The
States' Rights thing is a major concern. The
popular orthodoxy nowadays is all in favor of
States' Rights, but you have to bear in mind the fact that the same people who are saying this, are also saying that
violent overthrow of the government is just good clean fun. Well, regardless of
Thomas Jefferson's offhand remarks on the subject, the
Constitution has some things to say about
violent overthrow of the government and they're mostly pretty negative. We have stiff penalties for
treason, last I heard. Are they
unconstitutional? Is the supreme law of the land the
Constitution, or
the words of the prophet Jefferson? People get those two a little bit mixed up. Jefferson wasn't the only hand in the pot, and his
pithy epigrams are not what was ratified by the states. Just because all the guys you hang out with at the bar (or in the bunker) are fond of a particular fashionable interpretation of the
Constitution does not make it
reasonable or even sane. Fashions in thought change. This is why the justices serve for life: To inject a little stability.
The
Constitution replaced the
Articles of Confederation because the
Articles of Confederation (which we are fortunate enough to have noded
in their entirety)
sucked. They didn't work. They didn't provide for a
central government sufficiently strong to keep the nation intact, to defend against our enemies, or to do damn-all else. It was a mess, and that's why they junked the first attempt within a decade of establishing it.
And the relevance of
Amendment XIV hardly strikes me as a "stretch" at all; not having read the entirety of
Justice Rehnquist's opinion, I can't get real definitive here, but it sure looks to me as if
Amendment XIV is saying that when the states can't be bothered to protect the rights of citizens, the federal government has a legitimate excuse for getting involved. This is not at all far-fetched given the wording of that
Amendment. The exact wording of the
Violence Against Women Act and of
Amendment XIV may boil down to the
VAWA being
unconstitutional, but there's no flashing sign in plain view which makes it obvious.
Finally, off on a bit of a tangent: The "complicity" thing is genuinely bizarre. It may be
stupid to get drunk and go into somebody's room, but that hardly justifies
criminal assault. If I walk in a bad neighborhood after dark, I may be a goddamn idiot for going there, but I still get to press charges if I get
mugged. A crime is a crime, regardless of whether the victim should have had sense enough to avoid the
perpetrator. The question of whether the victim deserves sympathy (when I got mugged in the above circumstances, I got and deserved none) is entirely unrelated to whether or not the attacker should be punished. "Why did you mug that guy?" "
Everybody else was doing it, your honor." "Hm, so they were, so they were. Well, son, you're free to go."