The Founders and their Genius

We hear a lot these days about the Constitution, often from people who, clearly, have only a sketchy acquaintance with what it actually says. The context is typically a call for the removal from office (occasionally by violent means) of a “liberal” politician or judge who has said or done something, usually unspecified --or, if specified, erroneously so, such as the creation of “the bank bailout” of 2008 by President Obama, who took office in 2009—, that places him or her outside the category of the fully American, if not that of the fully human.

The Constitution is virtually interchangeable, in this rhetoric, with “the Founders.” The word “Founders” is always capitalized, like the name of Jesus, but not because it is a proper noun; rather, the Founders constitute American divinity. Right-thinking (in both senses of the phrase) people believe that every word of the Constitution, every parochial conceit of “the Founders” –forget that they were a rather diverse group of individuals who often disagreed vehemently—is Holy Writ, as immutable as the Torah (again, ignore  the marginal hints contained in the scrolls of which, that are intended to suggest what is supposed to be meant by a word in the text proper that has no colorable meaning where it appears; odd though it may be for the Author of the Universe to have made these spelling errors).

If the Founders did not say it, this line of thinking goes, it cannot be true; and it certainly cannot be enshrined in our laws; all attempts to do so constitute secular (a word that is not often used by Patriots) blasphemy, and should be dealt with like, well, like blasphemy.

They don’t say what, if any, respect should be given to Amendments to the Constitution; perhaps the Bill of Rights has pride of place, having been put together by the Founders.

This, simply put, is the basis for an entire political movement in the U.S. The “Contract From America,” a Tea Party founding document, would require that every law passed by Congress contain a citation to the specific provision in the Constitution that authorizes it.

Good-by, Air Force: the Army and the Navy are specifically authorized by the Constitution, but no such luck for the fly-boys. Good-by, Telecommunications Act. Moving to the sacred cows of the Right, so long Defense of Marriage Act (actually, marriage is never mentioned in the Constitution), Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and even (no, especially, as it authorizes the federal government to intervene in a purely state matter) the Act for the Relief of the Parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo (remember her? And her physician, Senate Majority Leader Dr. Bill Frist?).

I’d like to point out just a couple of things that are true of the Constitution, and of the Founders.

The Constitution explicitly endorsed the practice of slavery; indeed, all the talk of Liberty notwithstanding, the Constitution puts forth a formula for how to count slaves in determining the population of a state for purposes of allocating Congressional representation. Our British friends had a great deal of fun with this over several decades during and after our Revolution.

The Founders themselves, as a group, generally did not expect the Constitution to be immutable; they regarded it, like all products of negotiation among differing interests, to be a provisional, approximate statement of the kind of government they wanted to establish. that's why they provided a means to amend it.

None of the Founders would have agreed with the notion of a speed limit; it wouldn’t have made sense to them. And placing a limit on immigration would probably have seemed silly, or meaningless, to them.
Contrariwise, the notion that an adult male, having been born in, say, Massachusetts, should automatically be allowed to vote for President, would also have been an odd proposition in their eyes. In fact, the notion that any citizen could vote directly for President was regarded as inadvisable by the Founders; and of course their wisdom in this regard prevails today.

They pretty much unanimously, however, agreed that the States had too much power, as opposed to that of the federal government –they were writing a Constitution, after all, because the Articles of Confederation weren’t working. They wanted something that worked better.

The point is this: the Constitution is a remarkable document, and it has worked pretty well. It is not immutable, not Holy Writ (whatever that may be). It's purpose, again, is to serve our needs, not for us to worship at its immutable feet, not to be handled, like a palimpsest, with velvet gloves under glass and never, ever to be disturbed. It will only work if we respect its purpose, and not enshrine its every word. If we so enshrine it, it will become a talisman, a symbol that will lose, over time, its connection to reality.