Bill of Rights project

[Ostrinski]

I have to do a paper and a speech on one amendment of the Bill of Rights (first ten amendments of the United States constitution) for my history class. It includes a discussion of the meaning of the right, any Supreme Court case over the right, and then finally our interpretation and analysis of it.

I was wondering if you all could help me pick one and also gives some tips on how to conduct a Marxian historical materialist analysis of the topic as well as constitutionalism in general.

[JPSartre12]

I would say to do the paper on the 2nd Amendment. Not only is the issue of gun control vs gun rights all very prominent in the news right now, there was also a thread that I saw the other day regarding Marxist-Leninism and guns.

[Ostrinski]

Everyone is gonna do the second amendment. I want to do a different one.

[Geiseric]

Well you could talk about how its only in effect when the state wants it to be, and that the idea of rights is bourgeois.

[Ostrinski]

Yes Broody I was thinking just that. Does anybody have a link to a Marxist refutation of the bourgeois conception of rights?

[Os Cangaceiros]

I've always been interested in the 4th amendment. Between the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror", it's been undermined pretty drastically by the state.

[Ostrinski]

The third amendment is, I think, the only amendment in the Bill of Rights that has never been undermined or violated. Probably because there have only been a couple military conflicts on US soil since its drafting with the civil war being the only major one.

[kashkin]

How about the first amendment, looking at bourgeois notions of free speech? And how some types of 'speech' (anti-war, anti-state, etc) have been restricted by the state for its own purposes.

[Questionable]

I think it would be interesting to talk about how the first amendment has become a completely abstract and de jure amendment in the world of growing mass media where speech is a commodity.

[Ostrinski]

I might just do the first amendment and talk about things like the Red Scare, the anti-war protests of WWI, etc. That is an interesting point as well Questionable, definitely worth a look-into.

[Red Commissar]

Some areas that come to mind

-Aforementioned topic of first amendment rights, and how the government curtailed those in time of war without much meaningful opposition (outside those getting targeted, of course), and how the Supreme Court okayed it.

-The Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment", and how that has come into conflict with the death penalty. You might want to point out how Furman v. Georgia decided to essentially ban death penalties based on the eighth amendment in 1972, only to overturn it four years later in Gregg. v Georgia.

-The vague nature of the ninth amendment.

-The 10th Amendment is pretty good too for this, considering how it has often come into the foray when it came down to the federal structure of the United States. You could bring up the case of southern slave states who often employed the amendment to try and protect their government actions, but did not balk at then using federal government power to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in other states. Pretty much any court case over the powers of the federal government ends up involving this as a counter to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. It was invoked many times by states with Republican-dominated legislatures in response to the stimulus and later the healthcare reform act in their attempts to put legal challenges to it.

[Ostrinski]

Other than The Democratic Principle by Amadeo Bordiga, are there any other Marxist texts that take bourgeois constitutionalism into consideration and make an analysis of it?