The July 4 issue of Time magazine carried an image of
the U.S. Constitution on its cover, along with the headline: “Does
It Still Matter?” The photo of the Constitution showed it was being
shredded into narrow strips — which describes what Time
managing editor Richard Stengel attempts to do in his accompanying
article.
There was a time, decades ago, when Time magazine
had great influence, but in the age of the Internet, cable TV,
battling blogs, Facebook, Twitter and instant e-books, there is
delicious irony in an ink-on-paper news weekly suggesting
that the U.S. Constitution is obsolete in the modern America. Oh,
Mr. Stengel, the Constitution is not anywhere as obsolete as
Time magazine. As for Time, the question might be
asked: Does it still matter?
But let us pretend, for the sake of argument, that
Time might influence some Americans’ views on the subject,
and examine the case put forward by Stengel. He sets out to suggest
that the document written by the Framers in the 18th century is
hopelessly out-of-date to govern a modern, progressive America. And
he does it in a way that almost begs hysterical laughter at the
first sentence.
Honestly, I did not make this up — Stengel wrote it, and
I quote:
Here are a few things the framers did not know about:
World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television.
Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of
disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers.
Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.
The framers did not know about Lady Gaga? Or sexting? Then
how could they possibly have devised a system of
government and a statement of our natural rights that would be
worth anything today?
After inviting ridicule with his silly opening, Stengel
moves on to pose what he thinks are a series of questions that
could show how irrelevant the Constitution is to modern
conditions:
What would the framers say about whether the drones over
Libya constitute a violation of Article I, Section 8, which gives
Congress the power to declare war? Well, since George Washington
didn’t even dream that a man could fly, much less use a global
positioning satellite to aim a missile, it’s hard to say what he
would think.
No, it’s not. Obviously, Washington couldn’t foresee
modern weaponry, but as our Commanding General he had seen weapons
evolve and would have known future wars would bring new ways of
battle. But all that’s beside the point. He would have opposed
undeclared wars initiated only on the will of the Chief Executive
just as he outspokenly opposed foreign alliances and U.S.
involvement in foreign wars. Washington and the Framers would have
certainly seen American participation in NATO’s war in Libya as
unconstitutional.
What would the framers say about whether a tax on people
who did not buy health insurance is an abuse of Congress’s
authority under the Commerce Clause? Well, since James Madison did
not know what health insurance was and doctors back then still used
leeches, it’s difficult to know what he would say.
Stengel again revels in irrelevancies, like leeches (to
show how backward those people really were then) but so
what?
Madison argued that the Commerce Clause was necessary to
manage trade and commercial relations between and among the various
States (so that one state could not impose a tax on goods crossing
its border from another state, for example). The Commerce Clause
was never intended to manage or dictate decisions of individual
citizens as to whether or not they would engage in commerce.
Not buying health insurance is a decision to refrain from engaging
in commerce, so it’s ludicrous to argue that Congress can penalize
a citizen for not buying something. This very issue will be decided
by the U.S. Supreme Court in considering the Obamacare mandate —
and if the Court should uphold the mandate, the justices would
indeed shred the Constitution and there would be no limit on
Congress’s power to compel individual decisions by citizens. If the
Federal government can tell you what to buy, and what not to buy,
then what’s left of liberty?
Stengel goes on to examine — all in the context of his
liberal, all-powerful-state bias — four contemporary issues: the
war in Libya, the debt-limit debate, Obamacare and immigration. But
he gets to the heart of his progressive argument in the wind-up of
the article, portraying the Constitution as some kind of roadblock
on the statist’s highway to Utopia, where the all-powerful central
government will decide what’s good, what’s allowed, and what’s
forbidden for all Americans.
We can pat ourselves on the back about the past 223 years,
but we cannot let the Constitution become an obstacle to the U.S.’s
moving into the future with a sensible health care system, a
globalized economy, and evolving sense of civil and political
rights.
The Constitution as “obstacle” has become a staple of
leftist political thinking, for it establishes limits on the reach
of government power, and it explicitly recognizes God-given rights
that the state cannot abridge. These are obstacles to the
progressive’s vision of the modern democracy, where new rights
“evolve” in liberal courts, where an unelected bureaucracy of
“experts” regulates behavior, and where the states become
administrative agencies of the all-powerful Federal government,
rather than what they really are: the sovereign governments that
united to create a limited central government.
Stengel and his ilk may wish to shred the Constitution,
but the American people seem to be awakening to the urgent need to
return to Constitutional government, with all its limits, checks
and balances — before our debt-burdened economy implodes and our
central government takes over our individual lives.
The Constitution is the only path to a viable future for
our beloved republic, and its immediate re-emergence as a guide to
good government is the only hope for avoiding the fate of former
empires that found their ruin in debt, decadence, endless war and
loss of their founding values and culture.
May the Constitution long survive when Time is
forgotten!
