After Reading the Constition, What Other Goverment Document Should I Read
How to Read the Constitution - and Why
What is the president actually immune to do nether the U.S. Constitution?
It'southward a question that'due south comes upwardly from time to fourth dimension at NPR, and when it does, we've turned to experts such as Kim Wehle, now a law professor and CBS News legal commentator. Now, she's written a book virtually it. It'southward called How to Read the Constitution — and Why.
Wehle says that all the debates around the constitutionality of various Trump administration policies inspired her to write the book. She says she originally had a contract to write a book for an academic audience, but found herself writing for laypeople.
"I call up it's actually important for people to be educated about not but nearly their constitutional rights, which is 1 part of the Constitution, merely the structure — the structure of our regime," Wehle says. "And if nosotros permit the regime to consolidate power in one branch, one human being, one political party, and then our individual rights pause downwards. So it'due south that bulletin that I recollect is ofttimes lost in the day-to-solar day discourse about any that latest tree that's on fire in the wood. I like to focus on the forest."
Interview Highlights
On how reading the Constitution is like reading a poem
I have a poem in the book. And we suspension down the poem and talk about different means of interpreting the verse form, and how your point of view — what yous're trying to reach in reading the poem — might bear upon how you lot read the verse form. And I advise the Constitution is the aforementioned fashion. Every time we see a Supreme Court nominee come on lath, or fifty-fifty in a presidential election, we hear calls for strict reading of the Constitution, judges that aren't going to color outside the lines. And the point — i of the many takeaways from the book — is that the Constitution is rarely blackness and white. In that location are underlying themes, one of which is accountability; nobody's in a higher place the law, nobody is the boss of all the bosses in our authorities. But other than that, rarely, rarely can we have a plain-reading, obvious interpretation of the Constitution. ...
And I get this with my students a lot. They desire answers. (You know, I teach law students.) And I tell them: If you could Wikipedia the answer to the question, no one'southward going to pay you lot to do your job as a lawyer. It's a lot of gray expanse. These days, a lot of the questions that are beingness posed past this assistants and the current Congress are non answered anywhere in the constabulary; the Supreme Court hasn't addressed these at all. And and then we can hypothesize as to what the proper answer is. We tin can have debates about it. But there really isn't a thumbs upward or thumbs down on a lot of this stuff.
On what the Constitution says about the president'southward duty to execute or enforce laws
I think most people are surprised: The Constitution doesn't say anything about separation of powers, or checks and balances, or even the separation of church and state. Merely the way it's broken downward is, in that location are iii vesting clauses of the Constitution. The legislative branch makes laws; the executive co-operative enforces those laws. That'southward what the Constitution says. That being said, at that place's a lot of squishiness in the Constitution. And this is where nosotros accept to be quite vigilant to make certain that each co-operative doesn't step over likewise far over the lines of what it'southward supposed to do, and that that branch, when it does, gets checked past the other two branches, and ultimately by the voting public. ...
We run into it, I recollect, a lot with migrants at the border, with Trump making the announcement in that location'due south going to exist widespread enforcement of immigration laws. That is a decision, over again, that individual prosecutors leading upward to the president get to make, and the American public can say: Listen, that'southward not what we want our authorities to exercise. And the response would be to, of form, vote a different person into office. But I think the bigger outcome these days has to do with Congress beingness feckless, really, in enforcing its own prerogative of oversight of the executive branch. Nosotros've seen not only under the Trump administration, simply for decades a steady accumulation of power in the presidency. So Congress has to itself be vigilant to ensure that it retains its authority through the public to make certain that we don't have a rex in this country. 'Cause fundamentally, our Founding Fathers and mothers didn't fight and dice in the revolution to make sure there was more than power in the presidency.
On the fragility of the Constitution, or its susceptibility to erosion
Again, the framers of the Constitution understood this, that it'southward man nature to aggregate ability. And that's why we take this three-headed monster of regime; we don't have a unmarried 1. Because the idea is no one's in a higher place the constabulary. If this president crosses a legal purlieus, crosses a norm boundary (a historical norm of beliefs), and there'southward not a consequence, of a sudden, what I say in the book, that tool goes in the president's toolbox for utilization past a future president. It might be a Republican president, information technology might exist a Democratic president; that president's going to accept that much power. And then if y'all're on squad Trump, or if you're on anti-team-Trump, it's sort of irrelevant. You have to say to yourself: How comfortable am I with my worst-example scenario president having this corporeality of ability in his or her toolbox?
If that gives you business organisation, and so I think you're one of the many people who should join me in this concern about the structure of our government sort of falling autonomously right now and moving, slipping into something that is certainly not consistent with how this land was founded, which is minor authorities, not large authorities; individual people accept the power. Government ability has to be constrained. It's not a political thing; it's not blue and red. It's right and incorrect at this point, and correct and wrong in terms of protecting freedoms for our children and our grandchildren.
Victoria Whitley-Berry and Eric McDaniel produced and edited this interview for circulate. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/25/735533665/a-lot-of-gray-area-a-legal-expert-explains-how-to-read-the-constitution
0 Response to "After Reading the Constition, What Other Goverment Document Should I Read"
Publicar un comentario