Gilbert Keith Chesterton once famously said, “It’s not that
Christianity has been tried and found wanting. It’s that it has
never really being tried.” Part of the reason is that too many
folks feel that Christianity — with its moral absolutes and
especially its prohibitions — is outdated and unworthy of modern
interest. One might also apply this gem of wisdom to those who rail
against the U.S. Constitution; the product of another apparently
obsolete belief system.
One such of those is Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the
University of Texas and the author of a book called Our
Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And
How We the People Can Correct It). Mr. Levinson, it seems, is
feeling a bit hostile toward some of the foundational aspects of
the law of the land, calling it, “a distinctly 18th century
document that inflicts significant damage upon our 21st century
reality.”
In an opinion piece for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Levinson laments the veto
power of the President: “We are long overdue for a national
discussion of whether we are well served by our peculiar form of
government that places such a power in the hands of a single
individual.” This alone should be enough to send shivers down the
spine of those who revere our unique system of checks and balances.
But there’s more.
When the Founders wrote and ratified the Constitution, many were
dead set against the enumeration of specifics rights listed in the
Bill of Rights. The thinking was, if we only set out certain rights
as inviolate, a future government might trample at will on the
rest. Sadly, we have seen that this is all too true.
Even the beautifully and plainly written 9th and especially the
10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by
the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved
to the States respectively, or to the people”) have not stopped the
carnage.
IN FACT, MANY of our current problems are a result of too
much monkeying with the Constitution. For example, Levinson
and others complain about the dangers of a “lame duck” president
with veto power, but had the 22nd Amendment not interfered with the
process, this fear would be practically non-existent.
The idea of electing the president popularly instead of using
the Electoral College is one of the main planks of liberals
everywhere, and one that is planted even in the minds of our
schoolchildren. Levinson writes;
Lest one believes that presidents, at least, represent
the country as a whole, one must realize that our bizarre system of
electing presidents through the Electoral College assures that
almost no candidates any longer run truly national campaigns. So
even if first-term presidents are held accountable via having to
run for re-election, they focus only on a mixture of their “base”
and “battleground” states, which leads to remarkable pandering to
the latter and an almost total disregard for “wrong-color”
states.
Surely the professor realizes that if the Electoral College were
scrapped, candidates would only need to campaign in areas of
concentrated population; namely, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and
other liberal strongholds. But, isn’t that the point?
And if supporters of the popular election of the executive have
their way, the next thing to go would logically be the present form
of the U.S. Senate. After all, the principal that gives the less
populous states a say in the election of the president, is the same
which sustains their equality in the upper house.
WHAT MR. LEVINSON and others like him fail to acknowledge can be
summed up in the very title of our nation; the United States of
America. In other words, the Constitution was set up to loosely
govern a federation of smaller governments; those of the individual
states. The president was meant to be elected by the states and not
by purely democratic means. The Founders were well acquainted with
the dangers of direct democracy.
That is why the noxious 17th Amendment, which called for the
popular election of senators, so upset the delicate balance between
the states and the federal government. Senators, as opposed to
representatives in “The People’s House,” were intended to be chosen
by state legislatures to protect the interests of those states
against federal power, not to add to it.
Just as the cure for our wounded public morality is more
religion, not less; so too, the only cure for our governmental woes
is greater adherence to the Constitution as written, and not its
constant dilution. Because, just as religion reins in sinful human
behavior, the restrictions placed on Washington by the Constitution
should similarly curb governmental abuse
It’s not the U.S. Constitution that has been found wanting; it
is those who have sworn to uphold it.
