“The Constitution: Suspenders or Straightjacket” by Reid Champagne
Every so often, we get essay submissions from writers and bloggers across Delaware and beyond. We welcome guest columns, and today it is my pleasure to bring you an essay from Reid Champagne, a freelance writer who has written for Delaware Today.
The Constitution: Suspenders or Straightjacket
By
Reid Champagne
The more politicians use and abuse the Constitution as so much mud to be slung at opponents, the more it reveals just how much ignorance abounds over a document many believe should be adhered to with an almost biblical literalness.
In fact, the Constitution itself was unconstitutional in its framing and adoption. Historian Garry Wills, writing in his political biography James Madison, points out that no less an Original Intender than Madison himself knew that the then existing Articles of Confederation would be of no use in supporting the fledgling United States in taking its proper and secure place among the nations of the world.
Madison knew the mechanism providing for the constitutional changing of the Articles would never allow for the transformation of that document into something he believed would be necessary for the country to survive not only a Europe swept by despots bent on conquest, but also to “control the centrifugal tendencies of the states [that would] destroy the whole harmony of the political system.” In short, no less a limited government icon than James Madison was enshrining the idea of a strong central government into the very parchment of today’s Constitution in order to bind the nation together and to grow into the powerful force necessary to defend itself against any and all enemies.
And it was another icon of limited government, Thomas Jefferson, who early on expanded the role of a strong central government to encompass that of an equally strong executive. Nothing in the Constitution gave Jefferson the authority to make the Louisiana Purchase and then staff it with governors of his own choosing without congressional oversight. Later, having once denounced a national bank as unconstitutional, Madison supported it as president, defending it as necessary to the survival of the national treasury recently emptied by the disastrous impact of the Embargo of 1807.
If the framers did not originally intend the Constitution to be elastic like a pair of suspenders managing a growing waistline, rather than rigid like a straightjacket confining us to an asylum of ideologues, they certainly discovered that it was to theirs and the country’s benefit to interpret it so. It follows then that if “Obamacare” is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution (although you could perhaps argue the phrase “promote the general Welfare” in the Preamble puts it there) as wasn’t the Louisiana Purchase or the Embargo, it merely takes a stroke of Jeffersonian or Madisonian pragmatism to permit it. At least then we could argue Obamacare on the merits of its fixing the abysmal record of private and profit driven healthcare, rather than on sectarian principles no one appears to even minimally understand anyway.
If the phrase “those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it” is a truism, then what history are today’s dazed and confused politicians doomed to have us repeat: the 1960s perhaps?
How about the 1860s maybe?
I thought we read the constitution and drank champagne? Well thought out and clearly written. Thw wing nuts will hate it:)
The President has assumed the role of a despot and claims the legal authority to imprison, torture, and kill American citizens in secret and without due process. The banks are stealing people’s properties without regard to due process or following the contractual laws that make basic property rights enforceable. Local and state police electrocute people virtually at will (and often to death) without repercussion. We have the highest per capita rate of imprisonment in the world and have started to wage wars of aggression against other countries. Our over-entertained and under-informed populace can’t get any traction to make changes as they can’t even come close to paying the bribes to the ruling elites that corporations and media conglomerates can.
The Constitutional republic envisioned over 200 years ago has been lost to a plutocracy, just as Franklin thought it might be. Nothing short of a revolution will get it back.
The Constitution is written in plain English, It’s not full of “boilerplate” Legalese clauses that you would find in a document written today. So there’s not much elasticity to it. The Revisionists argue what the Founders would have wanted had they foreseen changes in the future, for example technological advances. (Automatic action firearms). They call it a living document, as if it needs to be pruned from time to time. And they have gotten their way with liberal justices over the years at times.
My argument is this: the constitution can be changed if society doesn’t like parts of it. All they have to do is get the congressional votes to do so. Until then it’s the law. But these liberals keep playing the end run by putting liberal justices on the Supreme Court bench who are willing to try to make changes by modern interpretations. Hence our predicament today. A specially trained drug sniffing dog walked by your detained motor vehicle specifically for that purpose without a warrant is not illegal search and seizure (4th Amendment); as well as other rights thrown under the proverbial bus.