I am going to add this now, but as you can tell I wrote this last fall, but wrongly posted it as a comment not as a post. Hope it can still start a debate!!
I believe we had our first real Constitutional moment during Wednesday’s final Presidental debate. In one of the final questions of the night Bob Schieffer, asked both candidates,”Could either of you ever nominate someone to the Supreme Court who disagrees with you on Roe V Wade?”
McCain answers: “I thought it was a bad decision. I think there were a lot of decisions that were bad. I think that decisions should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist”
But someone should have told McCain thats not federalism, thats devolution. The devaluing of the national structure in order for the oppresive majority to legally occur. And that his view in this case is actually antifederal, McCain believes that states should be able to vote the way they want so the majority of the individual states, can overrule rghts that all Americans agree are found in the Constitution.( the blue box is more important then the purple box)
Obama answered the question in this manner “And I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.”
Now we have a true federalist answer. That the majority cannot be oppresive to the supermajority. That our government is designed not to support the majority, but guarantee the rights of the supermajority. That Purple is greater then the blue box.
I am glad that we finally had 3 minutes out of three hours, where there was at least an attempt to actually deal with the governing document of this country.
From the punditry it would appear Sotomayor is repeatedly directing Senators to revisit the U.S. Constitution. We, of course, haven’t seen this ourselves since we’ve been busy with the National Academy!
I don’t remember this moment you point to in the presidential debates. It’s equally possible I was bored with them at this point or that I was outside the building that night supporting my candidate. This is a question that at least threatens to reveal something about each candidate’s conception of constitutional order. I’d still like to see a more direct conversation of that question since the cloak of Roe v. Wade allows both candidates to utilize vagueness and code words to appease their base while saying as little as possible. I’m afraid the audience simply looks for a match to their own code words without considering any conception of a constitutional perspective. I’d like to see candidate’s for office approach this kind of question head on!