Quote:
sneddog
Please explain how the Louisiana purchase and the creation of an Air Force are against the original intent of the constitution?
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He can't, because he doesn't know wtf he is blathering on about...and also because they are not against either the original "intent" or the original understanding.
The Louisana Purchase was a TREATY, and land acquisition was one of the many long-established and perfectly accepted purposes of treaties when the Constituion was written, ergo, the Louisiana purchase was clearly within the Treaty making powers of the federal government.
As for the Air Force, as has been indicated previously is simply a semantic organizational distinction. A long standing principle of jurisprudence is such semantic distinctions if the exact same substantive actions could otherwise be achieved (for example, we could have all the same planes, equipment and personel which comprise the "Air Force" as a division of the Army and/or Navy, hence it is merely an organizational/semantic distinction rather than a substantive one.
The underlying premise of challenging the existence of the Air Force under originalism/textualism is that it confuses this theory of jurisprudence with "strict constructionism", which originalists do NOT hold to. The question before a modern judge vis-a-vis the Air Force would be to determine which of the two possibly relevant clauses of Article 1, Section 8 would control its jurisprudence over the Air Force (the only distinction being that there is a 2-year limitation on appropriations for the Army, but not for the Navy, and this becomes wholly irrelevant given the modern practice of annual appropriation). For the record, I believe that the Air Force should be governed by the principles which cover the Navy in the Constitution (the limitation of duration of appropriations for the Army were based on the founders clear recognition that any prolonged systematic threat of tyranny requires troops, and could not be maintained by a Navy--or an Airforce), although I am open to the argument that the airforce is more akin to a troops with regard to this threat.