Who would pick the BEST Supreme Court Justices? Bernie Or Hill ?

[anigbrowl]

37. Get real.

Apparently my point about how and why Courts construe things as they do sailed over your head, as did my observations that corporate personhood can be dated back to the Roman empire. I know you wish they did things differently, but they don't.

Had the original authors seen the history from that amendment onward, you could be damn sure that they would have put the term "natural" in front of the used and abused ambiguous "person" reference in that amendment.

No, that's what you think they should have done. And while you are fully entitled to this opinion, and I agree with you about the problems that have resulted, you don't have the time machine and the crystal ball that would enable you to make decisive statements about what the authors of the amendment were really thinking and why they didn't put their real ideas down in paper form, even though they were the political and legal elite of their day. Again, I agree with your policy idea that corporate rights would be much better handled legislatively, but then your focus should be on pushing a constitutional amendment for that, not demanding that courts interpret the Constitution as if it had been written differently.

That's interesting that Thom Hartmann has written a book about it, but he is neither a historian nor a lawyer. When it comes to matters of constitutional interpretation, I prefer to rely on my legal casebooks. And they tell me over and over again that wishing missing words into the Constitution doesn't win cases. I'd like to see Citizens United overturned too but this 14th amendment missing word argument will not be the vehicle.