Just finally admit it and be honest for once, “liberals”: you have no regard whatsoever for the Constitution, and in truth harbor great antipathy to it, since it stands athwart your grandiose plans for power and control, yelling “Tyranny!” So to speak.
Oh, look, one of them did…just guess where.
Go on, guess.
AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.
Actually, all too few of us blame the real culprit: meddlesome, megalomaniacal Progressivist fools.
Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. 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? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?
Well, ultimately to prevent you fascist fucktards from walking over the few rights remaining to us after decades of misgovernance, encroachment, and abuse, that’s why. That was kinda the whole idea, see, and the Founders knew all too well what they were about. They knew swine like you were bound to come along eventually.
The next line might be the most disturbing part of the whole mess:
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. 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. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: 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. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?
As someone who has taught Constitutional law for almost forty years, I would hope that the genius of the Founders in setting up a system based on timeless principles of freedom, self-determination, and limits to the depredations of all-powerful government would have been able to penetrate the fog of liberal-fascist disingenuousness and will to power by now, whether or not they themselves always lived up to those highest of ideals. Guess not.
Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional disobedience. When George Washington and the other framers went to Philadelphia in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the Articles of Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the legislatures of all 13 states. Instead, in violation of their mandate, they abandoned the Articles, wrote a new Constitution and provided that it would take effect after ratification by only nine states, and by conventions in those states rather than the state legislatures.
No sooner was the Constitution in place than our leaders began ignoring it. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Thomas Jefferson thought every constitution should expire after a single generation. He believed the most consequential act of his presidency — the purchase of the Louisiana Territory — exceeded his constitutional powers.
None of which are good arguments for continuing to ignore it, or discarding it altogether.
IN the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.
Oh, izzatso? You just spent umpteen column inches arguing that, as you yourself put it, “our system is broken,” and now everything is jakesy-jukesy when it suits your agenda to claim so? How very typical of you.
Indeed, I submit that our system IS broken, and badly so–and that it was broken by people who fully if by no means openly intended to do just that, so as to instigate a hue and cry for our reduction to absolute tyranny under a far too powerful central State. In a word, totalitarianism–which, despite any amount of soothing blandishments from liberal-fascists pooh-poohing the very idea, we are way too close to to be able to count ourselves as a truly free people under a government even remotely like the one set up by the Founders–who, whatever their skin pigmentation, property-holder status, or views on slavery, did amount to the next step forward in the pursuit of true enlightenment and progress.
This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.
And you should all be willing to have faith in your benevolent and wise government to protect those principles; we don’t need any messy old Constitution statutorily requiring such. Perish the thought. Hey, trust us; we know what’s best.
What would change is not the existence of these institutions, but the basis on which they claim legitimacy. The president would have to justify military action against Iran solely on the merits, without shutting down the debate with a claim of unchallengeable constitutional power as commander in chief. Congress might well retain the power of the purse, but this power would have to be defended on contemporary policy grounds, not abstruse constitutional doctrine. The Supreme Court could stop pretending that its decisions protecting same-sex intimacy or limiting affirmative action were rooted in constitutional text.
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.
Uh huh. And is dysfunctional. And broken. And needs to toss out the tattered shreds of a Constitution that no longer works as it was intended. Because we ignored and, ultimately, destroyed it.
Look, ya dope: the Constitution IS our “social fabric.” In a nation of immigrants from every diverse background under the sun, founded not on geography or topography nor held together by traditional allegiance to some long-irrelevant hereditary monarchy, the Constitution and the ideals it codifies are the only real connection we have. The strength of that bond is now being severely strained precisely because Progressivists have sought to overthrow it, and have been alarmingly successful at it.
Without our Constitutional bond, we are simply a loose aggregate of people who violently disagree on a lot of things; there’s no reason in the world why a traditional farming family in the rural South or Midwest that hews to the old values of self-reliance, religion, and independence should be interested in one word out of the mouth of some Northeastern neo-Marxist metrosexual college-boy dumbass with no experience in anything at all except spouting off and revealing his ignorance through his dipshit pontification. Indeed, they’ve all but stopped listening to them now; remove that last Constitutional bond, and you’ll see a much more active resistance to the forcible encroachment of values they not only don’t share but actively despise. Count on it, egghead; you can insist all you like that you know what’s best for those people, but they don’t believe you, and there’s no earthly reason why they should.
And then all you’ll have left to instate your multiculti, politically-correct, Progressivist horseshit will be raw force. And after being properly radicalized, those hardy Midwesterners and Southerners will rediscover just how strong they really are, and how many devious ways there are to resist, thwart, and damage you. And you will lose in the end.
All of which just demonstrates once again that liberal-fascists depend entirely on sophistry, circular argument, self-fulfilling prophecy, and outright deceit to realize their authoritarian dreams. But I don’t recall when I’ve ever seen so obvious and straightforward an example of it.
What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon.
Yeah, best not to, bub. Some of us aren’t ready to willingly don your silken fetters just yet, and never will be. And, thanks to that archaic irrelevance of a founding document, most of us are still armed.
You’re all probably getting tired of hearing me say it by now, but in these dangerous, truly awful times, it always bears repeating: molon labe, motherfuckers.
Via Glenn, who says this:
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Paul Berger writes: “The reason a politician or any public official shouldn’t just act in opposition to the Constitution whenever they feel like it? How about because they took an oath not to! If you don’t want to play by the long established rules – find a different game. But I’m just a regular guy in the real world and he’s a Georgetown professor writing in the NY Times, which I suppose speaks volumes about both of us.”
It’s beyond even that. Their entire authority comes from the Constitution, and is the only reason we aren’t entitled simply to ignore them, or hang them from a tree for their insolence. Take away that source of authority because you don’t like the constraints it involves, and you’re a lot closer to the tree. Those who think themselves above the law are not in a position to hide behind it.
Exactly. It never has failed yet: those useful idiots lobbying hardest for Leftist tyranny in the early stages are always the first to be put up against the wall when they finally get their precious revolution. It’s cold comfort indeed, but at least it’s justice of some sort.
Update! Jeff nails it, as usual:
So argues Louis Michael Seidman, who, as is routine with progressives from Woodrow Wilson onward, is gracious enough to keep the parts of the Constitution he likes, but bemoans the very checks and balances that serve to protect individuals from the government, and deny temporary demagogues the power to affect enormous sudden systemic change. He also (predictably) ignores that the Constitution contains an amendment process, a strategic rhetorical bracketing on Seidman’s part, presumably because that process is too slow and cumbersome and doesn’t allow progressives to capitalize immediately on the latest ginned up crisis to savage the framework for our constitutional republic. You can read the whole thing here if you’d like. Me, I’m tired of such treachery, disguised as it always is in appeals to “getting things done” and decrying having to answer to dead white propertied slave owners. So I’ll say only this (yet again): go find a state or set of states with people who agree with you, Mr Seidman, and secede. Declare your independence from the tyranny of the Constitution. Declare your independence from our founders and framers, with their dogged insistence on keeping government constrained and the individual empowered. Declare your independence from independence, and be content that you’ve salved your psychic wounds and political conscience.
As Jeff later says, that isn’t an expedient that either Seidman or his fellow fascists would ever dream of taking. They need the rest of us for subjects to lord over and experiment on. Most especially, they need the despised capitalist entrepreneurs to finance their toxic utopia.
No, if there’s to be any secedin’ done, we’re the ones who will be doing it. Slavers will always need slaves, and they’ll always go out of their way to find them and put them into harness. Those of us who wish nothing more than to be left alone by these meddlesome tinkerers are going to have find someplace to do it in, and then vigorously defend it against infestation by the goddamned termites–and make a better job of it than we did this one, too.
Governing the government update! An excellent take, one I’ve never seen put quite this way before:
Seidman, like so many progressives, misses the purpose of our Constitution. It is designed to sometimes impede government in order to protect liberty. The “constitutional bondage” on government is meant to protect liberty and to protect individuals from tyranny. It is, as Jefferson wrote, the “chains” binding down men who hold the awesome power of office.
The Constitution is therefore not merely a document that establishes – constitutes – a form of government. It is, as Joseph Story writes in his Commentaries on the Constitution, “an ordinance or establishment of government and not a compact, though originating in consent; and it binds as a fundamental law promulgated by the sovereign authority [,the people.]”
The difference between constitutionalists and progressives such as Seidman is that we recognize that the Constitution is not a law governing the actions of individuals or even of society. Progressives often confuse government with society. The Constitution is our supreme and paramount law, but it is a law written exclusively to frame and control our government, meaning that it was written to govern government itself.
The Constitution sets forth generally how the government must operate and behave. It is the laws of driving for the government, so to speak, and is violated at our peril. Only by remaining faithful to the Constitution may the government make, enforce and adjudicate other laws governing the people. But note that nowhere does the Constitution actually dictate the behavior of society – only the behavior of government itself.
The Constitution was unprecedented when it was created. No people had ever established from scratch and in one document a supreme, written law governing government.
Which, of course, is why they hate it, and always have, despite any politically convenient protestations they may make otherwise. As such, I’m not sure it’s correct to say that “liberals” like Seidman have misunderstood or “missed the purpose” of the Constitution; they’re obfuscating it and trying to do an end-run around it, more like. Hence:
What the Founders did through the Constitution was to create a supreme law to govern government itself, which is necessary to preserve liberty. To “give up on the Constitution,” therefore, is the progressive way of freeing government from the rule of law.
Bingo.