Mr. Justice Scalia's Constitution

The US Constitution became law of the land when New Hampshire became the 9th State to approve in 1788 by a legislature vote of 57 to 46. Rhode Island made it unanimous in 1790 with a vote of 34 to 32.

The was a large minority of people who yet retained the idea that it was the right of the States to withdraw from this compact when necessary. The first State to set about doing so was Kentucky in 1798, followed by Tennessee, both passing resolutions of potential nullification of the agreement to join into the Union under the law of the Constitution.
Their grievance was the inactivity of the Federal government in securing free and open navigation of the Mississippi all the way through New Orleans. Since the government did soon accomplish this objective, these efforts came to naught.

In 1814, the New England States met at the Hartford Convention in Hartford, Connecticut, due to their own perceived grievances, and soon passed a resolution of nullification:




 Daniel Webster was the hero of Hartford, and this assembly was seemingly the birthplace of the spirit of sectionalism in the country.
Hodgson, in his "The Cradle of the Confederacy" writes:





We shall go no further, but must observe that there are currents flowing from the era of the Founding Fathers - a minority, true, but still a vital part of a democracy - that had a very different view of the Union and the Constitution of that Union.

I ask Mr. Justice Scalia whether we attempt to understand the minds of a few Founding Fathers, or do we add in the minorities, whose debates and discussions were as equally formative of the Constitution as the debates of the select few who have been canonized by our history books?
--

Paradox of Technology and Attitudes

All the benefits of Science and Technology result in nothing if the attitudes of their societies lead to a Politics of Obscurantism.

The Conservatism of our present time is Simplification, just as the Liberalism has become a Complexity which becomes a moral maze wherein people say repeat "I don't know, I don't know" forever.
At the same time, the Simplification of Conservatism makes the hills low and the valleys high, and gives us a moral plateau of indifference. The indifference stems from the fact that we have separated ourselves from the moral quest, and relied upon the past-as-remembered by authority.

What is Simplification?
An example of gross Simplification in thinking is shown in a situation where - confronted with a moral dilemma - someone asks "WWJD?", or "What would Jesus do?"

An example of the opposite method of thinking, which I call "Fractal" - meaning that it tries to deal with the full complexity of a situation as opposed to simplifying it, would in this example consist of asking the question "What would Jesus do?", then doing likewise, then attempting to re-cast one's entire life according to such moral principles, and finally to live one's life as a moral entity rather than a plaything of Matter & Desire.
--

Justice Scalia's Foolishness 2

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/07/justice-scalias-foolishness.html

Is Mr. Justice Scalia correct in treating the Federal Constitution as a holy object, and seek access somehow to the mental events in the minds of those who wrote it?

Does this mean that if a case at law were to come before a court, and that case relates to an amendment to the Constution, do the justices need get into the minds not of the Founding Fathers, but of those men who write the applicable amendment to the Constitution?

And do we need merely and solely to gain access to the mental working of the Framers of the Consitution? Or do we also need to look about in the minds of those legislatures of the several states that voted for it? Are those members of the State Legislatures considered Founding Fathers, or don't they meet the definition of "Founding Father"?
The members of the legislatures were in constant contact with their representatives at the convention tasked with writing the Constitution, and we know their representatives paid attention to their missives... where do these "minds" fit in Justice Scalia's reasoning?

It took more than 3 years to secure the adoption of the Constitution by all 13 States (voted on by the State legislatures) and in several States the margin of victory was exceedingly slim.
New Hampshire was the 9th State to ratify, at which time it became the law of the land: the vote by the New Hampshire legislature was 57 to 46 in favor of the Constitution.

In New Hampshire, were the 57 yea voters of minds similar to those inspired minds of the Founding Fathers, and how do we evaluate the minds of the 46 nay voters? Uninspired? Unimaginative? Anti-Wave-of-the-Future?
Tell, us, Mr. Justice Scalia.

The original document also guaranteed the establishment of slavery; was this an "inspired" bit of legislation... or a bit of haggling at the county fair. It worked, but it hardly reflects a frame of mind we wish to seek out and emulate today.

Let us consider Slavery.
Let us now strive to attain insight into the minds of those men struggling and haggling over Slavery, and who came up with a compromise ensuring Slavery had a place in the country...
... and which led to the famous case of Dred Scott vs. Sanford...
... the outcome of which was a highly probable re-iteration of the mental set that established the Constitution: that slaves belonged to their owners: the Justices under Chief Justice Roger Taney actually did get into the minds of the framers of the Constitution as they haggled in the market of political ideas, and they came down 7 to 2 that Mr. Scott was the property of his owner, a result consistent with the negotiated settlement of the Constitutional framers that was necessary to get the southern States into the Union.

The fiery response to the Dred Scott decision was not based on legal discussions about the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, but rather on the outrage of people totally opposed to slavery... a mind-set which was not equally shared by the Framers of the Constitution. There was no similar large scale resistance to slavery back at the birth of the Constitution, and the subsequent development of anti-slavery ideas accentuated those doubts about slavery which the Founding Fathers committed to paper for the edification of future generations, and decreased those writings which reflected their certitude about the rights of slavery.

... or should we ignore all this and struggle to "get into" the minds of those who wrote the 14th Amendment, outlawing such slavery? Or, again, into the minds of the several State legislatures?

Mr. Justice Scalia would answer that I have attacked a straw man, and his position is much more complex than I have described.  I doubt it. The more complex his position becomes, the more a dubious over-simplification of History it becomes.

Mr. Justice Scalia is a Simplifier, and as such seeks to Abridge the complexity of life.
Mr. Justice Scalia takes the Fire and cools it lukewarm.
--

Tea Party Simplified Viewpoints

The Romney campaign called stimulus for start-up wind energy companies a "boondoggle".
What, then, are the billions in subsidies and tax breaks to Big Oil, now and in the past?

Then,  Richard Mourdock of Indiana running for the Senate frequently compares the present to the time preceding the Civil War. In the Huffington Post:

Just last week, Mourdock compared President Barack Obama's rescue of Chrysler to slavery, saying the deal stiffed creditors -- including Indiana's pension system -- and that it was like the slavery Lincoln opposed because it involved taking from one person and giving to another.

Mourdock joked during his victory speech about how often he brings up Lincoln.

Asked on Capitol Hill Tuesday about his penchant for making historic comparisons that some find objectionable, Mourdock stood by his habit, and elaborated about how he means it.

"I'm a big history buff," Mourdock said. "I just mean it in the sense that polarization -- And in that sense the polarization makes it hard to find compromise. And that's not unlike the incredible polarization that took place during those periods of the 1860s."
The polarization of the 1860s led to the bloodiest war in American history....

I am not sure I follow what is going on in this story, but the nonsense of comparing the present now in any meaningful way to the time preceding the Civil War is stupid. I know that I have done it, but it is a simile that points in other directions and not to any assumed deep similarities to that age.

It is a simplified simile, and should be used to send the mind in other directions and to gather much more detail.

For one thing, I think you would need a "Bleeding Kansas" type skirmish for starts. We may have one yet, but we certainly do not now. Perhaps Mr. Mourdock sees himself as the latter-day John Brown. That's is a name he should keep bringing up, not the name of Lincoln

Yes, perhaps Mr. Mourdock is closer to John Brown.
--