WI: The Christian Amendment is Adopted

As a Christian who might have some sympathy with something like the Christian amendment in principle, but who is also a lawyer, I will also say that the proposed language in the OP is just plain bad legal drafting. This phrase in particular--"His revealed will as the supreme law of the land"--was probably just meant to mean something like 'yay for the Bible' or 'the moral and ethical bases of this polity are rooted in the holy Bible,' something like that. But it comes out sounding like a form of Sharia where the Bible is now literally part of the Constitution. Since the Bible is an extremely heterogenous book composed over thousands of years in cultures pretty distinct from ours, and that was never intended to be used as a law code, this is an extremely bad idea.

I mean, the idea that the parable of the wheat and the tares, say, is supposed to some kind of statute, is just painful.
 

NothingNow

Banned
Even today, the idea that a treaty or some aspect of international law could trump the Constitution or an amendment is highly, highly, highly controversial. The Supreme Court has essentially rejected that view in the Medellin case. But go back to the 19th C., and there's simply no question that some treaty procedure couldn't invalidate a constitutional amendment.

Well, yes, but it does produce a pretty strong textualist and intentionalist opinion of said "Christian Amendment" being nothing more than a pile of steaming theocratic bullshit. And that's what counts.
 
Alright, so I am reading that this would be legally and politically untenable, at least in the form they had chosen, is that right Mister Mandias?
 
Respectfully: this could not be more wrong.

Read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, and the Second Treatise by John Locke; that's where the Founding Fathers' understanding of rights come from. You might want to check out Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration while you're at it.
Actually, since Locke justifies and bases the existence of rights on the Christian God, he isn't that far off.
 
Well, yes, but it does produce a pretty strong textualist and intentionalist opinion of said "Christian Amendment" being nothing more than a pile of steaming theocratic bullshit. And that's what counts.

Textualism and intentionalism are methods for interpreting the meaning of constitutional texts. Neither one would make the Christian Amendment, if adopted, "a pile of steaming theocratic bs." If the Christian Amendment is that, its because the content of the Christian Amendment is a bad idea, not because of textualism or intentionalism or any other mainstream method of constitutional interpretation. I'm not even sure what you're trying to say.
 
Alright, so I am reading that this would be legally and politically untenable, at least in the form they had chosen, is that right Mister Mandias?
It would be legally untenable in that if the courts took it literally, they would have to incorporate the Bible into the Constitution and there's just no way to do that. So the courts would have to ignore the literal language of the amendment.
 
zoomar said:
Actually, use of Peyoye in the Native American Church is allowed, I believe. I believe the courts have upheld other non-Christian and otherwise "illegal" religious rites as long as it is demonstrated they are necessary to practice the faith and do not infringe on other rights protected by the constitution.
Not from what I've heard, but it's been awhile. It may've changed since.

As for Christianity, ISTM the Founding Fathers were relying heavily on Christian values, but not explicitly Christian religion: so, a belief in a supreme god, but not in any particular God.
 
Actually, it's the reverse. Article 11 in the Barlow translation (ratified Unanimously by Congress) is the one that makes the statement about religion. It's something completely different in the Arabic version.
Here it is:
Article_11.GIF

I stand corrected...and I'm glad.
 
It would be legally untenable in that if the courts took it literally, they would have to incorporate the Bible into the Constitution and there's just no way to do that. So the courts would have to ignore the literal language of the amendment.
Alright, so effectively it would have been about as significant as having In God We Trust upon our currency.
 
I still have a question for final clarification. If the preamble were revised in 1864 as proposed by the OP but the text of the First Amendment prohibiting establishment of a religion were retained, wouldn't the language in the First Amendment totally supercede anything in the preamble? After all, unless I'm wrong, various amendments revising voting rights and how senators were elected are what we pay attention to, not the original articles in the constitution which are not rewritten? In this context, the clear statement in the First Emedment would completely negate anything that could be explicitly or implicitly read into the preamble.
 
What's unusual about the OP is that it posits a constitutional amendment that changes the text of the original constitution, instead of being tacked on to the end like all other American constitutional amendments.

But that doesn't actually present any difficulties to the courts because they way constitutional amendments work is pretty unusual. Changing the written law instead of adding something to the end of the law is how most statute amendments work. When Congress wants to change a law, it doesn't add an amendment on to the end of the law, it simply changes the language of the law wherever in the law Congress thinks works best. And if there are ever any conflicts with other parts of the law, the courts don't look at which part is further on in the statute, they look at which part was more recent. The rule is that more recent stuff trumps older stuff.

So IF the Christian Amendment was somehow passed and IF the courts decided that it had some legal effect and IF the court's interpretation of the Christian Amendment couldn't be reconciled with the First Amendment, the Christian Amendment would trump.
 
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Not from what I've heard, but it's been awhile. It may've changed since.

In Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court ruled that peyote use was not protected under the First Amendment. Congress has, by legislation, made it legal under federal law. I'm a little unclear about whether states can still ban it.
 
What's unusual about the OP is that it posits a constitutional amendment that changes the text of the original constitution, instead of being tacked on to the end like all other American constitutional amendments.

The 12th Amendment changed an internal part of the Constitution, didn't it?
 
Yeah, pretty much. Although I could have seen this legitimately possible in some TLs such as even "For All Time" if too many more guys like Jim Jones got elected to the White House.....(in fact, the mere thought of guys like him, or Pat Robertson, Rousas Rushdoony or, the devil forbid, Samuel T. Francis in the White House, scares me a little. BTW, if you don't know whom the latter two guys are, look them up. Francis, in particular, was a real screwy individual, though Rushdoony wasn't much better.) but in our universe, at any time in the 20th Century? Just not going to happen.

Incidentally Jim Jones was a leftist radical (who had contacts with Walter Mondale, Mrs. Carter, Jerry Brown, and Harvey Milk).
 
If an amendment contradicts a prior amendment, the most recent one supersedes the previous one absolutely. Its common sense.

If Americans wanted to repeal freedom of speech, they can craft a new amendment that utterly annihilates it, and it would be perfectly binding if it goes through the lawful amendment process. The only reason that seems a bit strange is that so far amendments have tended to address desired changes departing from or building on the original constitution, but in no way are amendments protected from being amended further.
 
I still have a question for final clarification. If the preamble were revised in 1864 as proposed by the OP but the text of the First Amendment prohibiting establishment of a religion were retained, wouldn't the language in the First Amendment totally supercede anything in the preamble? After all, unless I'm wrong, various amendments revising voting rights and how senators were elected are what we pay attention to, not the original articles in the constitution which are not rewritten? In this context, the clear statement in the First Amendment would completely negate anything that could be explicitly or implicitly read into the preamble.

This amendment, even though it amends the preamble, would be, like any amendment to the Constitution, valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the Constitution. It would in affect declare something like this: the people of the United States' framework (paradigm) for understanding how to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, etc. has changed, and going forward, the government shall operate according to this new understanding. It would ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to determine how the United States can be both an vowed Christian nation and a nation in which the government is prohibited from creating an establishment of religion or whether this new understanding completely negates the prohibition imposed by the 1st Amendment.
 
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