{"id":29943,"date":"2016-05-20T01:00:37","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T05:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29943"},"modified":"2016-05-10T09:35:04","modified_gmt":"2016-05-10T13:35:04","slug":"qotd-the-law-and-the-us-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/05\/20\/qotd-the-law-and-the-us-constitution\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The law and the US constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle \u2014 a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.<\/p>\n<p>It is the aim of the Bill of Rights, if it has any remaining aim at all, to curb such prehensile gentry. Its function is to set a limitation upon their power to harry and oppress us to their own private profit. The Fathers, in framing it, did not have powerful minorities in mind; what they sought to hobble was simply the majority. But that is a detail. The important thing is that the Bill of Rights sets forth, in the plainest of plain language, the limits beyond which even legislatures may not go. The Supreme Court, in <em>Marbury v. Madison<\/em>, decided that it was bound to execute that intent, and for a hundred years that doctrine remained the corner-stone of American constitutional law.<\/p>\n<p>H.L. Mencken, <em>The American Mercury<\/em>, 1930-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle \u2014 a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,53,41,13],"tags":[715,591,217,752],"class_list":["post-29943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-constitution","tag-hlmencken","tag-rights","tag-supremecourt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7MX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29943"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34764,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29943\/revisions\/34764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}