Fredd

As VIPR's mission creeps to trains, subways and music festivals, perhaps the topic can be expanded to discussing the extent to which citizens may live their lives without encountering check points, searches, and demands for i.d."

"If you don't like it," er, what alternatives will remain?

RichardKenner

Yes, but that's just in the context of due process! The fundamental difference between a privilege and a right is that if something is a privilege, the government can prevent you from doing that thing by due process (but only by due process); if it's a right then it can't prevent you from doing it even by due process.

WillCAD

I've never heard of a permit requirement for holding a wedding, funeral, birthday party, family reunion, religious service, or Thanksgiving dinner.

You need a permit to have a gathering or event on public property. You need a permit to have a gathering or event for commercial purposes. But private gatherings, on private property? Not that I've ever heard of.

When has the government ever told anyone that they need a permit, and required any sort of government oversight, for a backyard BBQ?

Fredd

I'm on your side but have to point out zoning laws.

RichardKenner

Well, you don't need permit for that, but if you're in PA, you'd better be sure you haven't forgotten the flag. (PA Penal Code Section 2101).

More seriously, normally the freedom of assembly is meant to imply the freedom to protest and you normally do need a permit for that.

Boggie Dog

We are well down the slope.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/chri...bible-studies/

InkUnderNails

Might as well quote it:

The constitution refers to three separate and distinct groups: The People, the States and the United States. If you do not understand the difference, and what each is, then you are not ready to discuss this. (Refer to the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 10th Amendments for an example of the use of "The People." The 10th in particular shows the clear distinction between the three and that the three are considered separate entities.)

So, yes, Congress has within its enumerated powers the ability to "regulate Commerce ....among the several States...."

Do you know what this means and why it is in the constitution? Did you notice that the regulation of "The People" is specifically omitted from the commerce clause? If you are going to use the commerce clause to justify regulation of travel, find for me the part of the clause that specifically refers to the fact that the clause is intended to enumerate a power to regulate the people. It is an enumerated power to regulate the commerce among the states. And that that does not mean the commerce of the people in the states. It means among the states.

I am done.

SWCPHX

What?

You asked under what authority Congress has to regulate travel, the answer is the Commerce Clause. Unfortunately, regulating any industry often involves regulating the people within that industry, what's confusing about that? Please tell me how you regulate interstate commerce without regulating people?

The Commerce Clause (through judicial rulings) has been used by Congress to stick their fingers in almost everything. I understand that you don't agree with that, but the courts don't hold your opinion.

InkUnderNails

One more try.

The commerce clause does not give the Congress an enumerated power to regulate the travel of the people. They have used that as an excuse to do so, but congress does not grant itself enumerated powers. Those powers were granted by the states and limited to 18 specific and limited enumerated powers.

The commerce clause only regulates the commerce between the states. Not the people. Not the people in the states. Not industry in the states. BETWEEN THE STATES. And you regulate commerce between the states by establishing that states are not permitted to set rules of interstate commerce and the states released that specific enumerated power to congress. The commerce clause allows regulation of how states may trade with each other. For example, Tennessee can not unilaterally charge a tariff for goods crossing over from Kentucky. That power is enumerated to Congress.

The people are not the states and the states are not its people. They are recognized as different entities with different rights and different powers as stated and enumerated in the Constitution.

If you do not understand the difference in The People and The States, and are unwilling to see that there is a difference, there is no hope in discussing this further.

And, a court ruling does not make a law constitutional. It only makes it legal. It becomes the rule of men, not the rule of law. My position is to stand for the Constitution as that is what makes us a nation with the rule of law.

Just because they have made it that way, and that it has been that way for a while, does not make it right or constitutional.

[Ignore is my friend.]

joelfreak

Try to read the facts before you believe hype pushed by people who want that to be the story:
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/val...tting_crim.php

RichardKenner

While that is certainly a valid interpretation and indeed may well have been what was intended by that clause, no modern court has interpreted it in that way. The ACA decision contains a very long discussion of the current theory of the Commerce Clause.

InkUnderNails

Thank you.

That is what I have been trying to say and feel like I have be talking to a brick wall. What we have, and what we must live with, are interpretations of the constitution that have become far removed from the original intentions of what was written. We no longer live under the rule of law. We live under the rule of men that say whatever they want the law to be and then feign adherence to a constitution that they do whatever they can to ignore.

As we can never know how the next judge will rule, we can never know what the law will be, only what it happens to be today. Even that can be based on contradictory opinions.

Boggie Dog

By this definition breathing is a privilege.

nachtnebel

There is this fundamental disconnect between people who see the Constitution from perspective of recent/current court rulings, and those of us who look at what the actual words of the Constitution say. (Eg, the disagreement between InkUnderNails and SWCPHX.) Many rulings/interpretations since FDR's time support the growing dominance of the federal system over states and individuals. For example, the word "regulate" before the 1930's was understood to mean "make regular" ie, encourage the free flow of commerce between states. Since the 1930's, "regulate" has increasingly been understood to mean "dominate".

There is no need to see the Constitution as merely a legal document, under which we relinquish all interpretation to the legal priesthood. In fact, when that priesthood has arrived at a point where the plain and clear text of the Constitution is denied (as in the case of TSA testicle and breast carresses without cause wrt the 4th Amendment), it is fatal for the people to continue abdicating their judgement. The Constitution is a political document that the people should be using to measure the entire federal system, including the courts. The federal court system simply has to be regarded as simply one more political party with an interest in outcomes, and not as an impartial arbiter.

There is a growing disconnect between what SCOTUS says the Constitution means in certain key particulars, and what citizens think it says and their expectations.

RichardKenner

Unfortunately, the Constitution was written at a time when life is very different than it is now and the sorts of decisions that have to be made now about what's permitted and not permitted are things that couldn't even have been envisioned back in those days. That was a time when communication was an extremely slow phenomenon, when it could take weeks or months to communicate a message across the country and many of the provisions and understandings in were based on those sorts of considerations. Now that same message takes small fractions of a second.

"Freedom of the Press" means one thing when you're talking about the only form of media being printing presses and quite something else when anybody can put what they want on the Internet at any time. Assault rifles and machine guns didn't exist when the "right to bear arms" was codified.

I don't think you can try to appeal to the literal words of the Constitution unless you're asking a question that would have been applicable in the era when they were written. And almost none of the questions we currently ask are in that category.