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There is all that. Although it seems baked into the post is the unsaid premise that the problem is the laws were crafted poorly/maliciously. But, IMHO, the problem is all the enforcement agencies have been captured by neoliberals. And so there simply is no law that they won't interpret in the manner that most suits their objectives. I mean, already with the constitution, you'd think "shall not be infringed" is clear as day. But to a neoliberal lawyer, or a judge that decides "The second amendment does not exist in my courtroom", it's all very nuanced.
So I suppose my opinion is that no law can possibly be crafted to prevent these enforcement agencies from just doing whatever they wanted to do anyways. As such, if you really want to curtail their behavior, you must abolish them.
But I'd be willing to settle for abolishing the undemocratic regime where unaccountable agencies get to make up whatever regulations they want without any oversight from congress, and seeing how things go from there first. A guy can hope.
Well there are other words in the amendment. Words like 'bear arms', the meaning of which is pretty clearly up for debate even if you come down on the side of a broad interpretation.
Can you respond to his point about the judge that said it does not exist in her courtroom?
That seems to me the bigger issue.
State criminal courts don't do constitutional debates. He broke NY law. Whether that law is unconstitutional (probably yes) is outside the remit of that court.
So that implies... that challenging the constitutionality of the state law can still happen, but needs to be pushed through the court hierarchy to the federal courts before that can happen?
Gosh. What a system...
It's not true at all.
Could you elaborate?
To clarify a little more than supremacy, trial courts are triers of fact: did the accused do the thing the state says they did, and is that a violation of what the law says. They do not evaluate the validity of the laws.
If your belief is that the law itself is invalid then you have to make that case at the appellate courts.
I always wonder if the US wouldn't benefit from a similar mechanism to the French QPC that gives persons a constitutional right to directly ask the high court if a promulgated law that is involved in their judicial proceedings is constitutional or not.
Would save everybody a lot of time and prevents politicians from exploiting the loophole of constantly passing unconstitutional laws faster than they can get taken down.
Sure it would require a constitutional amendment, but it's a sufficiently procedural and bipartisan idea that you may well get it ratified in less than a century.
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