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« on: June 30, 2011, 06:01:31 PM » |
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The Patriot Post - TIME on the Constitution: 'Does It Still Matter?'
From The Federalist Patriot
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TIME on the Constitution: 'Does It Still Matter?'
By Mark Alexander · Thursday, June 30, 2011
Only if Liberty still matters
"The Constitution, which at any time exists, 'till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People, is sacredly obligatory upon all." --George Washington, September 19, 1796
In celebration of the 235th anniversary of the signing of our Declaration of Independence1, Time Magazine, the "journal of record" for the Leftist Illiterati (or as they prefer to be known, "the intelligentsia"), published a cover story featuring their errant interpretation of our Constitution. On an image of the shredding of that venerable old document Time posited this question: "Does it still matter?"
The short answer is, only if Liberty still matters. But Time's managing editor, Richard Stengel, begs to differ, having discarded Rule of Law for the rule of men.
In his boorish 5,000-word treatise on the issue, Stengel unwittingly exposes the Left's patently uninformed and self-serving interpretation of our Constitution, and he aptly defines their adherence to a "living constitution2." That adulterated version of its original intent is the result of revision by decades of radical judicial diktats, rather than in the manner prescribed by our Constitution's Article V.
Stengel opined, "To me the Constitution is a guardrail. It's for when we are going off the road and it gets us back on. It's not a traffic cop that keeps us going down the center." According to Stengel, then, our Constitution just exists to keep us between the ditches and entitles us to swerve all over the road without consequence. Of course, that is hardly what our Founders intended, but Stengel insists that to ask "'what did the framers want' is kind of a crazy question."
Exhibiting a keen sense of the obvious, Stengel observes that times have changed and that our Founders "did not know about" all the advancements of the present era. Thus he concludes our Constitution must be pliable, or, as Thomas Jefferson forewarned in 1819, "a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please."
Stengel insists, "The Constitution works so well precisely because it is so opaque, so general, so open to various interpretations," rather than, as "originalists contend ... a clear, fixed meaning."
To assert that our Founders intended the Constitution to be "so opaque, so general, so open to various interpretations" is beyond any accurate reading of history. As noted previously, our Founders provided a method to amend our Constitution in Article V. The problem, of course, is that Stengel and his Leftist cadres know their agenda would never pass a Constitutional Convention and, thus, they circumvent Article V by discarding Rule of Law in deference to their own tyrannical rule.
Consequently, we now have a Constitution in exile, one that is little more than a straw man amid increasingly politicized courts that serve the special interests of political constituencies rather than interpreting the document's plain language, as judges are bound by solemn oath3 to do (Article VI, Section 3).
While it is highly tempting, any effort to rebut Stengel's erroneous claims point by point would violate my own rule against swapping spit with a jackass. However, as it is the eve of Independence Day, let us, for the record, revisit Essential Liberty4 as "endowed by our Creator" according to our Declaration.
The natural rights of man outlined in our Declaration are enshrined in our Constitution5 as evident in its most comprehensive explication, The Federalist Papers6, a defense of that august document by its author, James Madison, and Founders Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.
Here is what our Founders actually did write about our Constitution and Rule of Law. |
