"Lincoln’s nationalism legacy is most discernible in constitutional law, especially the as manifested in the judicial phenomenon of selectively incorporating provisions of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment. Because Fourteenth Amendment due process and equal protection standards apply to all the states equally (“no State shall…”), whatever the Supreme Court decides is a Fourteenth Amendment protection automatically standardizes the policies of all the States in regard to that protection, thereby displacing with national standards what could otherwise be State and regional diversity. Thus, the uniformity of public policy that results from selective incorporation is one answer to Lincoln’s “house divided against itself’ dilemma, insofar as state diversity is supplanted with national standards. The virtually unrestrained power of Congress to regulate the economy literally overwhelms state economic prerogatives.[25] However, in the absence. of Congressional “necessary and proper” and “regulate interstate commerce” (Article I, section8) powers, state police power prerogatives have been somewhat more resistant to judicial nationalization, until, that is, the Twentieth Century judicial distortions about the Fourteenth Amendment’s historical meaning."-Marshall DeRosa
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 23:55:17 +0000
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