Interpreting the Constitution In the Digital Era

oik writes "NPR's Fresh Air this week had an interesting interview with Jeffrey Rosen, one of the authors of Constitution 3.0 , which addresses a number of issues to do with interpreting the US Constitution in the face of new technologies (both present and future). Many of the topics which he touches on come up on Slashdot a lot (including the GPS tracking cases). It's well worth listening to the program (link in the main page), of which the linked article is just a summary."

Comments

Why would you want to interpret the constitution?

[Colin Smith]

When you can simply ignore it.

It's not as if there are any repercussions.
 

Re:Interpret? Your doing it wrong.

[CRCulver]

Thats where you went wrong... there is no such thing.

All texts require interpretation. No human utterance is unambiguous. This has been understood for over a century now, since Saussure proposed l'arbitraire du signe. Science, bitches.

Re:The real issue

[anagama]

Here's a real gem from Obama's position on the law:

Moreover, applying this military custody requirement to individuals inside the United States, as some Members of Congress have suggested is their intention, would raise serious and unsettled legal questions and would be inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets. We have spent ten years since September 11, 2001, breaking down the walls between intelligence, military, and law enforcement professionals; Congress should not now rebuild those walls and unnecessarily make the job of preventing terrorist attacks more difficult.

In other words, Obama is saying "Bush, Cheney, and I have managed to get get around constitution for the last decade. If you pass this bill, you jeopardize all that hard work."

I'm afraid of what we'd lose.

[XxtraLarGe]

You can bet the Second Amendment would be gone. That's the lynchpin keeping all the other ones in place. On another note, the constitution doesn't need to be recreated. The founders created a clear method for amending it, which has happened over two dozen times now.

Re:The real issue

[Runaway1956]

Please, look at the name of our nation again. United STATES of America. Like Pete Venkman already said, a bunch of free and independent states united together for mutual support. I don't recall where in my history books that the states abdicated their rights, in deference to the Corporate American Empire. I guess it was around the time that the federal government decided to expand interstate commerce laws. (not all of the fed's interstate commerce regulations are wrong, just as not all of them are right)

Re:Usurping power by subverting the Constitution

[LocalH]

There is a larger question here as well - should gov't even be allowed to pass NEW laws at all? I don't think so.

The problem isn't new laws, it's that they exceed their authorization to pass laws covering certain things. The Interstate Commerce Clause basically turned into the legal equivalent of a rootkit when it can cover activities that are fully intrastate, merely because they can "affect" interstate actions. That little bit of legal wrangling pretty much guts the 9th and 10th, from a practical standpoint. If a person is too "self-sufficient", that means they are affecting the interstate market for various things and must be stopped (see Wickard v Filburn).

Re:It's the pledge week question

[heypete]

The loss of government funding wouldn't dramatically affect NPR itself (about 7% comes from "grants and contributions"). The largest single source (34%) of their funding comes from station programming fees.

However, it would affect many of the local public radio stations that re-broadcast NPR (and which, in turn, pay NPR for programming fees). According to this site, 16.4% of the average public radio station's funding comes from government funding and grants from the Corporation from Public Broadcasting. About 14.3% of a public radio station's funding comes from universities, which frequently get income from the feds.

Without funding from the government, many public radio stations would have insufficient funds to continue to operate and would need to close down. NPR would likely be able to continue without much trouble, but local radio stations that actually provide services to their local community would be shut down.

Many of the pledge weeks are for the local stations to raise funding, not for NPR itself (though the NPR radio staff often record "Give $local_station_name money!" ads for the stations).

Re:constitutional interpretation

[Attila Dimedici]

Well, there are two reasons for that. The primary reason that the Constitution is "underdetermined" is because it was a document designed to limit the power of government. Many of the issues that people think the Constitution does not speak clearly enough on are issues that the Framers considered to be things that the Federal government should not be involved in. The second was that the Framers intended that those who followed them should amend the Constitution as needed to address new issues.
For the most part though, I believe that the "problems" you see in the Constitution result from the attempts to twist it to allow the federal government to do things the Framers thought they had explicitly denied it the power to do.