undefined | Better HN

0 pointsCWuestefeld12y ago0 comments

plenty of things remain prohibit by the Constitution

The language of your statement reveals the problem (sorry for being deconstructionist...)

There is very little that the Constitution prohibits -- that's not how it's constructed. It's not designed to blacklist certain governmental powers.

Rather, it starts from a perspective where all rights belong to the people, and the government may do nothing. It then whitelists certain powers as the people have decided to vest them with the government. That is, the government can do nothing other than the things the people have enumerated for it in the Constitutions (particularly Article 1 Section 8).

That people think of government power in terms of whether it's prohibited by the Constitution rather than whether it's allowed by the Constitution reveals how far away we've gotten from understanding how it was intended to work.

0 comments

dragonwriter12y ago

> The language of your statement reveals the problem (sorry for being deconstructionist...)

Sure, but not for being wrong.

> There is very little that the Constitution prohibits -- that's not how it's constructed. It's not designed to blacklist certain governmental powers.

There's quite a lot that the Constitution prohibits the government from doing.

> That people think of government power in terms of whether it's prohibited by the Constitution rather than whether it's allowed by the Constitution reveals how far away we've gotten from understanding how it was intended to work.

That people think that there is a difference shows how little people have paid attention to the Bill of Rights, a rather critical piece of the Constitution, which, as part of its whole stack of specific prohibitions, made the two superficially-conflicting approaches you refer to equivalent when everything not explicitly granted to the federal government was explicitly reserved against the federal government (see Amendment 10.)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse