Showing posts with label Rob Natelson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rob Natelson. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

On the methods, purposes and legitimacy of corrective Constitutional Amendments

Constitutional Scholar, Professor Rob Natelson, has written an interesting article posted at the Tenth Amendment Center concerning State initiated amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

By the way, the italicized descriptive I used in the previous sentence I sort of coined several years back when I discovered the procedure while reading the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. Natelson's descriptive is a bit different than my own, whereas it is denominated in his article the state-application-and-convention method -- a minor piece of trivia that only matters if someone is interested in searching the archives of this blog for my own posts on the topic of State initiated amendment proposals. Anyway,...

Below is a relevant excerpt from Natelson's article.

Mr. Natelson writes:

The Founders created the state-application-and-convention process primarily as a way to rectify federal abuses of power. The Founders recognized that clarifying and corrective amendments might become necessary even when the proper reading of the document seemed clear. The Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Amendments all are examples of clarifying and corrective amendments.

Precisely! And I think it may be time for another known as the 28th. Which is Fourteen multiplied by two. Hmm. ;-)

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