Lefties And The Constitution

Libs are suffering the vapors over the GOP's reading of the US Constitution from the floor of the House yesterday.  The most important parts were left out, Dahlia Lithwick complains in her most recent Slate column.

Constitutional Whitewash

What House Republicans left out when they read (parts of) America's founding document.

The House's public reading of the Constitution today opened with a brief but meaningful hiccup. When it became clear that the Constitution would be read in its "most modern, amended form" (i.e., without references to portions that had been superseded by later amendments, including the explicit language in Article 1 that classified slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of congressional apportionment and taxation), several House Democrats raised objections to what was—quite literally—a constitutional whitewash.

Can you imagine!  The brass of those Republicans to leave out parts of the Constitution that are no longer in force!  Libs would like you to know what rotten bastards the founding fathers really were!  What better way than the tried and true liberal strategy for attacking people and ideas they don't like.  Call them racist! 

This is not the first time Lithwick voiced her complaints about Republicans reading the Constitution from the floor of the House.

The problem with the Tea Party's new Constitution fetish is that it's hopelessly selective. As Robert Parry notes, the folks who will be reading the Constitution aloud this week can't read the parts permitting slavery or prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment using only their inside voices, while shouting their support for the 10th Amendment. They don't get to support Madison and renounce Jefferson, then claim to be restoring the vision of "the Framers."

The fact is, libs really don't like the Constitution.  They find it way too constraining on federal power, which is exactly the point Republicans hope to make by reading it.  The federal government needs to be constrained.  If not, our freedoms are not just in jeopardy, they're gone.  What happens if health care reform's individual mandate is allowed to take effect.  What limit will there be on the power of the federal government, if the act of doing nothing -- not buying health insurance -- can be punishable?  What limits federal power if an individual can be forced to buy a product -- in this case health insurance -- from a private company?

But that's what progressives want.  In fact that's the purpose of health care reform.  Expand federal power.  Our liberal leadership in congress didn't do such a red hot job of disguising that fact.  Why else would they claim health care reform would reduce the federal deficit, then instruct the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the impact by counting ten years of revenue against six years of entitlement costs. 

It's smoke and mirrors.  Democrats don't care how much health care reform costs any more than they care about the deficit.  After bitterly complaining about deficits supposedly caused by the Bush tax cuts, Democrats went ahead with tripling the largest deficit incurred during the Bush administration, and they did it two years in a row.  This past year they didn't even bother to pass a budget.  Couldn't be shackled by a budget.

They refused to be bound.  Crises in financial and housing markets were opportunities they seized upon to grab more power.  And to hell with the deficit.  Lefties, liberals, progressives, Democrats, whatever we want to call them, want more power for themselves and will fight tooth and nail against anything that would place limits on it.  The Constitution would place those limits.

So we get a chorus of their complaints and with it the race card.  Here's Alex Altman of Time magazine piling on, likening Republicans to a cult and pointing out how flawed a document the Constitution really is.

Which brings us to today's reading. Is there anything wrong with starting a new session of Congress by reviewing one of America's seminal texts? Not as far as it goes, though as Vanity Fair notes, you could argue it's an expensive use of time: more than $1 million in opportunity cost, by one reckoning. The Constitution is a remarkable document, and eminently worthy of the reverence heaped on it, but it's also flawed. Despite their genius, the framers were fallible. Law professor Sanford Levinson wrote a book called "Our Undemocratic Constitution" which points out some of these flaws-including its treatment of slavery, which the House papered over today.

Altman then proceeds to argue that flawed and undemocratic is just the way Republicans like their Constitution. 

Consider one example of how the Constitution gets hauled out for partisan arguments. At Commentary Magazine today, Pete Wehner, a former Bush Administration and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writes:  "For many modern-day liberals, the Constitution is, at best, a piece of quaint, even irrelevant, parchment." In the context of his argument, this swipe follows from a discussion of how liberals' dismissal of the today's reading as a "gimmick" shows they don't take the document seriously. It eventually leads to a defense of the orginalism, the theory which holds the Constitution should be interpreted according to the original intent of its framers, as best we can surmise them. Its most famous proponent, Justice Antonin Scalia, has argued -- as Wehner points out -- that the problem with treating the Constitution like a living document is that there will never be agreement about how it should evolve, and because it's too messy to make those determinations, it must stay static.

The reality is that the Constitution will not be static, and Republicans don't want it to be.  Republicans are quite happy with changing the Constitution as long as it's done in the way the Constitution itself prescribes.  America has been changing its Constitution for centuries, according to the Constitution. 

But guess what!  When we follow constitutional prescriptions, it's not so easy to change the Constitution, nor should it be.  But that's a big problem for our liberal friends.  Changing it that way just isn't fast enough to suit our lefty friends.  They want what they want right now!  That's why they like progressive activist judges --lefties would call them fair-minded judges -- because they can effect constitutional changes instantaneously.

There's another reason lefties favor consitutional change by judicial activism.  Their ideas and their policies generally suck.  The majority of Americans didn't want the kind of health care reform that has been forced on us by the left.  They've said so, often and loudly.  The majority of Americans are not receptive to the practice of income redistribution that is so dear to leftist hearts.  The majority of Americans favor free markets over a government controlled economy.  How does the progressive minority overrule the majority of Amerians.  Their solution is to attack what would constrain them. 

They attack the Tea Party.  They attack Republicans.  They attack talk radio.  They attack Fox News. 

The Constitution constrains them, so progressives attack it, discredit it, and seek ways around it.  They remind us that the original Constitution said a slave was equal to three-fifths of a free person when adding up the population.  They call Republicans "originalists" implying that in their hearts Republicans are racist, and that there is some hidden nefarious yearning for a return to days when African-Americans were considered less.

But it's all so confusing and contradictory.  They say Republicans are originalists.  But House Republicans chose not to read the original text.  Well, are they or aren't they?  Liberal Democrats don't really care.  They want power.  A stricter reading of the Constitution might put limits on power -- power that progressives believe should rightly be theirs. 

And so today lefty pundits are out in droves professing that no one can possibly know what Constitution means.  For them the Constitution should mean whatever some progressive judge says it means.  Or it should be ignored.  Ignoring it has certainly been the Obama approach.

Comments

[Marian]

Nice rant Dad!! Funny how the constitution is supposed to be static when read from the Congressional floor by Republicans, yet Justice Alito will get blasted by the left for calling it so? Likening that reading to the editing of Mark Twain's work is just ridiculous. I am for one appalled about the linguistic changes made to the book but not by reading the constitution and editing out sections that are no longer applicable today.

[Tom Bowler]

Yeah. As if Republicans are airbrushing slavery out of American history by skipping sections of the constitution. I think it's pretty sickening how lefties are so desperate to prove that America and the constitution are flawed. That democracy itself is flawed. How could it not be, when it permits progressives to be out of power? It's unthinkable -- to progressives.