Rand Paul

sturg33 said:
How about a garage sale?
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I'm no lawyer, so I'm not exactly sure how active of an open store you have to be running to be subject to those rules. But it's pretty distant from the scenario you originally proposed, which was a guy just walking up to your door and asking to come in.
 
sturg33 said:
I believe it was unconstitutional because of the restrictions it put on private business owners. it gave the federal government power over the hiring and service offered of employers.

I don't know where the harm was worse, and frankly I don't care. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the Federal government can force a private business owner to serve someone, or to hire someone. It infringes on someone's right to be able run his/her business the way they see fit.
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If that right appears in Ron Paul's copy of the constitution, I can see why he's so worked up about it.

Maybe you and he agree that the commerce clause begins and ends with Madison's (apparent, extra-constitutional) view. That doesn't change the fact that it's been interpreted more expansively over time. That it doesn't conform to Ron Paul's interpretation of the intent of a fractious group of politicians doesn't make it unconstitutional.
 
bravesnumberone said:
Since this thread has already gone to ****....

Who wrote the newsletters? Robert Byrd?
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Well, we've hit the Byrd threshold.

Instead of shining light on unapologetic or unreconstructed racists, we're pointing at racists who are apologetic and reconstructed . . . to say nothing of dead.
 
Metaphysicist said:
Even in your incredibly mundane example, the aftershock of your "helpful" racism is evident. The average joe black guy ends up on worse team, since the other team gets a better player at the same time. Additionally, the average joe black is saddled with subtle resentment ("I regret the decision") that he has no control over.

Now imagine if this was something that actually mattered.
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This.
 
50PoundHead said:
It's important to note that while the Declaration of Independence is not a governing document, Jefferson changed Locke's reference to "property" to "pursuit of happiness." I don't know if that solves anything here, but I've always found that interesting.
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This is a great point.
 
sturg33 said:
The framers of the Constitution intended
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So nobody can ever know why a business-person does something – whether their motivations for discrimination, say, are racially-predicated or not – but Ron Paul knows precisely what tens of two-hundred-year-dead men intended when they arbitrated a complex general legal framework for a fledgling nation-state? Is it that only Ron Paul gets to use reasoning and deduction to form conclusions about things he cannot know definitively and absolutely, or just that he runs a mean séance and spoke directly with the Constitution's authorial spectres?

This is one of the main reasons why I've never been able abide the Scalia mode of Constitutional interpretation: not because of some inane "living/dead document" distinction, but because it's suffused with that Straussian fallacy that there is some sort of "literal" correspondence which obviates the need for interpretation. Scalia is interpreting the document just as any other Justice does, he's simply hubristic enough to believe he isn't.
 
jpx7 said:
So nobody can ever know why a business-person does something – whether their motivations for discrimination, say, are racially-predicated or not – but Ron Paul knows precisely what tens of two-hundred-year-dead men intended when they arbitrated a general legal framework for a fledgling nation-state? Is it that only Ron Paul gets to use reasoning and deduction to form conclusions about things he cannot know definitively and absolutely, or just that he runs a mean séance and spoke directly with the Constitutions authorial spectres?

This is one of the main reasons why I've never been able abide the Scalia mode of Constitutional interpretation: not because of some inane "living/dead document" distinction, but because it's suffused with that Straussian fallacy that there is some sort of "literal" correspondence which obviates the need for interpretation. Scalia is interpreting the document just as any other Justice does, he's simply hubristic enough to believe he isn't.
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mordor__zpsb1bebb6c.jpg
 
Julio3000 said:
Well, we've hit the Byrd threshold.

Instead of shining light on unapologetic or unreconstructed racists, we're pointing at racists who are apologetic and reconstructed . . . to say nothing of dead.
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Still waiting to hear what Rand said. Not that I like defending him, but it's kind of like pointing a finger at Obama for some of the unsavory people he's had close working relationships with.
 
bravesnumberone said:
Still waiting to hear what Rand said. Not that I like defending him, but it's kind of like pointing a finger at Obama for some of the unsavory people he's had close working relationships with.
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Hey, don't blame that on Obama. He moved to northwest Hyde Park first; I used to live closer to the lake.
 
In in the interest of fairness – not to mention the chance to highlight a critical issue for the US, about which I'm pretty passionate – three cheers for Rand Paul on this point:

"If I told you that one out of three African-American males is [prohibited] by law from voting, you might think I was talking about Jim Crow, 50 years ago. Yet today a third of African-American males are still prevented from voting because of the war on drugs. The war on drugs has disproportionately affected young black males. The ACLU reports that blacks are four to five times more likely to be convicted for drug possession, although surveys indicate that blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate. The majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, but three-fourths of the people in prison for drug offenses are African American or Latino."

[...]

Paul said the Justice Safety Valve Act, which he and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced last March, would restore some of the discretion that mandatory minimums took from judges. [...] So while it is true that Paul’s bill would not repeal mandatory minimums, it would effectively make them nonmandatory.

[...]

In addition to the injustice of mandatory minimums, Paul mentioned their impact on the size of our prison system:

"Since mandatory sentencing began, America’s prison population has exploded, quadrupled. America now jails a higher percentage of citizens than any other country in the world, at the staggering cost of $80 billion a year."
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That doesn't sound like a racist to me...

Paul is on point, IMO. I don't see who benefits from minimum sentencing for non-violent drug offenses.
 
Agree entirely. Glad to see this getting attention.

Now, maybe he should quit writing books with neo-confederate secessionist types.
 
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