In the 2000 movie, “Pitch Black” (Vin Diesel’s first real star turn), every twenty-two years the planets aligned to plunge each into darkness, during which time, flesh eating beasties left their subterranean lairs to devour every living thing on the surface.
There seems to a similar astrological alignment that happens every few years that makes Democrats leave their subterranean lairs with a taste for destruction of our Constitution.
That cycle is beginning again.
Elie Mystal of The Nation and a MSNBC regular, went on The View and claimed our Constitution "is kind of trash".
In 2012, Louis Michael Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, wrote an editorial in the New York Times titled “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution”, stating:
“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.
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?
Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.”
In 2014, in the Washington Post, columnist Charles Lane wrote a predictably partisan – and incorrect – version of history under the head “Progressives learn the hard way that the Constitution is obstructionist”. In Lane’s telling, we were treated to the same tired lament that Woodrow Wilson expressed in one of his 1912 campaign speeches:
“The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.
All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.
I have always found it interesting that this lament of Wilson’s, that:
“Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776. Their bosoms swell against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom that is going on today.”
This idea pretty much forms the basis for every contemporary attack on our Constitution.
Progressives (or whatever the neo-communists are calling themselves these days) believe that the rubes are just to fixated on such antiquated ideas and principles of liberty and freedom.
“Why can’t you knuckle draggers just get with the times?!” they ask.
Modern progressives adopt Wilson's technocratic assumptions that their causes are always right and just and “progress” should only be defined their way. This idea is nothing less than a prescription of oligarchical tyranny.
Seidman promised that wouldn’t happen because progressives are just too darn virtuous:
“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.”
So without an actual Constitutional provision that must be followed, how is it assured that any of these can survive the power of an overweening government that finds the exercise of these basic rights to be inconvenient? Why not just disregard all laws we find objectionable? What if each party in power got to define what the term “legal” means? As we have noted by using the speed limit as an example, what stops you from driving faster than the limit and once you pass it, what is the limit?
I can’t really reason through their arguments as to why the Constitution is worthless to them without recognizing the notion that they should never be restricted by anything they can’t redefine or ignore. The irony is that even as they want to pick and choose, they seem to want to find ways to define and enumerate certain rights that are due certain classes. The only way these two positions do not conflict is when it is understood that any constitution of this construction would not be a constitution at all, rather a political weapon to be used arbitrarily and capriciously to advantage or disadvantage as desired.
This is why they've turned the judiciary into a legislative body - pack it with who they want and get the "votes" they want forever.