SCOTUS impeachment

[Schmitz in 1972]

Looks like there's a lot of misinformation about what the Constitution says. I'll clear things up a bit. I'll preface these remarks by saying that most of the arguments I'll make are no longer applicable as per previous judicial shredding of the constitution.

1. The argument that the 5th amendment doesn't apply to the states is absurd. While most amendments deal with the powers of the government, the language of the amendment makes it perfectly clear that it deals only with the right of the individual. The rights listed in the 5th amendment are rights that all people have and cannot be deprived of by any level of government, federal, state, county, or local. If the amendment in question were the 1st amendment, which is clearly prefaced with "Congress shall make no law regarding...", I would be forced to agree with A18 that the amendment doesn't apply to the states (in fact, Massachusetts had a state church well into the 19th century).

2. However, the key passage in amendment 5 is "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." One could argue that in this case, the property was being taken for private use rather than public, and is thus not under the jurisdiction of the 5th amendment. The only answer to this argument is that the right is found in the 9th amendments "other [rights] retained by the people." I'm inclined to agree that the right is found in the 9th amendment, otherwise common standards of justice would be set back several centuries.

[Schmitz in 1972]

I would argue that most of the Bill of Rights does apply to the states as well as the federal government. The 1st amendment says; "Congress shall make no law..."  Congress specifically applies to the legislative branch of the federal government. So the First Amendment is clearly aimed at the federal government. But the 5th amendment contains no such qualifier. It protects property rights from all governments.

Article I, Section 9.
Clause 3: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

Article I, Section 10.
Clause 1: No State shall ... pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or ...

The thing about amendments is that it is not always clear where in the Constitution they belong. Your example comes from article I, where the focus is indeed on the powers of congress. However, in amendments unless it begins with the qualifier "congress" or ends with the phrase "congress shall have the power to enforce this article through appropriate legislation" we can not make such assumptions. The fact that the first is prefaced by "congress" but the fifth is not is very telling. Congress could have proposed the 12 amendments in bulk as one superamendment, but they didn't, they were proposed as 12 individual ones having no relation to each other. Also the first was originally the third proposed amendment, doubly reinforcing that the congress qualifyer in the first applies only to the first and not to others. Therefore, the fifth amendment stands alone, independent of any qualifiers that other sections of the Constitution has. I stand by my earlier comments

 As for Barron v. Baltimore, when the plain text of the Constitution answers a question there is no longer any need to look at Supreme Court cases, and when any Supreme Court ruling is contrary to the plain text of the Constitution it carries no weight whatsoever.

[Schmitz in 1972]

Try reading that again:

Article I, Section 9.
Clause 3: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

Article I, Section 10.
Clause 1: No State shall ... pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or ...[/b]

Both are in Article I. By your laughable standard, the second is reduced to redundency.

not really, the first is in a section of article one where it is still speaking of the powers of congress, the second is prefaced by "state" and is furthermore in a section that speaks of states

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Because of the sections the first passage is in the qualifier of congress is implied. As for the second, along with it being implied by the section it's in the qualifier of "state" is present! The fifth amendment is in no larger section however.

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No, because you would have only taken my gun, not my right to a gun since I could just go out and buy a new one.

EDIT: I'm not really up to debating this anymore, so refute it if you wish, but my non-response to such a refutation comes from my tiring from this debate rather than my lack of an answer

[Schmitz in 1972]

Once again I find myself having to use the tired old phrase of you were right and I was wrong. Indeed after doing more reading on the origins of the Bill of Rights I've been forced to conclude that the fifth amendment does indeed apply only to the federal government. However, I must say that amendments 2-8 were very poorly worded in how they allowed for such easy misinterpretation in the manner that I did.