Irish voters will decide on Friday whether or not gay and lesbian unions should be recognised by the constitution - a question that has led to weeks of emotive debate.
In a 1995 concurrence, for instance, Justice Clarence Thomas looked to dictionaries from 1773 , 1789and 1796 to determine what the framers of the Constitution meant by "commerce," a question now in play in the challenges to the recent health care law.
He has tried to force landlords to ascertain the immigration status of their tenants, couples to produce Social Security numbers and proof of citizenship before they can be married, and even hospitals to stop issuing birth certificates — never mind the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution — if there is a question about the immigration status of the parents.
I'd be interested in knowing how respondents answer a question like, "The Constitution accords Muslims the right to build a mosque near Ground Zero.
But thousands of pages of scholarship notwithstanding, the right to abortion remains constitutionally shaky; abortion policy is a question that the Constitution -- even broadly construed -- cannot convincingly be read to resolve".
The written constitution in question is a spoof.
A federal appeals court sidestepped a question of whether the Constitution lets federal and state governments deny gay men and lesbians the right to marry.
"The transition to a new system, a new constitution, poses the question of who should be held accountable" for the deeds of preceding system, Mr. Gropp added.
He said the creation of a written constitution - a possible question for the commission he proposed - was "inevitable".
"Democracy is not just a question of voting systems, and having a good constitution," he says, "It is a question of and the English have a wonderful expression for it accepting things which are done and not done.
The constitution in question had recently been created by a Constitutional Assembly which the people had called for with a 92percentt mandate and ratified by popular referendum with 71.8percentt of the vote; not exactly an undemocratic document.
