I read this yesterday and thought that it needed to be read more widely…..a loyal friend of IST, Calico Jack, has hit the nail on the head with this post.
Project 2025 and the GOP are working hand in hand to throw out the existing Constitution and rewrote it to favor their archaic ideas.
Convention of States: The GOP’s Plan to Enshrine Project 2025 in the Constitution
Please let us know what you think.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Yes we are still on this…..why? Because the prez has weaponized a personal army within the DHS and it is getting worse and more blatant in its tactics.
But they say because of the shooting deaths in Minneapolis the reform of tactics will be forthcoming.
Will it?
It will begin with the recall of ICE agents…..
In the aftermath of the slayings in Minneapolis of two civilians, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the mass protests that ensued, Trump’s border czar has announced he’s withdrawing 700 ICE agents from the city. Trump himself has also indicated his administration is backing down from its hardline tactics.
A disturbing finding in the Edelman survey is that 40 per cent of respondents approve of one or more hostile actions to bring about change. This includes “attacking people online, intentionally spreading disinformation, threatening of committing violence, damaging public or private property.”
…
This willingness to take hostile action is the highest I have seen in my 45 years of research into public order and protest. It is far higher than numbers found in the 2017-22 World Values Survey of 102 countries that asked five questions about political action.
In that survey, only 35 per cent globally said they “might” get involved in a peaceful protest, while 46 per cent “would never.” In Canada, 48 per cent said they would get involved in a peaceful protest; 29 per cent would never. In the U.S., 55 per cent of respondents reported they “might” and 34 per cent wouldn’t.
With this disturbing news can we expect a bit of a draw down on our American cities?
NOPE!
President Donald Trump revealed that his administration has a list of at least five American cities they hope to target after the immigration operation in Minneapolis.
In a sit-down interview with NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas on Wednesday, Feb. 4, Trump was asked about the Department of Homeland Security’s controversial handling of immigration enforcement — including the recent shooting deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents, and whether he believes their deaths were justified.
“No. I don’t. I — it should’ve not happened,” Trump, 79, replied. “It was a very sad — to me it was a very sad incident, two incidents.”
Trump’s regretful response — a stark contrast from the messaging that others in his administration have spread about Good and Pretti, including labeling them as “domestic terrorists” — led Llamas to ask whether there was a shift on the horizon in how agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection will be operating as they carry out his mass deportation program.
https://people.com/trump-considering-five-more-cities-federal-agents-11900139
Regrettable? My scrawny ass.
Donny is lying to try and look like he is compassionate to the problem….which we all know the a/hole has no idea what compassion is….
While Donny may soften his words his House lap dog has a different view…..
“Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant.”
Those are the complaining words of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.), who was voicing his support for the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which now claims that its agents have the right to forcibly enter private homes without first obtaining a warrant signed by a judge. According to ICE, its agents may forcibly enter homes in certain immigration enforcement contexts based merely on a so-called “administrative warrant,” which is not actually a warrant at all, but is rather just a piece of paper signed by someone in the executive branch.
To fully appreciate the inherent lawlessness of the Johnson view, simply replace the phrase “getting a judicial warrant” with any constitutional requirement that you like in the above-quoted statement. For example:
- “Imagine if we had to go through the process of guaranteeing freedom of speech.”
- “Imagine if we had to go through the process of respecting the right to keep and bear arms.”
- “Imagine if we had to go through the process of paying just compensation when private property is taken for a public use.”
You get the idea.
When a government mouthpiece complains that it would be too difficult to follow the commands of the Constitution in a given context, that’s a dead giveaway that the government is already violating (or planning to violate) the commands of the Constitution in that context.
Did not this a/hole take an oath to protect the Constitution?
Wake up People! These goofballs have no intention of protecting your rights or preserving the Constitution.
Time to do something about these transgressions.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
I am sure that anyone with a functioning brain has seen the contempt that Donny has for the US Constitution…..he has side stepped it on so many occasions and SCOTUS has been a great help to him in his assault of the Constitution.
Bernie Sanders has written a piece that lays out this assault very well….
Donald Trump has, once again, shown his contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. The President of the United States does NOT have the right to unilaterally take this country to war, even against a corrupt and brutal dictator like Maduro. The United States does NOT have the right, as Trump stated this morning, to “run” Venezuela. Congress must immediately pass a War Powers resolution to end this illegal military operation and reassert its constitutional responsibilities.
Trump’s attack on Venezuela will make the United States and the world less safe. This brazen violation of international law gives a green light to any nation on earth that may wish to attack another country to seize their resources or change their governments. This is the horrific logic of force that Putin used to justify his brutal attack on Ukraine.
Trump and his administration have often said they want to revive the Monroe Doctrine, claiming the United States has the right to dominate the affairs of the hemisphere. They have spoken openly about controlling Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world. This is rank imperialism. It recalls the darkest chapters of U.S. interventions in Latin America, which have left a terrible legacy. It will and should be condemned by the democratic world.
Trump campaigned for president on an “America First” platform. He claimed to be the “peace candidate.” At a time when 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, when our healthcare system is collapsing, when people cannot afford housing and when AI threatens millions of jobs, it is time for the president to focus on the crises facing this country and end this military adventurism abroad. Trump is failing in his job to “run” the United States. He should not be trying to “run” Venezuela.
I love Bernie I just wish there were more recall Progressives in the Congress….the ones we have can only do so much because corporate Dems fight the progress they seek.
Time to think about that if you are considering voting in November….be the change we need.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Most all Americans cherish our rights under the Constitution and among those rights are religion, protest and free speech…..but the one that is our biggest advantage is that of free speech….but is it?
It appears that many Americans think the whole right to free speech thing is headed in the wrong direction….
An overwhelming majority of Americans believe freedom of speech is headed in the wrong direction, according to a new poll.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), through its National Speech Index, tracks attitudes toward free speech on a quarterly basis. The latest tracking shows that 74% of Americans believe things are headed in the wrong direction when it comes to free speech. Only 26% believe things are headed in the right direction.
The group says there has been a 10% increase since July in the number of Americans who believe free speech is headed in the wrong direction.
The index, which began tracking attitudes toward free speech in January 2024, has shown political shifts, where Republicans’ attitude shifted in a positive direction around the time President Donald Trump was elected for a second term; however, they have dropped from 69% in July to 55% in October, believing free speech was headed in the right direction.
It appears that we all love the right to free speech that is until someone uses it and then all Hell breaks loose.
Personally I believe that this country needs free speech and any effort to curb that right needs to be shutdown immediately.
We need that right to survive.
For at least the past half-century, Americans have been committed to a “free speech principle,” holding that speech is to be encouraged because it serves to produce knowledge, to enable the development of personal autonomy, and to facilitate the self-governance of the nation. In this essay, I argue that any such abstract free speech principle is fundamentally misguided. The value of speech is instead the value of the social practice within which speech occurs. Speech is to be encouraged when it advances the purpose of the social practice in which it is embedded. For constitutional purposes, the most important social practice established by communication is the public sphere, whose development in the eighteenth century made possible democratic self-governance. The health of a democracy depends upon whether its public sphere can produce a public opinion capable of legitimating the state. This turns on the quality of a nation’s politics, not on the quantity of its speech. Americans who conceptualize the current crisis as requiring rededication to the free speech principle thus essentially misdiagnose the nature of our contemporary emergency. We need to repair our politics, not our speech.
https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/unfortunate-consequences-misguided-free-speech-principle
What do you think is happening with our right to free speech?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
That may seem like a silly question to some….but I think it is a valid one.
True many Americans know the term but how many know the document?
I would post a link about here but why no one would use it?
You realize the the Bill of Rights was not part of the original writing of the Constitution, right?
Nope it was not it was an add-on thanks to the work of the anti-Federalists….the BoR was put in to protect one group from the other….but was it a unanimous decision to do so?
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the U.S. Constitution?
For many people, the answer probably involves one of the famous individual liberties that are spelled out in the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech, due process, or the right to keep and bear arms. When a person argues that something is unconstitutional, what that person often means is that it violates one or more of the provisions contained in the Bill of Rights.
Yet the Constitution did not originally include the Bill of Rights when it was ratified in 1788. Why not?
The answer is that some of the framers of the original Constitution feared that if certain rights were enumerated in the text, all of the other, unenumerated rights would be left wide open for government abuse.
“It would not only be useless, but dangerous, to enumerate a number of rights which are not intended to be given up,” declared future Supreme Court Justice James Iredell at the North Carolina Ratification Convention in 1788. That is “because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the government without usurpation.” What is more, Iredell declared, “it would be impossible to enumerate every one. Let anyone make what collection or enumeration of rights he pleases, I will immediately mention twenty or thirty more rights not contained in it.”
That was the position taken by those who came to be known as the Federalists. They thought that adding a bill of rights to the Constitution was a bad idea not because they were against individual rights, but because they despaired of what might happen to any rights that were not specifically written out.
But the Constitution’s Anti-Federalist critics were not persuaded by such concerns. “The want of a Bill of Rights to accompany this proposed system,” declared the Anti-Federalist pamphleteer who went by the pseudonym “John DeWitt,” “is a solid objection to it.” In his view, “to express those rights” which the government may not infringe was a necessary and proper safeguard against “the intrusion into society of that doctrine of tacit implication which has been the favorite theme of every tyrant from the origin of all governments to the present day.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/was-the-bill-of-rights-a-bad-idea-some-founding-fathers-thought-so/
There is so much about our early history that most do not know and schools do very little to change all the misconceptions.
Some say that we as a nation are heading for a constitutional crisis….I disagree we are already ass deep in one….and I am not alone….
There is a lot of talk these days about the desire to be king….that has been going on for longer than you may think….
At no time in our history has there been so illustrious a gathering as the corps of delegates who came together in the State House (Independence Hall) in Philadelphia late in the spring of 1787 to frame a constitution for the United States of America. After Thomas Jefferson, the country’s envoy in Paris, ran his eyes over the roster, he wrote his counterpart in London, John Adams, “It really is an assembly of demigods.
Yet, distinguished though they were, the delegates had only the foggiest notion of how an executive branch should be constructed. Not one of them anticipated the institution of the presidency as it emerged at the end of the summer.
One frightful goblin haunted their deliberations. The study of history — ancient to modern — instructed them that republics were always short-lived, and they feared that America might quickly adopt kingship.
https://www.americanheritage.com/shall-we-have-king
And it only took 250 years….
So that leaves it up to me and my fellow political historians to correct all the misconceptions….we just hope someone is listening.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Let’s have some fun and learn something.
You got it! The Old Professor is going to drop some history that most have no idea about.
How well do you know your history of this country? (Purely rhetorical because most know little to nothing)
There has been numerous amendments considered to the Constitutional but we shot down….but what would this country look like if they had passed?
The United States Constitution had been in effect for little more than a year when Congress first moved to amend it. On September 25, 1789, the legislature sent a dozen proposed amendments to the then-13 states (soon to be 14) for ratification, as the law required. By December 15, 1791, the necessary three-fourths of states had ratified 10 of the 12 amendments, which collectively became known as the Bill of Rights.
Another 17 amendments have been ratified in the 234 years since, for a total of 27. But these measures represent just a tiny fraction of the amendments that have been proposed in Congress over the years—nearly 12,000 to date.
“The U.S. Constitution was intended to be amended,” writes historian Jill Lepore in her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. However, “almost all efforts to amend the Constitution fail. Success often takes decades. And for long stretches of American history, amending the Constitution has been effectively impossible.”
Most proposed amendments die quietly in congressional committees (if they even get that far), with only a few sent on to the states for ratification. At present, there are six proposed amendments awaiting possible state ratification—one of them dating back to 1789.
Many failed amendments have involved fairly minor administrative matters. But others would have changed the American government in substantial ways and possibly altered the course of history.
Here are a dozen of those failed amendments and what they set out to accomplish.
In 1866, Missouri Representative George Washington Anderson proposed dropping “United States” from the country’s name and simply calling it “America.” The current name was “not sufficiently comprehensive and significant to indicate the real unity and destiny of the American people as the eventual, paramount power of this hemisphere,” he argued, albeit unsuccessfully.
Weighing in from across the Atlantic, the Illustrated London News mocked the proposal as the “verbal appropriation of a hemisphere.”
Just one hemisphere wasn’t enough for Lucas Miller, a first-term representative from Wisconsin. On a single February day in 1893, he introduced 46 bills, one of which would have changed the country’s name to the “United States of the Earth.”
Miller’s rationale, in his own words, was that “it is possible for the republic to grow through the admission of new states into the union, until every nation on earth has become part of it.” Another source suggests that he might also have settled for the “United States of the World.” Miller’s proposal was widely ridiculed at the time, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the congressman didn’t return for a second term.
(Read On)
There are a couple that would apply to the situation today….
Abolishing the Senate….not bad should be considered because the Senate is where good bills go to die.
Numbers 8 and 9 deserve consideration…
Numbers 10 -12 should already be part of the Constitution….
If you read the article then I would like to hear your thoughts on these past proposed amendments to our Constitution.
Be Smart!
Learn Stuff!
Class Dismissed
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
We have a Constitution and then we had an add-on that we now call the Bill of Rights.
Our Bill of Rights contains many amendments that deal with just about all aspects of life as an American….but those rights are been chipped away slowly but slowly….and in recent years that chipping has become harder and more extensive….
Since 20 January 2025 the government has attacked many of of the Rights put down by the Founding Fathers….those attacked have been numbers 1,5, 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 22, 23….and the attacks continue.
So do these attacks mean that some think the BoR was a bad idea and needs changing?
Well if they do then they are not alone….from the very beginning some of the Founders were not so keen on the BoR…..let’s look at the start of the debate on this section…..
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the U.S. Constitution?
For many people, the answer probably involves one of the famous individual liberties that are spelled out in the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech, due process, or the right to keep and bear arms. When a person argues that something is unconstitutional, what that person often means is that it violates one or more of the provisions contained in the Bill of Rights.
Yet the Constitution did not originally include the Bill of Rights when it was ratified in 1788. Why not?
“It would not only be useless, but dangerous, to enumerate a number of rights which are not intended to be given up,” declared future Supreme Court Justice James Iredell at the North Carolina Ratification Convention in 1788. That is “because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the government without usurpation.” What is more, Iredell declared, “it would be impossible to enumerate every one. Let anyone make what collection or enumeration of rights he pleases, I will immediately mention twenty or thirty more rights not contained in it.”
That was the position taken by those who came to be known as the Federalists. They thought that adding a bill of rights to the Constitution was a bad idea not because they were against individual rights, but because they despaired of what might happen to any rights that were not specifically written out.
But the Constitution’s Anti-Federalist critics were not persuaded by such concerns. “The want of a Bill of Rights to accompany this proposed system,” declared the Anti-Federalist pamphleteer who went by the pseudonym “John DeWitt,” “is a solid objection to it.” In his view, “to express those rights” which the government may not infringe was a necessary and proper safeguard against “the intrusion into society of that doctrine of tacit implication which has been the favorite theme of every tyrant from the origin of all governments to the present day.”
Thomas Jefferson, who was then stationed overseas as the American ambassador to France, shared this Anti-Federalist critique: There are “good things” about the new Constitution, Jefferson wrote from Paris in 1787, but one thing “I do not like” is “the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land and not the law of Nations.” According to Jefferson, “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/was-the-bill-of-rights-a-bad-idea-some-founding-fathers-thought-so/
At what point do we allow this assault to continue?
Does anyone really care about the loss of rights?
Please let me know.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
We keep hearing in the media that the Trump thugs are slowly destroying our beloved Constitution….and it looks like those they say that may be on to something….
Archive searches suggest the White House has scrubbed Sections 9 and 10 pertaining to Habeas Corpus and judicial review of unlawful detention from the official congressional website on the Constitution.
“Does this regime think that by editing the website they can delete these basic rights, or do they just want to make it harder to read about them?” demanded one commenter on Resistbot.
A quick scan of the site’s constitutional summaries from Aug. 6 do not match more thorough archived shots of the same page from May. Among missing texts are summaries for Sections 9 and 10. Section 9 contains language pertaining to Habeas Corpus, including: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
Section 10 outlines the rights (and limitations of rights) of states regarding organizing, particularly organizing against the federal government. “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”
https://www.alternet.org/white-house-constitutional-crisis/
In the rush to round up the usual suspects the Trump thugs will do anything to make some of their actions legal.
I guess he can convince idiots that he is ‘saving’ America from itself.
And the picking continues…..
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
I have not been a fan of SCOTUS for many years, since about 2000, to me they are nothing more than political hacks that use nothing for their decisions other than political dogma….the interpretation of the Constitution means nothing to them.
These people are longer pretending that they use the Constitution as a guideline and that deserves a closer look….
It is quite the bit, really, to spend decades insisting on your “originalist” and “textualist” bonafides, and then when dealt an essentially unbeatable hand simply decide over and over again that that “original” “text” actually means whatever the hell you want it to mean. Or, perhaps more accurately, that the text you supposedly revere simply does not matter, or simply does not exist. I imagine the six conservative Supreme Court Justices sleep as well as anyone in the country.
On Monday, SCOTUS issued a ruling that blocked a May order from a US District Judge that basically ruled Trump could not dismantle the Department of Education unilaterally. That original ruling was just obviously, on-its-face correct: the Department was created by an act of Congress. The president does not, constitutionally speaking, get to just undo that because he feels like it. And yet.
The new ruling was unsigned, and came with no decision explaining the conservatives’ reasoning, such as it may be. This isn’t necessarily unusual for rulings like this, but it does highlight the ruling party’s increasing disdain for the pretenses that generally have been upheld in centuries of Washington’s procedural wranglings — and one might think that literally undoing the Constitution might require some explanation, if the Justices maintained some tiny modicum of shame. Alas.
https://www.splinter.com/the-supreme-court-isnt-even-pretending-anymore
In recent years I believe these ‘hacks’ need to address the people of this nation and these ‘elitist’ dipsticks need to explain their abandonment of the Constitution….
The Supreme Court is allowing Donald Trump to dismantle the Department of Education. But it won’t say why.
Yesterday—almost exactly a week after the Court lifted a lower court’s block on Trump’s plans to fire thousands of federal employees—a majority of the justices decided to give the president the go-ahead for a different set of mass layoffs. Last week, the Court provided a handful of sentences that vaguely gestured at why it might have allowed the administration to move forward. This week, it offered nothing at all. There’s something taunting, almost bullying, about this lack of reasoning, as if the conservative supermajority is saying to the country: You don’t even deserve an explanation.
And this is not the only incident of these ‘hacks’ doing the bidding of a political party and it has only gotten worse in the past 20 years or so.
Time for these ‘people’ to step up and provide the leadership they are suppose to be….instead of the ones fueling the destruction of the Constitution of our great nation.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
***Let me state from the beginning that at NO point do I agree with anything about this turn of events….I offer it up solely to show just how f*cked up these douche-bags are***
I grew up in the South so at my age I am well aware of the segregation and the ‘Whites Only” signs that were plastered everywhere.
Since about 2010 there has been more harsh language from nationalism and the tearing apart the Constitution…..and now it is becoming more and more troubling since that d/bag took office.
This is a paper that won an award for content….
A white nationalist recently won an academic award for his law school paper arguing how the constitution only applies to white people.
Preston Damsky, a proud white nationalist and antisemite, garnered acclaimed from a University of Florida professor over his paper detailing his interpretation of the doctrine. Last fall, he wrote the paper on “originalism” for the law school seminar. An idea upheld by many conservatives, originalism interprets the constitution as written during its original time period.
According to the New York Times, a Trump-appointed judge who taught the class awarded Damsky the highest honor for his paper. In his assignment, Damsky argued that “We The People,” as first written on the Constitution’s Preamble, actually refers to white people. With this mindset, he defended the idea of stripping voting rights for nonwhite citizens.
He further stated his support for shoot-to-kill orders toward “criminal infiltrators at the border.” He also referred to an America where white people did not make up the majority as a “terrible crime.” Damsky later uttered that white people “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”
Instead of concern for his viewpoints, his professor, Judge John L. Badalamenti, congratulated him on his provocative essay. Damsky received the book award, granted to the best student in the class, for his detailed work. Badalamenti did not comment on why he chose his recipient.
The award issuance sparked controversy across the school, with opposers stating Damsky’s recognition undermines his dangerous rhetoric. Despite the calls to revoke his award, the University of Florida’s interim dean Merritt McAlister affirmed the matter, citing his “free speech rights.” McAlister also noted “institutional neutrality,” a new term in the rise of anti-DEI policies where schools remain impartial on political issues.
However, Damsky’s academic language did not continue on the internet. Months after the dean’s decision, Damsky created an X account to further showcase his views. His post that Jewish people must be ” abolished by any means necessary,” led to his latest scandal.
The jarring remark led to the University of Florida suspending him and barring him from campus. The University even boosted police presence at the law school. However, others believe the initial celebration of his works empowered Damsky to become even louder with his racist beliefs.
The issue also comes at a time where free speech has its own interpretation in Florida public institutions. One professor called out the double standards of Damsky being able to write his essay while she had to change the name of her class over its assertion of race.
(blackenterprise.com)
To me this is clearly racist BS….truth be told if one thinks about the Founders….who were they?
A bunch of white guys most of whom owned slaves….I can see where the jump can be made….not that I would ever agree with the premise at all.
What about you?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”