Baselessly accusing your own Miss Shoots of partisan hypocrisy is uncalled for. You don’t know me well enough to even know my gender, yet you believe you can detect nefarious, left-wing political motivations behind my ability to distinguish factual errors from wrong opinions, and legal briefs from op-eds? If you are going to call me the epigoni I will be forced to call you a peasant with a pitchfork. It ain’t my idea of debate, but when in Rome…

I ask you to point to any evidence in my posts that liberal hypocrisy and slavish loyalty to the NY Times are to blame for my opinion that the corrections page is for factual errors only. Not for retracting opinions expressed in editorials with which you happen to disagree, or for catering to ever-vigilant nitpickers who conspire to rationalize holding the Times’ op-eds to a unique standard of 0% poetic license, while giving a pass to far more tortured hyperbole in op-eds in The NY Post, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal almost daily.

For instance, did you know that al Qaeda is NOT actually a branch of the Democratic Party? You’d never know from checking the corrections page of The Washington Times! And you accuse ME of hypocrisy? Freud would call that projection.

I appreciate the arguments being made — that the author said “right” and not “rights” is particularly profound — yet I can’t lose sight of the fact that this is an opinion piece, and the guy was just giving his opinion that the vets have a constitutional right to this health care. If you and he ever get the chance to argue this before the Supreme Court, we’ll see who’s right. Until then, it’s moot, which is why you need to content yourselves with raising torches and pitchforks against his sloppy shorthand and sentence structure.

Had the Times put “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in quotes, I would agree it suggested the exact phrase appears in the Constitution. I would agree that it validates your call for a correction.

But it didn’t, it only claimed those three separate things are constitutional rights, and all three HAVE been recognized as such by the Court. So apparently your position is that the corrections page must point out that there should have been an “s” at the end of the word “right,” and that the Times regrets this omission. Keep up this good and important work.

The Constitution can be amended by Americans. The Declaration of Independence cannot. The Constitution, like the Articles of Confederation before it, is disposable by Americans. The Declaration is not. It defines American.

The Declaration founds as axiom that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men. To be American is to hold these truths to be immutably and undeniably self-evident.

The Constitution is the blue-print of one such organization “instituted among Men” to “secure these rights.” Government is no more the author of these certain unalienable Rights than one’s wristwatch is the author of time. To pretend otherwise is to spit into patriots’ blood since Lexington Green and so excommunicate from the very definition of American.

What Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said of “human dignity” in a recent speech can be said in paraphrase of the Declaration’s “certain unalienable Rights”:

“They are not a government’s grant to its citizens nor mankind’s gift to one another; they are God’s endowment to all humanity.”

Having a ZIP code or holding a U.S. passport indicate only that one is a recognized occupier of space here. Holding oneself proudly to an allegiant understanding of the Declaration is sine qua non American.

Q.E.D.

It’s not surprising that NYT epigoni would defend the Grey Lady.

At least one of three assumptions has to be accepted, for the NYT & its true believers to be right.

(1) In the Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments’ use of the term “life, liberty, or property”, which is closer to the original Lockean formulation than Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence phrase quoted by the NYT as part of the Constitution, the word “property” equals “pursuit of happiness” “Um, ‘property’; that word you keep using; I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Any posit that the fact that Tom Jefferson in his phrasing changed Locke’s word “property” to “pursuit of happiness”, an entirely more expansive concept means that “property” somehow equals “pursuit of happiness” & thus arguing that the NYT’s egregious misquote is not a misquote at all does not pass the old Hee Haw test. Unless one’s arguments are based on the “whatever” school of logic.

Heck why not argue that the Preamble to the Constitution includes the phrase “general welfare”, which term = “pursuit of happiness”?

(2) The Constitution incorporates all the terms of the Declaration of Independence, including “pursuit of happiness” (“Ontology Recapitulates Philology”). This claim is contradicted by the fact that many secular humanists, secular progressives have used the fact that that the Constitution makes no reference to God as a trump card in their war against religion in the Public Square, & all you Yahoos out there, you poor benighted religious fundamentalists nevermind that that the D of I does refer to a Deity. (BTW the Constitution does mention “our Lord”; see Art VII!) As Sydney Carlton might say about NYT writers, editors & alleged fact checkers: “Father, Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” What, Jesus said that? Nevermind, Sydney recapitulated Christ’s dying on the cross!

(3) Meyer v. Nebraska (“that [XIV Amendment]liberty [denotes the right of the individual]…generally to enjoy privileges, essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness of free men”) is proof that the NYT is “not exactly wrong” in using the exact phrasing from the D of I as if it were in the Constitution. This, if not exactly obfuscating, is tortured weaseling. Legally speaking, if one, in order to be au courant, has the right to add McReynold’s penumbra or emendation (can never quite get ‘em straight) of Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” to The Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments’ wording, shouldn’t he (the NYT writer) say “life, liberty, including the pursuit of happiness, & property”? Or here just “pursuit of happiness” since no one is allegedly taking Life or other liberties away?

What did Churchill say: “blood, toil,including devotion to duty, tears, sweat, & victory”? Well no…. But he did say all those words. Well yes, but just not in one pithy packed phrase.

For some reason a scoffing at such NYT inanities often results in charges of “wingnut”, “fanatic”, & “pedantry”. Or a dismissive “understandable”, “close enough”, & now, legally acceptable, or the cant phrase, “whatever”. Or perhaps a deconstructionist, Humpty-Dumpty approach to language. Politics aside, I suggest that the battle is worth continuing for the sake of clarity of thought.

Of course if Bush, Reagan, or some other Republican had said “constitutional right — to life, liberty and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ ”, the MSM, & the comedians, Stewart, Leno, & Letterman, as well as our Mr. Shoots would be all over them.

QED, the NYT needs better fact checkers & should be embarrassed. Neither will happen.

In any event, rather than stonewalling, perhaps the NYT can publish a note with all the defenses made in this thread & say “in our opinion our statement was not wrong”.

“The phrase comes from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.”

Variations of the phrase predate 1776, from John Locke (”life, health, liberty, or possessions”) Adam Smith (”life, liberty, and the pursuit of property”), and Samuel Johnson (”the pursuit of happiness”).

The elements and sentiments of the phrase were not new or unique to Jefferson or to the Declaration of Independence. Their inclusion in the Constitution is to be expected, and there they are.

What “correction” is needed to the statement “[there is a] constitutional right…to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” apart from it possibly being wrongly applied to the case at hand?

Excellent. Next time I write a brief, I’ll make sure to rely on the constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness. Let’s see how far it gets me.

Sure, something kinda-like what the Times says can be constructed, with enough effort, out of other parts.

For instance, you can go to the Fifth Amendment and find due process protection for life, liberty, property. We all know this.

The Times doesn’t seem to be doing this, though. Take a look at the Times language:

“But that’s to care for them as human beings, under that other constitutional right — to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Not rights. Right. A single right, apparently, to a package that includes life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And as I note in the post, such a unitary right does not exist in the constitution.

Why try to salvage the Times’ obvious error?

Apply Occam’s Razor. Sure, it is theoretically possible that a Times writer decided to reference the Fifth Amendment, copy part of it out (life and liberty) while leaving out other parts (property), obliquely refer to dicta from Meyer v. Nebraska, and for some reason combine those ingredients and call it all one big singular-form constitutional right.

Or, maybe they mixed up the documents.

Which do you think happened?

I apologize if I wasn’t clear enough. I did not defend the opinion of the sadly mistaken author; that may account for why my “argument is not very persuasive.” My arguments are generally far more persuasive when I actually make some.

You, and others here, have confused two issues: 1) whether vets have a constitutional right to a suicide watch list, and 2)whether a constitutional right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” EVER exists.

The first is a matter of opinion, while the second is a matter of historical record. As I pointed out, the due process clause expressly protects life and liberty, while many Supreme Court opinions over the years have reaffirmed that these, as well as the pursuit of happiness (as described by the court), ARE CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED when recognized.

That is enough to refute Wenger’s sweeping claim that “there is no constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He doesn’t specify “in this particular case;” he makes an absolute statement which must apply to EVERY case or it is false.

The “Corrections” page addresses wrong facts, not wrong opinions. In order for a factual correction to be warranted here, it must be true that there is no constitutional protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness EVER, that the elements of that phrase must not appear as protected rights in the Constitution (two of the three do), and the three elements must have never been cited by the Supreme Court as a constitutionally protected right in any case (they all have been).

As for first year law students, if you find them irrelevant, scold Mr Wenger for bringing them up; I only repeated his own second paragraph opening.

Even with this adjustment your argument is not very persuasive; I agree with the posters who argue that the editorial author is sadly mistaken. What a “Fist year law student” knows or does not know is not relevant here either. The subtext in all this discussion is that constitutional rights are frankly pretty hard to discern sometimes, even for lawyers. Constitutional rights seem to be often misrepresented in the media and consequently misunderstood by the public. The Times has some civic responsibility to maintain a minimum level of accuracy with regard to sources of law and the limitations placed on our government by the Constitution.

http://instapundit.com/archives2/008840.php

p.s.

p.p.s. Thanks for making stats tracker open.

Newspapers do not have fact checkers. See my post here:

http://jeremylott.net/?p=991

The 14th Amendment says, “No state … shall deprive any person of LIFE, LIBERTY or property without due process of law.” That’s two of the three elements expressly enumerated, so there can be no argument but that Wenger’s claim “there is no constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is at least 66.666% false.

As for the pursuit of happiness, the US Supreme Court has expressly cited it (as well as life and liberty) as a constitutionally protected right in several court opinions over the years. Meyer v Nebraska, e.g., cites “the right of the individual…generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS by free men.”

Better luck next time. : )

It says way too much about the Times’ priorities.