quote:Originally posted by Achilles: Simpsons did it better.
True story, I just spent 20 minutes trying to find a link to the actual video but Fox has done an enthusiastic job of getting rid of all traces of it on the internet. You can find the lyrics easily enough and there's a copy of it on youtube with just the sound.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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My favourite part about the Simpsons parody was that it was used, straight, in a Mervyn's commercial.
A few years back Mervyn's had a back-to-school sales and branded it with Schoolhouse Rock stuff.
They had a commercial and you briefly heard the singing bill say "there's a lot of..." which is actually a line from the Simpsons parody version, not the real one at all!
The full quote is "there's a lot of flag-burners who have got too much freedom, I wanna make it legal for policemen to beat 'em..."
Posts: 454 | Registered: Mar 2005
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My AP teacher showed us that video to explain how a bill becomes a law when we got up to the Constitution. I really don't think the framers had the stimulus bill in mind when they wrote the constitution...
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Question: Why do people have an obsession with what the founding fathers had in mind? Were they these infallible gods?
Posts: 2705 | Registered: Sep 2006
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When one is in a history class and gets up to the constitution the focus is what the framers intended. Any supplementary material is remembered in that context. The proper question would be: why don't we have unbiased and infallible godlike memories?
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quote:Originally posted by JonHecht: Question: Why do people have an obsession with what the founding fathers had in mind? Were they these infallible gods?
The issue isn't infallibility. A constitution is different than a law. It's what defines the nation and its government. For example, George Washington wasn't the first President of the United States. Technically, he was the seventh. But the previous six were all President while we were under the Articles of Confederation. Different office, different government, and basically, different country.
The idea of the Constitution was that it defined the structure of how the government works. It provided for a means to change things in the Constitution. That's called amending it. We should not be able to do things contrary to the Constitution without amending it.
That's why a lot of people consider it important to consider the intent of the framers. Because it was that intent, and the way the document was understood at the time, which the people of the United States ratified into being. It's not just a jumble of words that can be interpreted into things that clearly go against the intent of the framers. Using the commerce clause, for example, to completely override the 9th and 10th amendments... it's a horrible thing. If people wanted to repeal those amendments, they should have gone at it straightforwardly, rather than try and trick their way around them. But they knew they would never succeed in doing so, so they did it the tricky way.
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