The primary reasons I see to appeal to the Constitution are as follows:
Appeals to morality or values rely on shared morality or shared values. If I say “forbidding X will improve GDP!”, one can accept my argument as factually correct (forbidding X would improve GDP) but uncompelling (because they would rather X be legal than have higher GDP). Appeals to legality or constitutionality, however, have the shared part mostly taken care of. If forbidding X is unconstitutional, then end of story: forbidding X is not allowed. (Why ‘mostly’ taken care of? Because if the Constitution stands in the way of what people want, they will seek to change or evade the Constitution.)
The chief virtue of the Rule of Law (as contrasted to the Rule of Men) is that people can predict what will happen. In theory, if you read a law, you can predict how a judge will rule on a court case involving that law. (Notice that actual court cases are hard to predict because the sorts of cases that make it to court are the ones where people have differing opinions on how the law works, which typically means that law is difficult to interpret. Most issues of legality never make it to court because they’re clear-cut.) Thus, there is significant indirect value to Doing Things By The Rules, and the fact that the SCOTUS seems to be retreating further and further from Doing Things By The Rules to Doing the Right Thing means that we can’t just argue about rules, but we have to argue about what is the right thing.
Arguments for why a policy is a good idea for America are more relevant than arguments for why a policy is a good idea in general, and thus American policy arguments should be grounded in American policy, which (for most citizens) means grounded in the Constitution (because that one’s short enough they’ve actually read it, as opposed to all the case law since then).
Without espousing one side or the other, I can fairly safely and definitively say the US Constitution does support citizens’ rights to own guns.
That’s not thinking like a lawyer ;)
The question that tore our nation apart was whether or not the federal government had the right to impose abolition of slavery on all the states. I usually side with states’ rights. But slavery is such an abominable practice that in that case I would have considered the constitutional rights of the federal government a non-issue when weighed against the continuation of slavery in the US for a single more day.
Incidentally, this was the most extreme position on the issue at the time. William Lloyd Garrison was nearly lynched, not in a Southern town, but in Boston, in part because the people there (rightly!) saw him as agitating for bloody war to fix a problem that could conceivably be fixed by other means.
One general problem with learning from history is that we only see one of the branches. Garrison, agitating for the end of slavery even at the cost of war, is remembered fondly for helping end slavery, despite that it costed war. But we conceivably could be in a worse timeline than one where the Civil War never happened, and any of dozens of other scenarios played out instead.
The primary reasons I see to appeal to the Constitution are as follows:
Appeals to morality or values rely on shared morality or shared values. If I say “forbidding X will improve GDP!”, one can accept my argument as factually correct (forbidding X would improve GDP) but uncompelling (because they would rather X be legal than have higher GDP). Appeals to legality or constitutionality, however, have the shared part mostly taken care of. If forbidding X is unconstitutional, then end of story: forbidding X is not allowed. (Why ‘mostly’ taken care of? Because if the Constitution stands in the way of what people want, they will seek to change or evade the Constitution.)
The chief virtue of the Rule of Law (as contrasted to the Rule of Men) is that people can predict what will happen. In theory, if you read a law, you can predict how a judge will rule on a court case involving that law. (Notice that actual court cases are hard to predict because the sorts of cases that make it to court are the ones where people have differing opinions on how the law works, which typically means that law is difficult to interpret. Most issues of legality never make it to court because they’re clear-cut.) Thus, there is significant indirect value to Doing Things By The Rules, and the fact that the SCOTUS seems to be retreating further and further from Doing Things By The Rules to Doing the Right Thing means that we can’t just argue about rules, but we have to argue about what is the right thing.
Arguments for why a policy is a good idea for America are more relevant than arguments for why a policy is a good idea in general, and thus American policy arguments should be grounded in American policy, which (for most citizens) means grounded in the Constitution (because that one’s short enough they’ve actually read it, as opposed to all the case law since then).
That’s not thinking like a lawyer ;)
Incidentally, this was the most extreme position on the issue at the time. William Lloyd Garrison was nearly lynched, not in a Southern town, but in Boston, in part because the people there (rightly!) saw him as agitating for bloody war to fix a problem that could conceivably be fixed by other means.
One general problem with learning from history is that we only see one of the branches. Garrison, agitating for the end of slavery even at the cost of war, is remembered fondly for helping end slavery, despite that it costed war. But we conceivably could be in a worse timeline than one where the Civil War never happened, and any of dozens of other scenarios played out instead.