Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

I plan to watch the Democrat debate in 14 minutes. Here is the NBC blog.

Addendum: If I were a progressive, I'd be appalled by the choice between Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O'Malley. Clinton is corrupt; Sanders is senile; O'Malley is mentally retarded.

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Here.

What is the point of writing a constitution unless you intend it to be applied as faithfully as possible? The founding fathers don’t need Mr. Jackson to come to their defense. No one has accused them of being terrified of change. They deliberately provided a constitutional process for amending the Constitution.

In fact, the founding fathers provided a second mechanism for amending the Constitution: It requires Congress to call a constitutional convention to propose amendments when two-thirds of the states apply for such a convention. But if you mention that option, you will find all the liberals running as fast as they can in the other direction. Who exactly is terrified of change?

Liberals don’t want “we the people” to amend the Constitution in the ways prescribed by the founding fathers. They want liberal justices to stealthily amend the Constitution. That has worked for them in the past. Mr. Jackson’s prescription—“effective governance lies somewhere between revisionism and textualism”—is completely vacuous. Who would get to choose when the text controls and when revision is called for?

IAN MAITLAND

Minneapolis

Note from KBJ: As I explained in my Ph.D. dissertation (entitled "Constitutional Interpretation") many years ago, interpretation lies between discovery and invention. It is both constrained (by the text) and creative (in that texts are vague and ambiguous). There will always be debates (theories) about how to interpret the United States Constitution. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.

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Scott Adams analyzes Donald Trump.

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Recognition of libertarianism as a framework for utopia gives a clear indication of Nozick's pluralism, and that within his political vision there is great scope for people to live according to diverse, and even opposed, conceptions of the good. This observation suggests that Nozick's view is, essentially, a liberal one, being strongly neutral between different ways of life. Yet it seems much more commonly thought that Nozick should be labelled a conservative. The reason for this is not hard to find. A simplistic taxonomy of political views might lead one to argue that views have to be placed somewhere on the political spectrum, and, clearly, as Nozick is closer to the right than to the left, it follows that he is a conservative.

Nozick, however, never claims to be a conservative, and others with similar views refuse the label. Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, for example, contains a postscript entitled 'Why I am not a Conservative'. Furthermore, the theoretical conservative mainstream has hardly welcomed Nozick to its ranks. Roger Scruton, in his defence of conservatism, The Meaning of Conservatism, writes that the conservative emphasis on authority, constitution, institutions, tradition, custom, and allegiance are wholly incompatible with libertarian 'minimal statism'. Moreover, concerning Nozick's view that 'taxation is nothing but forced labour and therefore inherently unjust', Scruton writes, 'if we are to concede such an argument then we abolish the conservative enterprise, and cease to acknowledge the web of obligations by which citizens are bound to each other and the state.' Many traditional conservative beliefs—organicism, natural hierarchy, nationalism, divine intent in the design of society—would simply be an embarrassment to Nozick.

(Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State, Key Contemporary Thinkers [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991], 136 [endnotes omitted])