George Rebane
Bit by piece America’s Left is unraveling the role of our Constitution as the foundation of our country’s governance. Undoing the legacy of our Founders has now progressed from dancing the progressives’ constitutional sidestep to a growing chorus of calls to do away with the Constitution altogether – a document they see filled with “evil provisions” that has long held us in “bondage”. This is the conclusion that constitutional law professor Louis Seidman presented in his 30dec12 NYT op-ed ‘Let’s Give Up on the Constitution’.
And I don’t think that Seidman is the only academic who has been denigrating the Constitution in our halls of ivy. Progressives have correctly concluded that the Constitution does stand squarely in the way of their desire to fundamentally transform America into the next attempt at a socialist paradise. So, as Seidman, they claim that it is the restrictions of our Constitution that have caused everything from our dire fiscal cliffs (yes, plural) to the heartbreak of psoriasis.
While agreeing that certain parts of the Constitution need to be retained, Seidman advises that we can govern ourselves through some TBD ad hoc process that we make up as we go along. He claims that “(our) obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse”, and asks us to “imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country.” Should such judgments and courses of action be then reviewed in light of the Constitution? Absolutely not, according to this prominent maven of constitutional law.
What Seidman promotes is that politicians who have demonstrated their thin credentials in both knowledge and intellect, and who are overwhelmingly concerned only with increasing their prospects for re-election, it is they who should be the architects of ongoing revisionist government, swaying in the winds of managed public opinion. Most of us learned that this is exactly what foundational documents like our Constitution are supposed to prevent, and why such prevention is necessary if the Republic is to survive.
More considered interpretations of our current troubles show their clear source to be from ignoring the Constitution, and not in excessively hewing to its provisions. Constitutional scholar Professor Rob Natelson has responded to assaults on our Constitution, and did so again in this 4jan13 piece. There he concludes that “America performed brilliantly when constitutional limits were honored. As those limits have eroded, we have lost our edge: Economic growth has slowed, the civic fabric has frayed, and we have fallen into fiscal crisis. The fault, therefore, is not in the Constitution. It rests in politicians who disregard it and in scholars, jurists, and other citizens who encourage them to do so.”
Here is Fox News’ Megyn Kelly interviewing Professor Seidman.
So dear reader, are not such overtures more reason to conclude that we are an irreparably divided people attempting to govern one nation that is of two distinct minds, neither respecting the methods, manners, and morals of the other?
[H/T to a RR reader and regular contributor to the comment streams in these pages for bringing this timely topic to our collective attention.]
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