Totally Constitutional Lifetime President

It seems that everyone (other than me) agrees that the only body that is able to read and interpret the Constitution is the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).

So, Article II, section 1 of the constitution says, "
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, [...]"

The question is: Can SCROTUS interpret the meaning of the word "year"? Can they interpret the word "year" to mean 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hours?

 

What a silly question. Why would they do that?

 

Regardless of why they would do it, they can, right?

 

Where did you get this hair-brained idea?

 

You didn't answer the question. Can SCROTUS interpret the meaning of the word "year"?

 

Under what logic? How can a year be re-interpreted?

A year is based on the Gregorian calendar. It's a universal standard.

 

Maybe because Trump is the best president ever, who would want him to term limit out?

 

I've been told that only SCOTUS can interpret the constitution. So how is it possible that we, and not they, know what a year really is?

 

Still not following your train of logic.

If you're basing this on some court case or other bit of news, post a link, because you're not establishing anything to discuss seriously.

 

You're not following? Okay, let me start over.

I've been told that nobody other than SCOTUS has the authority to tell us what the words in the constitution mean.

The word "year" is a word in the constitution.

So, whatever SCOTUS says the word "year" means is the law of the land, correct?

 

Okay, so now I know you're not playing with a full deck. Good luck.

 

That's twice you've avoided the question.

Let's take this one step at a time.

I've been told that nobody other than SCOTUS has the authority to interpret the constitution. Are you one of those who is of this opinion?

 

Provide an example of when the SCOTUS has EVER re-interpreted basic universally accepted concepts, such as time.

 

I didn't say they have done so. I'm saying they could do so.

But you didn't answer my first in a series of questions: I've been told that nobody other than SCOTUS has the authority to interpret the constitution. Are you one of those who is of this opinion?

 

No, they could not.

The SCOTUS interprets law when lower courts have offered differing opinions. The courts do not interpret or change the meaning of common concepts. They interpret law and how laws are applied to given situations. What part of that do you not understand?

Is this how you have amassed over 9,000+ posts? By throwing out lame threads?

The SCOTUS does not define the length of a day, the days in a year, or whether gravity sucks downward. There is no logical reason to believe they would change the definition of a year for the purpose of a presidential term to be greater or less than the 1,460 days of a presidential term.

 

So, if the current president refused to step down, and claimed that his term was not over because a year was actually 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hours, and someone sued, and the court agreed with the president that a year was 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hours, then what would happen?

 

Since the word "year" is a social construct it can be bent and changed however one wants to interpret it.

 

Was the first copy in English or in some clandestine language that works completely differently than English and Romance languages?

 

Hence the totally constitutional lifetime president.

 

I've been told that only the SCOTUS can interpret the constitution. Marbury v. Madison or something like that. So they can interpret the meaning of the legal definition of "year", correct?

 

It's a silly way to raise the question, but it does nevertheless raise the question of how Supreme Court justices define and interpret words and what we might do if we disagree with a surpeme court ruling based on such an interpretation (selected definition) of a word. I would have to guess it then would fall back on the legislative branch to draw up and enact more agreeable legal definitions.


https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/us/14bar.html

WASHINGTON — In a decision last week in a patent case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. puzzled out the meaning of a federal law by consulting the usual legal materials — and five dictionaries.

One of the words he looked up was “of.” He learned that it means pretty much what you think it means.

In May alone, the justices cited dictionaries in eight cases to determine what legislators had meant when they used words like “prevent,” “delay” and “report.” Over the years, justices have looked up both perfectly ordinary words (“now,” “also,” “any,” “if”) and ones you might think they would know better than the next guy (“attorney,” “common law”).

All of this is, lexicographers say, sort of strange.

“I think that it’s probably wrong, in almost all situations, to use a dictionary in the courtroom,” said Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. “Dictionary definitions are written with a lot of things in mind, but rigorously circumscribing the exact meanings and connotations of terms is not usually one of them.”

J. Gordon Christy, a professor at the Mississippi College School of Law, surveyed the scene in 2006, and he did not like what he saw. “We are treated,” Mr. Christy wrote in The Mississippi Law Journal, “to the truly absurd spectacle of august justices and judges arguing over which unreliable dictionary and which unreliable dictionary definition should be deemed authoritative.”

In the last two decades, the use of dictionaries at the Supreme Court has been booming.

...

Justices who try to discern the original meaning of the Constitution sometimes consult older dictionaries, which makes sense given that usage may have shifted over time.

In a 1995 concurrence, for instance, Justice Clarence Thomas looked to dictionaries from 1773, 1789 and 1796 to determine what the framers of the Constitution meant by “commerce,” a question now in play in the challenges to the recent health care law. (They meant, Justice Thomas found, “selling, buying and bartering, as well as transporting for these purposes.”)

The case for using dictionaries to determine the meaning of modern statutes is weaker, in part because the materials consulted by the people who compile definitions can skew the results. A 1988 survey of the lexicographic staffs of five publishers concluded that “the ‘polite press,’ with The New York Times at its pinnacle” is “the single most powerful influence in constituting the record of the English lexicon.”

A decade later, Ellen P. Aprill, who teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, considered the implications of that finding in an article on “dictionary shopping in the Supreme Court.”

“It may also be a surprise to the Supreme Court justices who look to dictionaries as authorities in construing statutes,” Ms. Aprill wrote in the Arizona State Law Journal, “that in good measure they are interpreting law according to The New York Times.”

 

SCOTUS 'could' interpret 'year' as suggested by the OP.

It won't.

 

If it was in Hebrew "day" could mean 24 hours or an aeon, but I don't know if that works for "year." Since the day of Earl the Pearl Warren it can pretty much mean whatever the hell they say it means in their wizardry practice, can't it?

 

I know exactly what you mean and yes he can 'interpret' any word he wants and in fact does so often. For example when he says, "Nobody has been tougher on Russia than me", he might be interpreting the word "tougher" to mean, "softer" or possibly, "wimpier". But the thing is, no one else is obligated to humour the loon, including our Supreme Court.

Have you been listening to Fox again? Republicans are now reduced to fantasizing about a bloodless coup d'état?!? I suppose a few pulled their heads out of the sand and can see the train wreck coming in 2018.

So no, while his suck-ups would love life in a dictatorship (all that law and order, they'd feel like they were in heaven), Don can't interpret our Constitution any damn way he chooses. No matter how badly he would like to declare himself "President for Life"....

 

Sorry, but I was talking about the supreme court, not the president.