2010: THE YEAR OF THE CONSTITUTION
I submitted this piece to FrontPage.com on Monday and never saw it when it was published so I am highlighting it today. It’s about the Constitution and how ordinary people have forced it to become an issue in politics and the culture.
This reawakening of interest in our founding document by ordinary Americans has forced a re-examination of the relevance of the Constitution as it pertains to the duties and responsibilities of government in modern, 21st century America. It has reached the point where the avalanche of questions has invited a backlash from proponents of government expansion who seek to belittle and smear those who are earnestly and with great seriousness trying to place into context the actions of government.
“What do they know?” goes the criticism. How dare they question 221 years of constitutional law that has been carefully constructed to reflect the thinking of the greatest legal minds in American history? Besides, these rubes have it all wrong. They worship the Constitution like it’s the Bible, and approach questions about that document with a religious fervor that smacks of saintly veneration.
As Newsweek’s Andrew Romano sneered recently, these “constitutional fundamentalists” are “seek[ing] refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture and the imagined past it supposedly represents.” Lexington of the Economist blog echoes these sentiments, writing about the Tea Party’s promotion of the Constitution: “When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim.”