Getting Past the Founding Fathers

THE U.S. SUPREME COURT issued one of those five to four rulings today which inspires you to think that not only could the vote easily have gone either way, but that perhaps it should have gone the other way.

As of now, anytime a person is arrested for a "serious crime", it is  perfectly legal for the arresting officer to administer a DNA test to the arrestee on the spot, and to submit it as evidence. Precisely what constitutes a "serious crime" remains undertermined; it may be that misdemeanors are not serious, and felonies are.

Opponents of the ruling are quick to point out that there is room to believe that the ruling is a violation of the fourth amendment, the one about prohibiting unreasonable search and siezure. But here we are again; precisely what does the word "unreasonable" mean"?

IN this country, it means whatever the United States Supreme Court says it means.

Which brings up another point; wouldn't it be worth considering to write and adopt a new constitution for the united states, and to replace the current one with it?? Under the current one, everyone is forever asking "what was the original intent of the founders?

That "original intent" question gets asked so often that one becomes tempted to ask "why in hell does it even matter what the founder's original intent was? They're all dead! Why not focus on what the words mean, to us, now, among we the living?"

The advantage of a new constitution is that we could write it in such a manner that we would not have to spend precious time speculating what people who have been dead for two hundred years had in mind; we could write it clearly, succinctly, so that we would never have any doubt about its meaning - insofar as that is possible. And it wouldn't necessarily have to be all that much different from the traditional one; just clearer, and more relevant to us.

WE could eliminate the amendmant prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, and the amendment reinstating their legality, which of course cancel each other out. We could politically correctly leave out the clause defiing african americans as three fifths of a human being. We could write a version of the second amendment specifying whether bearing arms means carrying muzzle loading weapons around, as the founders intended, or includes AK47s, or whatever. We could do so much!

but first,we would have to get over this unwarranted idolatry of the founding fathers. After all, for the most part they were nothing more than a bunch of slave owning, high talking, wig wearing bunch of pompous aristocrats.