A response:
…there always have been American Tories—people who chafe at restraints on central power and would prefer a British-style government. In recent years, as political “progressives” have gradually lost the scholarly battle over constitutional interpretation, some have stopped pretending the Constitution means whatever they want it to, and have begun to trash the document itself.
But the source of the claim is more shocking, because it comes from one who has taught constitutional law for 40 years. And who should know better.
Did the Constitution cause our present “fiscal chaos?” Quite the contrary. The crisis has arisen not because we followed the Constitution, but because we have allowed federal officials to ignore it. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court announced that it would stop enforcing the Constitution’s limits on federal spending programs. Without meaningful spending restraint, Congress became an auction house where lobbyists could acquire new money streams for almost anything—a redundant health care program; a subsidy for an uneconomic product; or a modern art museum in Indiana.
It is hard to believe there would be a fiscal crisis today if federal spending had remained within the Constitution’s generous but limited boundaries.
…Although it is true, as Professor Seidman states, that politicians have violated the Constitution, it is rarely true that we have been better off for it. The breaches have included incarceration of innocent citizens during World War II, ill-advised attempts to micro-manage the economy through monetary and regulatory policy, and unrestricted spending. We have lived to rue them all.
The thought of limited government is anathema to would-be tyrants. Read the whole thing, which demolishes the ad hominem arguments put forth by those who want to ignore our founding document.
I can remember when pundits were tut-tutting the so-called “Constitution-in-Exile Movement.” Thanks to Seidman we now see that there are those who want it exiled.
I think a better constitution is certainly possible, but it would not be by going in the direction of those that would abolish it altogether. It would be by understanding that tyrants are worse and more subtle than the founders imagined. They should have made sure the central government could not take power away from the states as they have.
The Constitution is just words on parchment. Words on parchment do not a nation make. The United States is not a nation. A nation is ancestry+language+culture. The United States is a multicultural, multi-ethnic empire in which the whims of an ideological “elite” are enforced upon members of various nations within a “union” of purely arbitrary borders. In other words, the United States is Yugoslavia.
It will end up like Yugoslavia, too.
The Constitution does not confer upon me the right to bear arms. Man has no natural rights. There is only one right: might makes right — that is, power. I arrogate to myself the power to keep and bear arms, and no policeman or bureaucrat will take them from me. The only power anyone has over me is the power to make me dead.
Provided I don’t make them dead first, of course.
I know of no group of people so assured of their own perfection and superiority than progressives… it’s everyone ELSE they think are racist, hate-filled morons.
And I think that’s why they don’t want mere written words by lesser troglodytes to get in the way of making the world perfect.
“To Those Who Oppose The Constitution”, getTF out!
That’s just the way I feel.
And I’m not an old ‘Love It or Leave It’ type from the 1960’s. That was about policies of the government and war in SE Asia. The current ‘idea’ that we should do away with the Constitution, in sum total or it’s parts, is NOT a ‘policy’ debate. It’s a proposed change of everything we are founded upon.
So, I repeat, IF you want to live in a country, that is NOT run by the U.S. Constitution, get OUT! There are how many countries in the world? Well, ALL of them are run on laws / rules that are NOT the Constitution, find your favorite, and pack, your, crap!.