The majority of Democrats, polls suggest, have followed roughly the same path as the former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh, a staunch critic of Bush's wartime policies who now serves as a legal adviser to the State Department, supplying constitutional justifications for Obama's drone campaigns.
Continuing, "But, just as you don't have an individual right to by an F-15, if you're a billionaire, with ordinance on it, just like you don't have the right to buy an M1 tank, just like you don't have the right to buy an automatic weapon, those judgements have been made that there are no reasonable societal justifications or constitutional justifications for owning them".
The principal constitutional justification for the individual mandate is the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the right to regulate commerce among the states.
Drafting a bill, however, will require conservatives to resolve a fundamental disagreement: how to find constitutional justification for a nationwide ban despite their reservations about giving the government broad regulatory powers.
More recently, in a dissenting opinion, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by three other Justices, offered still another constitutional justification for a woman's right to choose, under a different part of the Fourteenth Amendment: the equal-protection clause.
The issue is not whether they have advocated violence against the government, but rather whether they have constructed a constitutional justification for violence.
Yet in cases like al-Aulaqi there is no accountability so long as the government is careful to assert arguments which offer a constitutional justification for targeted killings -- that the person posed an imminent threat which could be dealt with no other way -- and the courts refuse to exercise oversight.
After the referendum, Kilpatrick and now Byrd, too, began pressing for an even stronger legislative response, based on the constitutional justification of interposition.
Treating same-sex couples differently for federal law benefits, privileges and responsibilities has no constitutional justification even under the lowest standard of review - rational basis.
Personhood opens a new front in the battle; it attacks Roe's constitutional justification head on.
Laws like Proposition 8, they argue, do nothing to promote stability in heterosexual marriages and, besides, have no constitutional justification.
