The Gift of the Constitution

As President Trump and Speaker Pelosi retreat to their corners for Christmas, we find ourselves thinking of the gift of the Constitution. It was ten years ago that the Sun started writing about America’s “constitutional moment.” We had just brought out — as “The Citizen’s Constitution” — our annotated guide to the national parchment. It was animated by a sense that our politics had become so divided, so bitter, that our factions would end up fighting ever more battles on America’s legal bedrock.What an understatement that turned out to be. Who could have imagined how ubiquitous the resort to the Constitution would become in our everyday politics. When we started writing about the “constitutional moment,” the soothing years of George W. Bush had just ended, and the mellifluous years of Barack Obama were just beginning. President Trump hadn’t even fetched up on the scope. Now almost everything, including junior high school bathrooms, becomes a constitutional test.Today the courts — and if not the courts then our editorial pages and political debates — are crowded with constitutional cases. Immigration, the president’s hotel business, who decides whether to demote a Navy enlisted man, who gets to see the president’s tax returns, the rules of impeachment, whether a state can prosecute a president for a crime, whether religious druggists have to fill prescriptions for birth control . . . the list goes on at a dizzying pace.When we started writing of the “constitutional moment,” it was the Republicans who seemed to be thinking in constitutional terms. The Supreme Court had just handed down its opinion on whether the Columbia District could prohibit a retired security guard, Dick Heller, from keeping a loaded gun at home. The Nine parsed the grammar of the 2nd Amendment to mark that the right to keep and bear arms belonged not merely to the militias but to the people.The decision put a spring in the Republican step. By 2012, the GOP was so on fire about the Constitution that it opened the 112th Congress by reading the entire 8,000 word text of the parchment on the floor of the House. Given that every officer, legislator, and judge in the entire government and all the state governments must be bound by oath to support the Constitution, one would think the reading would have been a unifying moment, even the beginning of a tradition.Yet the reading caused a panic among the Democrats. “A ghastly waste of time” harrumphed the Times. The parchment “is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago,” Ezra Klein of Vox complained. “Let’s stop pretending the Constitution is sacred,” said a headline in Salon, which published a photo of a protestor’s sign saying, “I Believe in the Constitution. I’m a ‘Right-Wing Extremist.’” The Daily Kos later called the reading the “most boring circus ever.”That all this was coming from liberals, our editor wrote in the American Spectator at the time — and the Wall Street Journal this month — was ironic. For liberals had won some of their greatest victories in constitutional court. School desegregation, free speech, restrictions on public prayer, the right to abortion, same sex marriage. All the more remarkable that today, even the liberals seem to be re-discovering the relevance and power of the Constitution.And nowhere more so than in the impeachment of President Trump. Announcing it, Speaker Pelosi offered a homily in respect of the Founders. “When crafting the Constitution,” she said, “the Founders feared the return of a monarchy in America and, having just fought a war of independence, they specifically feared the prospect of a king-president corrupted by foreign influence.” Madison worried “that a president might betray his trust to foreign powers.”The Judiciary Committee promptly hauled in four liberal law professors to testify about the original intent of the Founding Fathers. On the one hand, it seemed absurd to hear such parley from the Democrats. On the other hand, it seems rather heartwarming. We wouldn’t want to make too much of it. Neither, though, would we want to make too little. In this season of gift giving, it’s a reminder of the gift of the Constitution itself. So Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.

The Gift of the Constitution

The Gift of the Constitution

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