Normally I would apologize for yelling in my title, but I mean to yell this time. There is another constitutional professor, this time writing in the New York Slimes, about abandoning our Constitution. You can read the liberal tripe here:
Let’s Give Up on the Constitution
This article is fraught with liberal logic and is completely off-track.
Here are just a few examples, with my comments in italics…
1. “Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy?”
Because taxation directly affects WE the People and the House is designed to be immediately responsive to the people.
2. “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.”
No, our obsession with American Idol has saddled us with dysfunctional politicians. Only in America can Congress have a 9% approval rating and have a 93% incumbency re-election rate.
3. “As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is.”
Teaching constitutional law does not make you a constitutional scholar; it makes you a scholar of constitutional case law. Many a lawyer I know says they were never taught the constitution in law school, just constitutional case law. Teaching constitutional case precedence does not translate into learning constitutional principles.
4. “…a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action.”
This is where he shows his true liberal colors with this tired old academic tripe. The brilliance in the Constitution is that it can be amended, for better or for worse. You don’t like it? Change it. The Founders understood the times would change and gave us the safest mechanism for changing our system of government.
5. “Before the Civil War, abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison conceded that the Constitution protected slavery, but denounced it as a pact with the devil that should be ignored.”
The Constitution did not protect slavery; it said it was to be dealt with in 20 years after our nation grew strong enough to deal with it. Was this the best solution? No I don’t believe so but had Congress acted in 1807 on the slavery issue instead of kicking the can down the road for half a century we may have prevented the Civil War. That being said, it was dealt with.
6. “The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity.”
To use the stated examples in his article as positive occurrences of “constitutional infidelity” shows his ignorance in American history, pre-revolutionary times. Our Founders declared that we would be a nation of laws; laws that were based on “the laws of nature and Nature’s God…” as Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence.
Of course he says he wants to keep parts of the Constitution, such as freedom of the press, so he can continue to publish his anti-constitutional tripe.
Very well Mr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University, go ahead and take out your black magic marker and blot out the parts of the Constitution you don’t like and we’ll all fall in line.