28 thoughts on ““The Constitution Is 400 Years Old””

  1. “This is a sign that too many people are voting.”

    You would rather that they live in a tyranny? (Of course not, I know.)

    How about this instead: this is a sign that no one has mounted an effective opposition to Jackson, one which can show why it is better to vote for them instead.

    Or how about: this is a sign that Jackson has plenty of strengths as well as weaknesses (like a great many politicians).

    Or how about (and I think this is very likely): not enough people are voting! Voter apathy is the number one reason for unqualified politicians!

  2. There are different political science theories about what voters are doing when they elect someone. One theory is that they are electing the wiser, better informed, more intelligent of the candidates. That theory is powerfully contradicted by the presence of Ms. Lee and many of her colleagues in Congress.

    Another theory is that they’re electing the person who will better represent their interests. Even astonishing ignorance does not disqualify someone from meeting that standard.

    This is a sign that too many people are voting.

    Only if it is more important that the person in Lee’s office be knowledgeable than that she represent that district’s constituents. If you care about legislators representing their constituents, you want as many of those constituents as possible to vote. If you care more about how knowledgeable or intelligent they are there’s no reason to have an election — you could just have a standardized test and give the seat to the top scorer.

    1. So Jim, the “Somewhere in Texas a Village is Missing an Idiot” bumper sticker: I recently saw one here in the People’s Republic. Do you disavow that kind of thinking now as going against Representative Government and the Proper Expression of Constituent Interests.

      Just wonderin’

    2. Then there are those voters who elect representatives who will loot the treasury and give them free stuff.

  3. Isn’t it, kind-a, sort-a if you go back to Cromwell, the English Civil War, and its influence on the American Founders?

  4. Like some of the statists who regularly post here, Ms. Lee is an example of the dumbing-down of the American Left (granted, a pretty egregious example).

  5. Sheila Jackson Lee is the product of the legalized Gerrymandering outlined in the Voting Rights Act. So long as the goal is to assure black Democrats have a seat in Congress, then her district will be kept safe for her. She won’t be challenged in primaries, because its a waste of money, and while Sheila will say stupid things, she’ll vote likes she told. She won’t be beat in the general election, because she is spotted a double digit handicap by law. So she’s a bought vote for Democrats, and Albatross to hang around the Democrats’ neck for Republicans.

  6. I used to live in Houston, and I was on a Continental flight where Rep Jackson-Lee was in first class. While I am not completely certain if she went off about her seafood meal, she definitely went off about something.

    After getting over my shock at her persistent outrageous behavior, I was completely blown away by the extraordinary patience that the flight attendants displayed for the remainder of the flight, and it was the first and only time I heard folks in first class offer to trade their seat with someone in coach, yet no one took them up on that offer.

    Me and the person I sat next to on the flight agreed she had some very poor potty training, yet she has some serious enablers that allow her to perpetuate that kind of behavior.

      1. LMGTFY,
        “December 16, 1773
        The Boston Tea Party (initially referred to by John Adams as “the Destruction of the Tea in Boston” ) was a political protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, on December 16, 1773.”

        There, how’s that?

          1. I got it, but good to know Bill Dale knew the date. If I recall, several reporters at the time didn’t know the actual date, while they foolishly blasted Sarah Palin’s ignorance. Acting like a fool and displaying ignorance seems to be DN-guy’s daily joy on this blog.

        2. Indeed she does. Paul Revere warned the British about what they were up against after they captured him. In 1798 he wrote about what happened when he was apprehended by the British.

          Paul Revere: [An officer] asked me if I was an express? I answered in the afirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and aded, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up.

          So according to Paul Revere, Paul Revere warned the British that we were coming.

  8. This is a sign that too many people are voting.

    The Founders knew that democracy is not a stable form of government, which is why they tried to restrict the privilege (not right) of voting to the best-educated and most responsible members of society. Over the years the Republic has been steadily whittled away and replaced with a nearly pure democracy. The result has been exploding entitlement programs and ever-expanding debt as far as the eye can see. I don’t think the Founders would be the least bit surprised if they could see our situation today. On the contrary, they would say, “We told you so.”

    Half of the population is on the left side of the IQ bell curve. I think it would be very instructive if a study were done matching IQ with voting habits.

    1. IQ may not measure intelligence, but it certainly does measure whatever it is that all those liberal college professors are very capable of demonstrating.

      Same goes for people who identify their profession as “scientist”:
      A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest “don’t know” their affiliation.

      1. I would like to see party affiliation for Engineers. you know, Engineers, they are a lot like Scientists except when they screw-up people die so it tends to quickly weed out incompetence instead of giving it Tenure.

        1. I would like to see party affiliation for Engineers. you know, Engineers, they are a lot like Scientists except

          I know quite a few engineers, and I would guess that some good proportion lean libertarian if not conservative. But I don’t agree that engineers are a lot like scientists. The fact that scientists might lean more progressive may have nothing to do with cultural indoctrination into academia. It may have a lot to do with people who read factual data outside the narrow confines of applied science draw similar conclusions about how the world works.

  9. I suspect the high level of democrat voting scientists has more to do with their extended time in college, surrounded by leftist politics and culture. I recall having read a study into this in a broader context that showed time in college was positively correlated with leftist voting patterns.

    2. Scientists would consider themselves part of the Reality-Based community

      “The aide [Karl Rove] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

  10. I work in Jackson’s district. She has nothing to worry about as most of the people living there don’t have the capacity to know how stupid she is.

  11. Having spent most of my life in academia/education, I have seen first-hand the strong selection pressures against anything except hard-left viewpoints. An ‘out’ conservative scientist has very little chance of ever obtaining tenure or a tenure-track job, IMHO.

    Also, young scientists generally go straight from college to grad school to postdoc to tenure-track job. They have little experience in the ways of the real world, little chance to learn that post-normative Marxian whatever theory doesn’t actually work.

    1. The GOP used to be run by College Professors, Gingrich, Armey, Cole.

      now the GOP is run by college dropouts.

      1. Ted Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton and magna cum laude from Harvard Law. Rand Paul got his MD from Duke.

        I think one reason so few conservatives list themselves as “scientists” is that they tend to think of themselves according to their specialties. They are chemists, metallurgists, economists, or genetic engineers. It’s the people in academia who would be more likely to self-identify as just “scientist” because it distinguishes them from English or art professors (I’m a professor who can do some math and statistics!)

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