From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"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.ht
m
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.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5