Constitutional Challenge Quotes
Actually it was Thomas Jefferson who had drafted most of the language. This attack was aimed at President John Adams, the big supporter of the unpopular Alien and Sedition laws, and the man Jefferson was intent on unseating at the end of his first term. He did and destroyed the Federalist Party in the process.
Turley was a strong supporter of the nomination of John Ashcroft as George W. Bush’s Attorney General in 2000. However, after Ashcroft was confirmed and in office, he came up with a plan for government detention (concentration) camps where he claimed the authority to hold suspects indefinitely without charges or trial. Turley withdrew his support and endorsement, and became one of Ashcroft’s major critics.
This quotation illustrates the brilliance of Scalia. He was in the minority of the Justices when he opposed gay marriage. However, instead of just writing a caustic dissent—which he did—he posed this question to one of the most brilliant attorneys in the country who was arguing the case for gay marriage. Clearly, gay marriage was not considered unconstitutional when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. It is almost certain that no one in those times even considered such a prospect. However, by 2013 a number of states had allowed gay marriage, and the majority of Americans favored it. The best Olsen could answer was “There us no specific data in time. This is an evolutionary cycle”. Despite his oratory tour de force, Scalia was again in the minority and his view did not prevail. Public opinion had clearly changed, and most judges believed that the interpretation of the Constitution most also change and there is no more a specific time to say exactly when that change took place than there is to say exactly when America concluded that the nation should have Prohibition or any other social norm.
