course, the more efficient manner of securing change is to ignore the contract between citizen and state. Which is why the arguments before the SCOTUS this week were heartening. It seemed like a circus downtown, with concerned citizens on both sides of the issue queued up for a week to get seats, or just crowded in front of the building to hold signs supporting their positions.
The first of two days of hearings looked at Prop 8 from California, one of those initiatives that united traditionally progressive minority groups with the religious conservatives to ban Gay marriage. The Justices appeared to favor the State’s right to regulate marriage under the 10th Amendment, among others.
The second day the High Court appeared skeptical of the ability of Congress to direct the several states with the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I am OK with both days, and the fact the basic component of our social contract actually was relevant to the discussion of a modern and evolving social phenomenon.
The case in point on DOMUS was the expropriation of more than $360K in death taxes from a lesbian’s estate who was legally married to another woman in New York- rang clear across whatever sex and gender issues there might be.
As an issue of personal preference, I do not like people who are in my face about changing society, but I equally have no problem with what citizens do in the privacy of their own homes, nor whatever personal and legally-binding shackles they chose to lock upon themselves.
But I don’t know. We seem to be in a sort of pick-and-choose Constitutional world these days.
Poor Senator Cruz, who dared to challenge Diane the Clueless on the import of what she proposed to do to the Second Amendment, and what her reaction would have been if she was tinkering with individual bits of the First and Fourth Amendments. The high dudgeon of her response was as priceless as it was pathetic, since she did not acknowledge that there actually was a relevant point to the question.
But back to the immediate question of Same Sex Marriage: I support it. I also support the right of the individual states to regulate what they consider marriage to be, based on the 10th amendment, which holds (or used to) that powers not specifically ceded to the Federals are reserved to the States and the People, respectively.
Hell, I have to be consistent on this. I support heavily armed married Same Sex Couples, exercising their right to Free Speech as loud as they want, and certain in the expectation that they are entitled to due process under law with no drone strikes. And no British troops billeted in their homes, for that matter, regardless of how well decorated they might be.
This stuff means something, but I am only mildly pleased that the provisions of the Constitution are actually being discussed this week. Here is a bold prediction: I think Prop 8 will stand, and I think DOMUS will be declared unconstitutional.
I also think California will change its laws in time, but it ought to be on Pacific Standard Time, not EST.
I think the Congress has no business telling all the states what they must do on matters of personal liberty.
I guess we will see. Outside the narrow confines of the High Court, it seems that everything else is becoming either optional or mandatory, and I have a hard time telling which is which.
(Where same sex couples can marry, partner, or cower in these United States. Chart courtesy Talking Point Memo Media).
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche