Slaughtering the Constitution?

P.S. Huff

Writes Prof. Michael McConnell:

This approach [the Slaughter solution] appears unconstitutional. Article I, Section 7 clearly states that bills cannot be presented to the president for signature unless they have been approved by both houses of Congress in the same form. If the House approves the Senate bill in the same legislation by which it approves changes to the Senate bill, it will fail that requirement.

McConnell's argument assumes that the House will be voting on a single piece of legislation. That garbles the issue. In drawing forth the much-maligned Slaughter solution, the House will in fact be considering two bills in a single vote.

I see nothing in the Constitution's text that prohibits a chamber of Congress from passing upon two or more measures in a single vote. The Slaughter solution is a lamentable departure from tradition, but there is nothing unconstitutional about it.

A Common Misspelling?

P.S. Huff

Search Query: constitution canada amendments

Google: "Did you mean: constitution and amendments"

Listening to the Classics on Period Instruments

P.S. Huff

Writes Jan Swafford at Slate.com:

When composers wrote for these instruments they sometimes loved them and sometimes chafed at their limitations, but in any case they wrote for those sounds, that touch, those bells and whistles. From old instruments, performers on modern pianos can get important insights into the sound image that Mozart, Schubert, et al., were aiming for. But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn't just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can't even be played as written on modern pianos. . . .

The prime example of what I'm talking about is perhaps the most famous piece ever written: Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. Hector Berlioz called its murmuring, mournful first movement, "one of those poems that human language does not know how to interpret." At the beginning, Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the sustain pedal through the whole first movement, so the strings are never damped. With the pianos of Beethoven's time, on which the sustain of the strings was shorter than today, the effect was subtle, one harmony melting into another. On a modern piano, with its longer sustain, the effect of holding the pedal down would be a tonal traffic jam. Today you have to fake the effect, and it never quite works as intended. . . . On the Katholnig [piano from around 1805], the effect of holding the pedal down in the "Moonlight" has a ghostly effect, most obvious in the longer-sustaining bass notes that can sound like a distant gong. All these elements of the pianos Beethoven knew shaped the music in the first place, including the way he picked out high and low notes around the murmuring figure in the middle of the keyboard.

Check out the clips—of the Moonlight Sonata, and several other compositions. "Appassionata" is marvelously better on the "restored" pianos.

Truth and Error: A Paradox

P.S. Huff

"It is the underlying fact which gives to fiction its vitality, and error is dangerous in proportion to the amount of truth which it embodies." — Philip Schaff

From History of the Christian Church (rev. ed., 1883), vol. 1, 261.

The Majesty of the King James Version

P.S. Huff

Wrote F.W. Faber, a Roman Catholic:

[W]ho will say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant bible is not one of the great strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on in the ear like a music that never can be forgotten, like the sound of church bells which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities seem often to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of the national seriousness. Nay, it is worshipped with a positive idolatry, in extenuation of whose grotesque fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of letters and the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing which doubt never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. It has been to him all along as the silent, but O how intelligible voice, of his guardian angel; and in the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant, with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible. And all this is an unhallowed power!

From An Essay on the Interest and Characteristics of the Lives of the Saints (1853), 116–17.