Texas Governor Unveils Plan To Repeal The 20th Century

[applegrove]

Texas Governor Unveils Plan To Repeal The 20th Century

by Ian Millhiser at the Huffington Post

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/01/11/3737857/texas-governor-would-make-federal-anti-lynching-laws-unconstitutional/

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) proposed a series of constitutional amendments on Friday that would so fundamentally alter our founding document that it would be akin to throwing out the system of government established by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and replacing it with something entirely different. The amendments are a hodgepodge of efforts to restore constitutional interpretations that briefly gained traction beginning in the Gilded Age, proposals to implement longtime Republican fantasies, and ideas drawn from the fringes of talk radio and the legal academy. Though Abbott’s new constitution would maintain the federal government’s current division between executive, legislative and judicial branches, the powers of all three branches would be diminished so significantly that the new system of government would be barely recognizable to students of our current system.

Indeed, Abbott would place restrictions on the federal government that are so severe, both national child labor laws and anti-lynching laws would be unconstitutional under his proposals.

Repealing The Twentieth Century

Abbott’s amendments are a hodgepodge of irrelevancies, curiosities and apparent efforts to return America to the golden years of the Hoover administration. One proposal is to “restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution,” a proposed amendment that’s already in the Constitution as the Tenth Amendment (although Abbott clearly disagrees with how many of Congress’s powers have been interpreted). Another amendment would “require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law,” which is a somewhat surprising choice for the governor of a state that is so eager to sue the federal government to halt policies it disagrees with.

Abbott’s first proposed amendment, however, indicates just how drastically he would like to shrink the role of the federal government. That one seeks to “prohibit congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one state.”




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[randys1]

1. so, folks like him getting to the WH would be bad? Crossing the streams, bad, got it.

[longship]

2. No, crossing the streams, good!

Either that, or we're gonna need a bigger boat.

(Too many cultural analogies?)

[smirkymonkey]

3. I would have sworn this was an Onion headline.

Amazing that we can no longer tell the difference these days. Sad.

[hobbit709]

4. Governor Abutt makes Perry look smart and George look downright intelligent.