From: "Rich Gauszka" 

While I make no claims of reading Jefferson's mind I would suspect his
motive was that a Constitution shouldn't just be mindlessly memorized and
followed with fundamentalist zeal. I agree his approach could cause a bit
of chaos though 


"Mark"  wrote in message news:4414f75f$1{at}w3....
> "James Madison, Jefferson's contemporary, found comfort in knowing that
> the
> populace would not be thrust into political turmoil every 20 years, and
> noted that the way the Constitution is now structured, it implies an
> acceptance of the status quo unless explicitly changed."
>
> Madison was right. Sheesh, Jefferson wanted to allow changes the
> constitution for each and every generation? I shudder at the thought. The
> amendment process is more than sufficient.  wanting to rely on some clowns in some other country to determine his/her
> ruling continues to be ridiculous>
>
>
> "Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
news:4414eb3b{at}w3....
>>
>> "Gary Britt"  wrote in message
news:4414e2e9$1{at}w3....
>>> One could, but that wouldn't be constitutional.  Evolving thought is
>>> supposed to build a groundswell of support so that amending the
>>> constitution is possible.  Only by amending the constitution can the
>>> citizens express by their votes a new or revised social compact that is
>>> embodied in the constitution.  Only in this manner does this social
>>> compact known as the constitution have the affirmative commitment of the
>>> governed to bind themselves and their posterity to the change.
>>>
>>> Change implemented in any other matter is not constitutionally derived
>>> from the consent of the governed as is required by our founding
>>> documents, and is therefore government deriving its powers by fiat and
>>> dictatorship versus the consent of the governed.
>>>
>>> Gary
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Even the founders had a problem with stagnation
>>
>> http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_newc.html
>> There have been many proposals for substantial change to the
>> Constitution. Thomas Jefferson himself was wary of the power of the dead
>> over the living in the form of an unchanging Constitution. To ensure that
>> each generation have a say in the framework of the government, he
>> proposed that the Constitution, and each one following it, expire after
>> 19 or 20 years. James Madison, Jefferson's contemporary, found comfort in
>> knowing that the populace would not be thrust into political turmoil
>> every 20 years, and noted that the way the Constitution is now
>> structured, it implies an acceptance of the status quo unless explicitly
>> changed.
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I'm not saying to change it on a whim. Judicial review is not new process
>> that just popped up as some would make it out to be. I suspect that one
>> of your ancestors argued against it 200 years ago. 
>>
>> http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_048800_judicialrevi
.htm
>> Exercised by both the state and federal judiciary, judicial review is
>> most identified with the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the Constitution
>> does not expressly provide for judicial review, the Founding Fathers
>> anticipated that the Court would exercise some control over the other
>> branches of government. Chief Justice John Marshall's famous assertion of
>> judicial review in Marbury v. Madison (1803) was not a brash departure
>> but a crystallization of a nascent tradition.
>>
>> The disparity between the Court's claims and its actions attracted little
>> comment until the 1890s, when James Thayer published an article that
>> moved the issue of judicial restraint to the center of constitutional
>> debate. He argued that the Constitution has a range of possible meanings
>> and that the Court should void only those acts of the national government
>> that are beyond the pale of permissible meaning. Whenever it voids an act
>> that is not "clearly mistaken," it is overturning an
interpretation that
>> a coequal branch of government prefers and substituting an interpretation
>> it prefers. Nondeferential review, he concluded, is discretionary
>> lawmaking that usurps the executive and legislative functions.
>>
>> After Thayer, judicial review began to be conceived as a device by which
>> nine unaccountable officials impose their opinions upon the nation. With
>> the rise of pragmatic jurisprudence and legal realism in the early
>> twentieth century, the view that judges make law when they interpret the
>> Constitution became a truism. And the central issue of judicial review
>> has become what, if anything, justifies their doing so. The Court
>> responded by engaging in restrained or active review according to
>> principles first sketched by Justice Harlan Fiske Stone in United States
>> v. Carolene Products Co. (1938). Those principles spurned active review
>> except when necessary to guard freedoms specifically protected by the
>> Bill of Rights, rights considered fundamental to the functioning of the
>> political process, or the rights of "discrete and
insular" minority
>> groups. Under these principles, the Court began in Brown v. Board of
>> Education of Topeka (1954) a course of review that changed the face of
>> American society by enforcing the civil rights of minority groups and the
>> poor and enlarging the civil liberties of all citizens. This course
>> frequently required the judiciary to impose remedial measures that
>> redirected the activities of the states. Indeed, in the "one
person, one
>> vote" decisions that followed Baker v. Carr (1962), the Court remodeled
>> state government itself.
>>
>> These developments provoked controversy, which coalesced around the
>> Court's defense of the unenumerated right of privacy in Griswold v.
>> Connecticut (1965) and its development into the right to an abortion in
>> Roe v. Wade (1973). Because of the controversy, and eight years of
>> conservative Republican appointments, the Court in the mid-1980s reversed
>> its course and began to abandon the Carolene Products model of judicial
>> review. In its place, the Court has claimed to be developing a model of
>> judicial review premised upon judicial restraint. The new Court has said
>> it will defer to the decisions of democratically accountable officials
>> and overturn only those acts that clearly violate specific constitutional
>> text or traditions. Yet the Court's protection of property rights in
>> Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) and its condemnation of a
>> municipal affirmative action plan in City of Richmond v. J. A. Cronson
>> Co. (1989) intimated more active review of some constitutional claims.
>> Thus it is unclear whether the Court's recent rulings portend a triumph
>> of judicial restraint or merely another shift in the focus of judicial
>> activism.
>>
>> Judicial review, then, remains firmly established but subject to
>> limitations. The controversies over judicial review may be interminable
>> because, as Robert McCloskey pointed out, they attempt to resolve
>> America's contradictory commitment to popular sovereignty and judicially
>> enforceable fundamental law.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>

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