On 12/12/2012 9:45 AM, Warp wrote:
> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> Any law can be passed, it's up to someone who wouldn't meet the criteria
>> to challenge it in court.
>
> But I thought the whole idea of a constitution is that anticonstitutional
> laws can *not* be passed.
>
Sadly, no. It just, in theory, unless someone appointed idiots and 
assholes to SCOTUS (but that would never happen...) means that they can 
do so, but it will be shot down. Usually the cases are borderline, so 
some careful consideration needs to be taken. All too often, and 
especially recently, with the, "You won't let us impose 
theocracy/oligarchy/dictatorships!", wackos panicking over how small 
their movement has gotten, and the appearance of the "wrong color" 
president, its gotten far more common, and way more blatant.

Mostly though, some of those laws have been around for a bloody long 
time, an they just never got enforced. State constitutions, city 
ordinances, etc., are all a bit like some people's basements/attics. A 
lot of stuff gets shoved into a corner, and since no one ever bothers to 
go in and clean them out (or, more to the point, the people allowed to 
are too busy cluttering it with more junk to crawl through what is 
already there), it all just sort of stays in there until some idiot 
notices it, tries to apply it to some situation, and gets sued over 
doing so.

Personally, I think every state, and even the fed, should have a group 
specifically designated to rummage through these basements and figure 
out what shouldn't be in there, or propose legislation to replace things 
that are currently covered by like 50 overlapping bits of incomplete 
gibberish, if for no other reason that to bloody simplify the whole 
thing. But.. you just know, if someone proposed this, all the nuts would 
crawl out of the woodwork, and object that either, "We should keep 
that!", or, "Why isn't that being enforced." It would be like watching 
an episode of 'Hoarders'.

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