The Constitution contains many phrases, clauses, and amendments detailing ways people cannot be denied the right to vote. You cannot deny the right to vote because of race or gender. Citizens of Washington DC can vote for President; 18-year-olds can vote; you can vote even if you fail to pay a poll tax. The Constitution also requires that anyone who can vote for the "most numerous branch" of their state legislature can vote for House members and Senate members. Note that in all of this, though, the Constitution never explicitly ensures the right to vote, as it does the right to speech, for example. It does require that Representatives be chosen and Senators be elected by "the People," and who comprises "the People" has been expanded by the aforementioned amendments several times. Aside from these requirements, though, the qualifications for voters are left to the states. And as long as the qualifications do not conflict with anything in the Constitution, that right can be withheld. For example, in Texas, persons declared mentally incompetent and felons currently in prison or on probation are denied the right to vote. It is interesting to note that though the 26th Amendment requires that 18-year-olds must be able to vote, states can allow persons younger than 18 to vote, if they chose to.
No the above statement are not rights that are laid out in the Constitution that phrase came from The Declaration of Independence and the only rights conferred as those rights as laid out in the 5th Amendment.... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;. These rights are only conferred when a person has entered some how into the criminal justice system by being arrested for an offense.
This phrase is commonly attributed to the Constitution, but it comes from the Declaration of Independence. The 5th Amendment does offer protections to our "life, liberty, or property," noting we cannot be deprived of any of them without due process of law.
The way it's used is in the 5th Amendment:
Amendment 5 - Trial and Punishment, Compensation for Takings
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
(Absolute) Freedom of Speech and Press
The Constitution does protect the freedom of speech of every citizen, and even of non-citizens — but only from restriction by the Congress (and, by virtue of the 14th Amendment, by state legislatures, too). There are plenty of other places where you could speak but where speech can and is suppressed. For example, freedom of speech can be and often is restricted in a work place, for example: employers can restrict your right to speak in the work place about politics, about religion, about legal issues, even about Desperate Housewives. The same restrictions that apply to the government do not apply to private persons, employers, or establishments. For another example, the government could not prohibit the sale of any newspaper lest it breech the freedom of the press. No newsstand, however, must carry every paper against its owners' wishes. It's a Free Country
A commonly heard mantra is, "Read your Constitution - it's a free country, you know!" Well, read your Constitution - it never says it is a free country. The implication of the aphorism is that in the United States, you can do whatever you want to do, and the Constitution is there to ensure that. It is certainly true that the Constitution protects many civil rights. The 1st Amendment ensures freedom of religious choice and freedom of speech, but those things are not without limit. You cannot create a religion that allows you to kill someone without civil punishment; you cannot use libelous or slanderous words without recourse. There are other things that restrict freedom - from the ability to suspend habeas corpus to the issuance of patents. Certainly the United States is a very free country, but it is not totally free - which is actually a good thing, unless you actually like anarchy. It is interesting to note that in his confirmation hearings in 2005, John Roberts said several times, "It's a free country." It will be interesting to see how this enters into his judicial philosophy on the Court.
"Of the People, By the People, For the People"
This phrase is commonly attributed to the Constitution, but it comes from the Gettysburg Address. Thanks to James Bishop for the idea.
Let him choose..it's not my choice to make...you either want to be with me or you don't...I'm not into forcing people...BUT don't think you're gonna go back and forth between us either or keep me waiting long cause then I'll just make your decision for you and tell to choose her....
Asked whether he thinks he's getting bad press coverage (the Project for Excellence in Journalism says in a report out today that 57 percent of the stories written about him for the past six weeks have been negative, with just 14 percent positive), he said, "Ah, listen, I'm not going to complain about the press corps."
But he bristles when asked about whether he is still the "old McCain," the maverick who wowed the media with his 2000 presidential run, when he bucked the Republican Party establishment, drawing gushing praise from an infatuated media.
"The interesting thing is, and it's happened on numerous occasions, I get 'How come you're not the old McCain?' and usually it's an Obama talking point from somebody. And I say, 'OK, tell me how I've changed.' 'Well, you changed on taxes.' I say, 'Look, I was for tax cuts, I wasn't for those tax cuts,'" he said, explaining his opposition to Mr. Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.
"There is no example they can cite that I'm any different, but they want people to believe that I'm different. I understand that, but it's just baloney. I'm the same guy. … We're working as hard as we can. You just put one foot ahead of the other for the next 13 days as we have for the past two years," he said with a laugh.
"Ed Rendell just said, I want President Clinton to come back because I'm nervous," Mr. McCain said, referring to the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania who has reportedly sent memos asking the Clintons to return to the state to campaign for Mr. Obama.
Mr. McCain said Mr. Obama's giant fundraising total — he announced this weekend that he raised more than $150 million in September — is going to produce "a scandal."
His campaign and the Republican National Committee have released the names of all his donors, including those who have contributed less than $200. That's not required by federal election rules, and Mr. Obama has declined to release his small-dollar donors, leading to speculation that some donors are trying to circumvent fundraising laws.
"History is a clear indicator. Senator Obama has unleashed a force which we will pay a very heavy price for sometime in the future if not now, because it's very unlikely we can track down and document the contributions that he refuses to reveal," said Mr. McCain, who co-authored a bipartisan bill to overhaul campaign fundraising laws.
Fair campaigning
Mr. McCain took great umbrage at comments by Rep. John Lewis, Georgia Democrat, who compared the atmosphere at recent Republican rallies to those of 1960s-era segregationist George Wallace.
"Here, a guy I admire and respect, a hero of the civil rights movement, saying, making a statement that somehow [Governor Sarah] Palin and I are involved in segregationist behavior, I mean, is beyond reason. In the debate the other night, Barack Obama refused to repudiate those remarks. I've repudiated every time there's been some inappropriate comment by a GOP operative anywhere."
Mr. McCain called that failure to repudiate Mr. Lewis' comment "certainly something that I don't think is acceptable."
The Republican nominee defended his campaign strategy of targeting Mr. Obama's ties to former domestic terrorist William Ayers but not to his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
Saying the issue of Mr. Wright has been "pretty well-ventilated," Mr. McCain said Mr. Obama has been slippery on his links to Mr. Ayers. He would not himself say being linked to Mr. Ayers makes Mr. Obama radical.
"The American people can make that judgment, he said, adding, "it's about full revelation of the relationship."
"First said it was a guy in the neighborhood, then he said, aw, well, that he knew him, now we find out he wrote blurbs for his book, now we find out that he served on the Woods Foundation board, which, coincidentally, gave ACORN $230,000," he said, referring to the liberal activist group which has long-standing ties to Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers and is accused of voter-registration fraud in several states.
"Look, it was an extensive relationship — the American people need to know the full extent of it. He's not being candid and truthful," the senator from Arizona said.
"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember, I said it standing here, if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."
Mr. Biden said Mr. Obama would have to make "some really tough" decisions when that occurs, adding emphatically: "As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it's going to happen."
The Democratic vice-presidential running mate said he could envision four or five scenarios, citing the Middle East and Russia.
Mr. McCain called Mr. Biden's comment "the most remarkable comment I have ever seen in presidential politics."
"Now he is saying — if we elected Senator Obama as president of the United States we are going to have an international crisis in these very dangerous times with the economy in the tank?" Mr. McCain said.
At a press conference Wednesday in Virginia, Mr. Obama noted Mr. Biden's words, saying that although "Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes," his central point was correct and a reason to back the Democratic team.
"His core point was, the next administration is going to be tested, regardless of who it is," Mr. Obama said. "The question is: Will the next president meet that test by moving America in a new direction, by sending a clear signal to the rest of the world that we are no longer about bluster and unilateralism and ideology?"
In a statement, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds responded: "It's not leadership for Barack Obama to promise to be straight with Americans, only to dismiss serious statements and concern from his own running mate as simple 'rhetorical flourishes.'"
Poll standings
As for the state of the campaign map, Mr. McCain said he sees himself five percentage points down to Mr. Obama in the race for Pennsylvania, although every poll in the past two weeks has put the deficit in double digits. Still, he said he is making a comeback, and pointed to comments by Democratic luminaries he said encourage him.
The self-described maverick, who was counted out of the Republican race in summer 2007, may to be doing just that. Although he trails in the polls in at least a half-dozen pivotal states, a new Associated Press survey finds the race statistically even, with Mr. Obama at 44 percent and Mr. McCain at 43 percent.
The survey found that Mr. McCain had surged among whites and people earning less than $50,000; among rural voters — he now has an 18-point advantage, up from four points in the previous poll — and on the issue of the economy, where he picked up nine percentage points and now trails the Democrat by just six points. Harsher criticism
Mr. Obama has spent virtually the entire campaign linking Mr. McCain to the president, saying a McCain term would be "four more years of George Bush" and identifying various Republican policies with the adjective "Bush-McCain."
Mr. McCain has in recent days sharpened his criticism of Mr. Bush, including adding a line from his final debate to his daily stump speech, that if Mr. Obama "wanted to run against George Bush, he should have run four years ago."
But on Wednesday, Mr. McCain went further in distancing himself from the man who beat him for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. In addition to the long list of failures he attributed to Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain blamed the president for supporting the Medicare prescription-drug bill, saying, "They didn't pay for it."
"They put a trillion-dollar debt on future generations of Americans, then allowed the liberals to expand it so they're paying my — they're paying for my prescription drugs. Why should the taxpayers pay for my prescription drugs?" he said with exasperation.
He rejected Mr. Bush's use of issuing "signing statements" when he signs bills into law, in which the president has suggested that he would ignore elements of the bills, labeling them potentially unconstitutional.
"I would veto the bills or say, 'Look, I don't like it but I'll obey the law that's passed by Congress and signed by the president.' I think the signing statements was not a correct implementation of the power of the executive. I think it was overstepping," he said. And Mr. McCain emphatically rejected Mr. Bush's claims of executive privilege, often used to shield the White House from scrutiny.
ABOARD THE STRAIGHT TALK AIR — Sen. John McCain on Wednesday blasted President Bush for building a mountain of debt for future generations, failing to pay for expanding Medicare and abusing executive powers, leveling his strongest criticism to date of an administration whose unpopularity may be dragging the Republican Party to the brink of a massive electoral defeat.
"We just let things get completely out of hand," he said of his own party's rule in the past eight years.
In an interview with The Washington Times, Mr. McCain lashed out at a litany of Bush policies and issues that he said he would have handled differently as president, days after a poll showed that he began making up ground on Sen. Barack Obama since he emphatically sought to distance himself from Mr. Bush in the final debate.
"Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously," Mr. McCain said in an interview with The Washington Times aboard his campaign plane en route from New Hampshire to Ohio.
"Those are just some of them," he said with a laugh, chomping into a peanut butter sandwich as a few campaign aides in his midair office joined in the laughter.
In the interview, Mr. McCain rejected the notion that he could win on the strength of voters who won't vote for a black president.
"I reject categorically the concept that people would, any number of people would vote on the basis of race," he said.
He also hit Mr. Obama for breaking his pledge to take public campaign financing; said Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. has as much as acknowledged that Mr. Obama would make the world more dangerous; and cautioned that while he may be down in the race, he's not out.
"There is one lesson of history, and that is every time we've been written off, that's when we've had a comeback," he said with an emphatic chop of his hand, just after flying out of the state that propelled him to the Republican nomination.
Hugz_n_Kissez Forum Posts (25,438)
The girl you're with now...
RE: Critique my new look and have fun.
Yessssss...Perfect....