Once again, difference between your ideal and reality. In this country, rights are related to enumerated powers. If you don't want it to be that way, then fine. But as of right now, in this country, it is that way. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. That is a common philosophical mistake, but it needs to stop. You don't throw all rights out simply because you agree to relinquish some of them. In fact, according to social contract theory, that is the very nature of the existence of government. And, as I'm sure you're aware, John Locke was enormously influential for the American Revolution.
No, it's the difference between reality and the artificial construct humans impose on it.
Rights cannot be created or destroyed. They cannot be granted or taken away. They are part of being human. They cannot be relinquished.
To maintain that they come from laws, or being enumerated, means they don't exist. If they come from what people decide to do, then they're just privileges or fads.
Yes, John Locke was enormously influential -- and he held that rights exist, and aren't granted. That was the whole point of the Declaration of Independence and the foundation for the Bill of Rights.
No. The case had nothing to do with overthrowing government. I've provided examples from the Constitution and a separate law that is still on the books (and both were in force when the Amistad case went to the SCOTUS) that make it clear there is no right to insurrection in this country. You want to claim I'm wrong, prove it.
You sound like a lawyer with an axe to grind.
Once again: Adams, in the
Amistad case, argued the right to insurrection. The right is not one against private entities, but a general one. SCOTUS affirmed this. So the right is real. Thus whatever those other items mean, they do not mean that there is no right of insurrection.
But that makes no difference, really -- the fact that this right was the foundation of the American Revolution is sufficient to show that it continues. Rights do not vanish. Those who drafted the Constitution knew that it existed; they'd recently made use of it. They also knew that no law or human document can take away rights.
Not quite. The declaration has been and can be used to help understand founders' intent as I already stated. Technically speaking, we're still not wholly sure what it's status is as a legal document. Some want it to be considered such. Lincoln's view that it helps you interpret the Constitution without overthrowing it is perhaps the most influential today.
Let me try again:
the Declaration of Independence is part of federal law -- that's what the U.S. Code is. Madison, one of the prime architects of the Constitution, recognized it as foundation to U.S. law, as the legal act by which the U.S. came to be.
That the courts generally ignore it is baffling.
Either way, the Constitution explicitly recognizes the right of government to put down insurrection. Not even the most ardent advocate of the DoI as law would argue that it takes precedence over the Constitution. Which it would have to in order to allow for insurrection as a right in this country.
Governments do not have rights; only people do.
And rights do not depend on location, nor on government, nor on documents: right exist. They come from being sentient and thus having self-ownership. All the scribbling by all the lawyers through all of time cannot change that.
BTW, Lincoln was correct in not recognizing the action of the South as an application of the right of insurrection: the right was specified in the
Amistad case, relying on the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, as the right to insurrection against tyranny. Lincoln properly recognized that slavery was tyranny and thus not unreasonably judged that this insurrection wasn't against tyranny but in support of it. So to be precise, there is no general right of insurrection, only a right of insurrection against tyranny.
