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Radley Balko uncovered this and posted the text on his blog. It's from the Dallas Morning News, October 20, 1999, while he was campaigning for President:
Gov. George Bush said he backs a state's right to decide whether to allow medical use of marijuana, a position that puts him sharply at odds with…
I have not yet addressed the Supreme Court's ruling in Hudson v Michigan, where the court essentially reversed itself on the question of no-knock warrants. It's a very odd decision in light of their previous rulings, particularly Wilson v Arkansas, which established that the requirement that police…
The notion of limited government took another enormous body blow today with the Supreme Court's astonishingly wrongheaded decision in the Kelo case (see the text of the decision here). It was 5-4, with the 4 most conservative justices - Rehnquist, Scalia, O'Connor and Thomas - dissenting. There is…
And here is why, despite Prof. Zywicki's behavior, I continue to read Volokh every day. For legal scholars like Randy Barnett and the kind of information that can be gotten only from blogs like that. Barnett writes that the case of Gonzales v Raich, last year's infamous medical marijuana ruling, is…
Hm. Balko says that "a faction of the framers, let by James Madison, were fearful that enumerating a list of rights would lead some, generations later, to infer that we are only entitled to those rights enumerated.... So to appease Madison, the framers added the Ninth Amendment...." Actually, the Ninth Amendment was Madison's idea. He wrote it and defended it on the House floor. Although he shared the concern about a Bill of Rights, I would say that it was Hamilton or James Wilson who "led" the aforementioned faction....
I agree with Sandefur here. Madison did offer some initial opposition to the idea, but it didn't last long. He conceived of the 9th amendment precisely to overcome the objections of Hamilton and others and to insure that no one would later think that just because a right isn't specifically stated it was open season for the government to regulate. Unfortunately, despite the clear historical record in this regard, many conservatives today have taken exactly the position that they made clear was incorrect.
I'm having a spirited conversation with a conservative on this subject here.
It seems that the right and the left like the idea of a living constitution.
Words and history have no meaning. It is all Newspeak and memory holes.
"Real Constitutionalist throw out what ever part of the document they don't like. Which is of course not legislating from the bench. Its just fixing what is wrong."
I love that comment, and I think you've got it right.