{"id":1102,"date":"2004-09-24T05:20:28","date_gmt":"2004-09-24T13:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/09\/24\/the-pledge-and-jurisdiction-stripping\/"},"modified":"2004-09-24T05:20:28","modified_gmt":"2004-09-24T13:20:28","slug":"the-pledge-and-jurisdiction-stripping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1102","title":{"rendered":"The Pledge and Jurisdiction Stripping"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember when the house passed a bill to prevent the federal courts from hearing DOMA challenges<\/a>? Now, they’ve passed a similar bill to prevent the federal courts from hearing challenges over the words “under God” the Pledge of Allegiance!<\/p>\n

Nj.com<\/a> reports:<\/p>\n

.. Democrats said the bill would damage a system of judicial review that has been fundamental to government for 200 years. “We’re playing with fire here, we are playing with the national unity of this country,” by letting each state make its own interpretation of constitutional law, said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y<\/div>\n

Why risk damaging our traditional system of judicial review for two words<\/i> in the Pledge of Allegiance? Well, Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., is worried that, should the courts strip the words “under God” from the pledge, “we will have emasculated the very heart of what America has always been about.”<\/i> Oh my! Does he mean feminism might win?<\/p>\n

For my part, if each state had it’s own point of view on the question of “under God”, I would still myself able to sleep at night. But the precedent of jurisdiction stripping would be a bad one. As Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., who supported stripping jurisdiction from lower federal courts, but retaining jurisdiction at the Supreme Court, noted:<\/p>\n

“The issue today may be the pledge, but what if the issue tomorrow is Second Amendment (gun) rights, civil rights, environmental protection, or a host of other issues that members may hold dear?” <\/div>\n

Of course, we all know the issue came up, to use a metaphor, yesterday. That time the issue was same sex marriage. The constitutionality of jurisdiction stripping was discussed widely. Notable discussions are available at: Volokh <\/a> who thinks it’s probably constitutional, Ox Blog<\/a> who thinks it’s not and Findlaw<\/a> who thinks the issue is unclear.<\/p>\n

Constitutional or not, jurisdiction stripping is a bad idea. Hopefully, the Senate will not pass this bill. If they do, hopefully the whole idea is unconstitutional. That could keep this strategy from exploding on to the scene and affecting every civil right the American people retained.<\/p>\n

===Edited:
\nBalkinization<\/a> has an interesting article which appeared at 1 am Sept. 25.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember when the house passed a bill to prevent the federal courts from hearing DOMA challenges? Now, they’ve passed a similar bill to prevent the federal courts from hearing challenges over the words “under God” the Pledge of Allegiance! Nj.com … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}