Amicus Brief from Finnis and George for Dobbs

Very important amicus brief from John Finnis and @McCormickProf in SCOTUS’s Dobbs case: “Prohibitions of elective abortions are constitutionally obligatory because unborn children are persons within the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment” https://t.co/5gdyFd92wg

— Josh Craddock (@joshjcraddock) July 29, 2021

Finnis Responds to Whelan

John Finnis clarifies his argument that abortion is unconstitutional in response to Ed Whelan’s objections. https://t.co/1s3HRPx5ki

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) March 30, 2021

Because pro-life will win through the courts!

Defenders of life should turn to the Fourteenth Amendment in their next legal battles.https://t.co/kfbzZnMiW2

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) January 12, 2021

The Abbeville Institute: Killing the Incorporation Doctrine By Ryan Walters

Items of Interest, 3 October 2011

Metropolitan Hilarion meets with Pope Benedict XVI

Transition: BBC2′s ‘Town’ programme about Totnes now online!


Shifting the Suburban Paradigm by Allison Arieff

Three strikes and you are out? - commentary [on Daniel Yergin's latest]
by Jeffrey J. Brown (EB)

Mark Mitchell, On Power (the subject of the post - On Power: The Natural History of its Growth by Bertrand de Jouvenel)

MARSHALL AUERBACK, Are Trade Deficits Really That Bad?

Has he looked at the problem of unmployment in connection to the supply of cheap energy and its displacement of human energy?

The new recession by Barath Raghavan (EB)

The real recession never ended
Anthony Mirhaydari, MSN Money

We're well into a recovery, so why does it still feel so bleak? Here's why: The crunch we’re in is rooted in stagnant paychecks and payrolls, and it’s more than a decade old.

Why an understanding of money creation is essential to financial reform by Josh Ryan-Collins

Redesigning business by Justin Ritchie (EB)

VIJAY PRASHAD, De-Colonize Wall Street

99% Wrong by Jim Goad

Jeffrey Polet, Plutonomics (he links to this article in Atlantic: "Can the Middle Class Be Saved?"

Reflections of a Questioner: The Palmetto Freedom Forum Revisited by Robert P. George

The importance of the Fourteenth Amendment for Robert George.

Fr. Z: Video interview with the Secretary of the Pont. Comm. “Ecclesia Dei”. Link to the video.



PATRICK COCKBURN, The Deadly Costs of Muslim Sectarianism

Yang Lan: The generation that's remaking China

"Conservative" Robert George?

Governor Perry, the 10th Amendment, and the 14th

“It is important for Governor Perry and for all Americans to recognize the responsibility of the national government under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment to ensure that the guarantees of Section 1 of that Amendment are honored by all 50 states. Those guarantees include the following: ‘nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ As a matter of indisputable scientific fact, the child in the womb is a living human being. As a matter of moral truth, deeply embedded in our legal and constitutional traditions, all human beings are persons. Thus, by the clearest logical implication, the national government is empowered and obligated by our Constitution to ensure that unborn human persons are equally protected in their most fundamental right---the right to life. Because this is an expressly delegated power, there is no 10th Amendment basis for denying or relieving the national government of its responsibilities, along with the states, to protect the child in the womb.”

PCR, The Nazification of the United States

The Nazification of the United States
Death of the First Amendment


He references Chuck Norris's "Obama's U.S. Assassination Program?" (parts 1 and 2)


More from Counterpunch: Julia Nissen, Birthright Citizenship, "Anchor Babies" and the 14th Amendment

NPR: The Debate Over 'Anchor Babies' And Citizenship

audio and transcript

More on the Prop 8 ruling

Gregory K. Laughlin, On Prop 8 Court Decision
Austin Bramwell, You Call This Equality?
Edward Feser, Some thoughts on the Prop 8 decision
The Thinking Housewife, The Liberal Judge: A Contradiction in Terms and Marriage and Civil Resistance
NOM: National Organization for Marriage Decries Federal Court Decision Invalidating Proposition 8; Calls on the Supreme Court and Congress to Protect Americans' Right to Vote for Marriage
NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR MARRIAGE RELEASES STATEMENT BY JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE, PRESIDENT OF THE RUTH INSTITUTE

Some posts at Rebellion:
The 14th strikes again! (cross-posted at Rebellion)
A little background on the judge who legalized same-sex marriage
California and conservatives

Arizona’s Next Immigration Battle
By Russell Pearce

It could be over the 14th Amendment and “birthright citizenship,” says the senator who introduced the Grand Canyon State’s controversial enforcement law.

(via Daniel McCarthy)

Jack Hunter, RE: Gunning Down the Constitution—Kevin Gutzman Defends

The 2nd Amendment And The States - With Dr. Kevin Gutzman

Mike: So Judge Napolitano says that the Second Amendment applies to all the cities and all the states and all the municipalities in the United States. And you, when we lost your cell phone connection, you were explaining that you had reviewed his book “We the Sheeple” or something to that effect for The American Conservative magazine, and then we lost you.

Dr. Kevin Gutzman: Right. Well, his book was called “A Nation of Sheep.” And essentially it was a book I could endorse about 95 percent. The one shortcoming was that he has this idea that all of your rights are based on natural law or that they are somehow suddenly the result of philosophical speculation. And so as we heard in the sound bite you played, if we have a right to self-defense, then that must be a right to keep and bear arms, which means you have a right to own a weapon that you might use in your own defense, and therefore no government in the United States can contravene this right.

Well, if he were right about the origin of your rights, that might be a reasonable way to get to that conclusion. The problem is that your right to keep and bear arms, like the other rights in the federal Constitution, is actually a historic right, not a philosophical one. It’s based on people’s experience as English subjects before American independence, where they had a right to keep and bear arms. And that right to keep and bear arms had certain contours. Now, when the Bill of Rights, when the federal Bill of Rights was adopted, it was intended entirely to reserve control over these questions to the state governments. That is the reason why we had a federal Bill of Rights was further to clarify the limits on federal authority.

The Problem with the Supreme Court Conservatives
by Gregory J. Sullivan

An Anti-Incorporation Decision

by Kevin R. C. Gutzman on June 22, 2009

I lamented here that the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, __ U.S. __, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637 (2008), seemed about to be “incorporated” into the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause—that is, enforced against the states. Since then, however, comes news that a New Jersey appellate court has now found the Second Circuit’s decision not to “incorporate” more persuasive. Mayhap sanity will reign.

Maybe, on the other hand, the Supreme Court will have to take up the issue. It generally dislikes conflict among circuits, as has now developed between the Second and Ninth. That would give some enterprising originalist an opportunity to level a blast at the Incorporation Doctrine generally. (It would also provide phony “originalist” Antonin Scalia an opportunity to explain that he doesn’t want to refight the incorporation battle.)

From his previous post:

James Madison endeavored in the First Congress to include in Congress’s proposed bill of rights an amendment providing for federal judicial oversight of states’ behavior in respect to certain rights. His effort was unavailing. Thus, when “originalist” Antonin Scalia announced that the First Amendment establishes a right to burn a flag enforceable by federal courts against state authorities, he showed exactly how “originalist” he really is.

Corporate Frankensteins, by Ralph Nader

Over the following two hundred years, these ever larger corporations and their attorneys have been driving relentlessly, dynamically to erect systems of privileges and immunities that give the corporations themselves limited liability.

Their first big move was to take the chartering authority from the state legislature and place it inside an executive agency where chartering became automatic, shorn of the conditions the lawmakers once imposed.

Once chartering became automatic, perpetual and open-ended, corporate lawyers moved to have the courts – not the legislatures – turn corporations into “persons” for purposes of constitutional rights.

Their big breakthrough came with the Santa Clara case in 1886 when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed its summary headnotes to declare that the railroad in the case was a “person” for purposes of the 14th amendment. Through elaborations in later Supreme Court decisions, that meant that companies like Aetna, General Electric, Exxon and Lockheed had most of the same constitutional rights as real people like you.

Some Thoughts on the Right to Privacy

There is some discussion of libertarianism at the Crunchy Con blog, which refers to this essay by Joe Carter over at Culture11. John Schwenkler also comments.

It seems to me that libertarianism is a form of classical liberalism--how much does it diverge from it? Libertarianism provides limits on government, and some basis for those limits, epistemological (some sort of skepticism or agnosticism about the human good) and ethical (respect for freedom or rights). The question is whether that basis is legitimate and acceptable in itself, or if it is an unreasonable imposition.

I was thinking a little bit about the right to privacy tonight. Some have appealed to a supposed 'right to privacy' in order to strike down laws making certain behaviors illegal and so on. It seems to me that the permitting of some actions (or the imposition of certain restraints on law and government authority) can have a different and valid justification in law. For those who believe in a right to privacy, we should ask: Does the right to privacy rely upon a distinction between private and public spheres? Is it defined only by the rights it engenders, or the actions it protects or justifies? How is it distinguished from subsidiarity (or some other principle) or the protection of a proper individual autonomy (which again, can be defined through the possession of other rights)?

As for depriving one of liberty without due process--apparently this has been understood as being applicable to both punishment and legislation. (It would seem that the 14th Amendment originally written to cover both.) What sort of legal philosophy is underpinning the 14th Amendment?

The DC gun ban

Ron Paul offers his view on the ruling by the Federal appeals court

That this is the right decision would seem to follow from a certain understanding of the Constitution.

Still, Mike Tuggle offers a different understanding:

The most obvious result of this ruling is that the Federal government can overthrow any State or local law. Worse, the constituency that accepts this view, gun owners, is being coopted into supporting Federal supremacy, and gunowners are on the whole conservative. Therefore, this case will lead a sizable number of activists who would normally support limited government to buy into the notion that the Federal government has no such limits. This can only lead to more Federal usurpation.

Then there’e the subversive doctrine that the Bill of Rights is a comprehensive guarantee of individual rights. This is also a perversion of the original intent of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights was designed to draw a definite boundary of what the Federal government is empowered to do. That’s why the Tenth Amendment was added to make it crystal-clear that the Federal government can legally exercise only those powers delegated to Congress by the sovereign States.

Does an individual have the right to own a gun? Absolutely. It’s a traditional right that goes back to Britain. North Carolina’s Constitution, for example, makes the assertion much more clearly than the mangled Second Amendment. Article I, Section 30 guarantees “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Our rights do not come from the Federal Constitution. The Bill of Rights was not designed to protect individual rights. To argue otherwise only cripples the struggle to restore the rights that have been taken from us. The alleged passage of the 14th amendment, like the other Reconstruction Acts, was imposed on the people at gunpoint, and the Federal Supreme Court gradually worked what came to be called the Incorporation Doctrine to apply the Bill of Rights to the States. But like any other use of force, it does not make valid law.

It’s ironic that many of the same activists who rightfully dissent at the assertion that the Constitution does not grant the right of secession will accept the notion that the right to bear arms is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. It’s nothing but a snare and a delusion.

Ok, of course he relies upon rights talk, and I will too, as I think it is useful and there is a place for it, though I am still investigating the basis for suchy [subjective active] rights. (Review of Rights Talk at Brothers Judd.)

The question is whether the right to bear arms is a natural "right" or a legal "right." I would hold that if there is a natural right to self-defense, then the right to bear arms is a conclusion drawn from that, and holds the same force as a natural right. It is a natural right, or at the very least a right derived from a natural right (if one wants to makes a distinction between what is self-evident and what is deduced and give different names to "natural" rights accordingly).

So how would Mr. Tuggle respond to Dr. Paul on this point? What should have been done instead with regard to the DC law?