Following up on the living constitution...

Following up on an item I wrote about yesterday, Dahlia Lithwick provides reader feedback to her suggestion that supporters of the Living Constitution are a dying breed. It's a-Living. The responses were broken down in to a host of somewhat interesting categories, a few exerpts:

Many, many of you observed that the Constitution is alive simply because our laws have changed: "To believe otherwise, is to believe that African-Americans still count as only 3/5ths of a person," says David Berestka.

A thought about the need for sometimes extreme meddling by the court by Ted Niblock: "I don't know how many times I have had to remind people that we didn't make this stuff up to annoy Justice Scalia, people were getting lynched for trying to vote! Minorities and women (who were discriminated against even while hovering at around half the population) were being systematically kept from the key freedoms and liberties that the Constitution was designed to protect, and no other part of the system was going to change that."

Not too many of you had suggestions for how to respond to the assault from the right. Jonathan Stein, citing Larry Kramer, suggests that "The Left should respond by insisting that the court is not creating rights, but simply protecting rights that society as a whole has created."

Some interesting thoughts...