Speaking as a lawyer, I would say that upwards of 99% of the comments in this thread are full of crap; people confidently throwing around opinions or even supposed-knowledge without any real knowledge of constitutional law. The disheartening thing is, I know HN participants tend to be more intelligent than the average person. It makes me marvel at how our nation functions at all.
Yes, and I used 'smart' but what I actually meant is 'well-informed'. Doesn't even matter if they're smart, but a well-informed person should have a basic grasp of how constitutional law works.
Some basic problems in this thread:
1. The U.S. Constitution does not exist in a vacuum. You can't just read it and make a pronouncement on what it means. It has been applied and interpreted by the courts for over two hundred years, and case law, especially Supreme Court cases, are necessary parts of understanding the Constitution. I'd have to look again, but I don't think there's a single comment in this thread where case law is used to provide authority/support for someone's assertions. In other words, people are just spouting off with irrelevant crap. (All of this is true regardless of what Scalia or anyone else says about "plain meaning"; their plain meaning is often not plain to others (need to look at cases), and/or they pick and choose what they think is plain and what's not).
2. It may seem counterintuitive, but there is no such thing as an "absolute" right. At least not in any human legal system. Rights sometimes conflict with other rights (in which case at least one needs to be limited), rights are (and always have been) limited when they conflict with what courts determine to be a "compelling" government interest (need to read case law and reason by legal analogy to understand if any particular situation may rise to level of "compelling" interest), and they can be limited in less restrictive ways when the government's interest does not rise to the level of being "compelling". In other cases we may speak of a right as being absolute, e.g., right against "cruel and unusual punishment", but it should be obvious to anyone in U.S. over last ten years that that right depends on how courts interpret "cruel and unusual", i.e, it's flexible.
Those, I think, are two main things. But, really, without my even saying those it should be clear to anyone reading this thread that it's conducted at the level of two (earnest but uninformed and perhaps inebriated) college freshman debating late at night in their dorm room.
3. Another smaller thing. In some cases people in this thread have tried to interpet the language of the Constitution. Many of these attempts at interpretation are laughably bad, don't involve careful reading. If people coded with such little attention to detail programs would be crashing right and left. (Of course, the text of the Constitution is not program code, like any laws laid out in human language they're subject to interpretation, often misinterpretation.)
