Reply #12: More about Mukasey [View All]

More about the new AG pick

from an opinion piece of Mukasey's
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005059


"As we participate in this debate on what is the right course to pursue, I think it is important to remember an interesting structural feature of the Constitution we all revere. When we speak of constitutional rights, we generally speak of rights that appear not in the original Constitution itself, but rather in amendments to the Constitution--principally the first 10. Those amendments are a noble work, but it is the rest of the Constitution--the boring part--the part that sets up a bicameral legislature and separation of powers, and so on, the part you will never see mentioned in any flyer or hear at any rally, that guarantees that the rights referred to in those 10 amendments are worth something more than the paper they are written on.
A bill of rights was omitted from the original Constitution over the objections of Patrick Henry and others. It may well be that those who drafted the original Constitution understood that if you give equal prominence to the provisions creating the government and the provisions guaranteeing rights against the government--God-given rights, no less, according to the Declaration of Independence--then citizens will feel that much less inclined to sacrifice in behalf of their government, and that much more inclined simply to go where their rights and their interests seem to take them.

So, as the historian Walter Berns has argued, the built-in message--the hidden message in the structure of the Constitution--is that the government it establishes is entitled, at least in the first instance, to receive from its citizens the benefit of the doubt. If we keep that in mind, then the spirit of liberty will be the spirit which, if it is not too sure that it is right, is at least sure enough to keep itself--and us--alive."

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..so the Constitution is MORE important than Bill Of Rights because the Bill of Rights are merely amendments to the original document, and we must give the government the benefit of a doubt when it relates to the powers of the government over the rights guaranteed to us? Silly me, I always thought that we gave people the 'benefit' and laid the burden of proof on the government to prove beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt and not the other way around. Mukasey likes the meme of guilty until proven innocent. For a former judge, he also believes that all of these 'laws' just get in the way of letting the government do what they need to do to keep us lowly sheep safe and sound. He's another one of the 'Daddy Government please save us from ourselves' kinda people.

Mukasey was the district judge who signed the material witness warrant authorizing Jose Padilla's arrest in 2002, and who handled the case while it remained in the Southern District of New York.