You know, the more I read, the more I understand why the United States is a declining power. The education in this country must really be slipping. On Thu, 14 Mar 1996, jim bell wrote:
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So he wants a cite of Supreme Court decisions from you bearing on legislative history & congressional intent, does he?
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to about 8.5 years FLAT time in the joint. The original absurdity was challenged in Chapman but the SC blindly stuck to it's own reading of "mixture or substance", blindly ignoring reality & Congressional intent that "cuts" of drugs such as heroin or cocaine being an attempt to increase the amount sold & therefore profit, should be punished, while the LSD paper was merely a way to transport & distribute it. As far as congressional intent goes, Joseph Biden has said that as chairman of the senate judiciary committee, they gave little thought to LSD but they definitely did NOT mean weigh the whole blotter paper in handing out nickels & dimes.
Who cares what the chairman of the committee who forwarded the bill thought? He is but one member who voted or declined to vote for the bill. The view that he has any more authority than any other member who supported the bill is a silly one. Indeed, he may have had LSD out of mind when he wrote the bill, but unless you poll every member of congress as to their understanding of the bill, this means little if anything at all. If a bill passes that says "All discharging of firearms within the District of Columbia is illegal." Who cares if the chairman of the judiciary says (after the fact incidently) that he didn't think of handguns when he wrote the bill. Obviously congress has passed an ambigious statute. They could very easily have clarified the statute and applied the correction retroactively. This they did not do, (despite the fact that they have often done so before, and that the court often invites congress to revisit an issue and make a correction, and congress often does).
Now the US Sentencing Commission has changed the guidelines by changing the way the dosage is calculated to something reasonable, the SC refuses to make the change retroactive to help a lot of people.
You mean, help a lot of convicted drug felons. And even if they are deserving of help (I personally could care if people use drugs as long as they don't operate heavy machinery in public areas thereafter) where is the congress leaping to the rescue and writing an amendment to apply a corrective act retroactively? (Which, incidently, is arguably beyond the power of the supreme court to do). One might also note that the district court and the circut court came to the same conclusion in reading the intent of the statute. You think those judges had their heads up their asses too? You're talking now about 15 people who all came to the same conclusion. Who's wrong? These Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Georgetown and Stanford educated legal professionals, or you?
Note where Kennedy basically says that if Congress passees laws that are poorly worded & subject to create great unfairness in sentences, the SC, once they've made a stupid decision in interpretation will stick to it no matter how unfair it is in order to make congress write laws that are linguistically intelligible.
And you think that instead we should have two legislative branches second guessing one another? What the hell is the law supposed to be if congress can't write it properly? And if the manner of its application offends congress so much why has it not been corrected retroactively? Kennedy in this respect is acting as one of the more rational justices. It is the activist justices that go crazy and stretch the law beyond the bounds of its intent. Sure, it's easy enough to appeal to the libertarian in everyone by citing a supposedly silly result in a drug case, but you are fighting with smoke and mirrors here. The real issue is one of seperation of powers. It never ceases to amaze me how smart "commentators" like this think they are when they makes grand denouncements of the system. It never ceases to amaze me that almost every single one of these "commentators" knows so little about the way the system really works that it's a wonder they passed the constitution test in 8th grade. (Was it required when you were in school? Probably not). The more they talk, the more they prove my point. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A little legal knowledge is lethal.
This would be fine if those on the sharp end of them were congressmen. The more Supreme Cocksucker decisions I read like this, the better BOTH your big ideas sound.
So move to a civil law jurisdiction. --- My prefered and soon to be permanent e-mail address: unicorn@schloss.li "In fact, had Bancroft not existed, potestas scientiae in usu est Franklin might have had to invent him." in nihilum nil posse reverti 00B9289C28DC0E55 E16D5378B81E1C96 - Finger for Current Key Information