The Other McCain

“To attempt to abstract from the Preamble to the Constitution a lever for transforming it into an instrumental document is . . . to invent powers that do not exist. And it is also a transparent attempt to import the second paragraph of the Declaration — as a mandate for national self-creation, refounding — into our fundamental law. A contemporary point of reference for all such nonsense as follows from an activist view of the Preamble and Declaration is Mortimer Adler’s We Hold These Truths, a book ‘about’ the Constitution whose wweaknesses are specificed by its very title. After Adler identifies the Declaration as a ‘preface’ to the Constitution, we know how his argument will tend: that in the end that Declaration will, if allowed, swallow up the Constitution — except for the Preamble, as ideologically construed.”
— M.E. Bradford, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution (1993)

“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, an evolving sense of civil and political rights. The Constitution, as Martin Luther King Jr. said in his great speech on the Mall, is a promissory note. That note had not been fulfilled for African Americans. But I would say the Constitution remains a promissory note, one in which ‘We the People’ in each generation try to create that more perfect union.”
— Richard Stengel, Time magazine, June 23, 2011

Aaron Worthing identified 13 specific factual errors in Stengel’s article, but it strikes me that Stengel’s biggest mistake is the one which Bradford noted in Adler’s work: Conflating the Declaration and the Constitution in such a way that the Constitution’s limitations on federal authority are effectively voided, so as to make the phrase “a more perfect union” a mandate for endless experimentation in pursuit of egalitarian objectives.

Advocates of unlimited centralized power habitually seek to portray the Constitution as an obsolete remnant of the “horse and buggy” era, a pejorative phrase popularized by liberal proponents of the New Deal, key elements of which were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. By the 1950s, however — after two decades of Democrat presidents — the court’s former conservative majority had been replaced by liberals, and for more than three decades the Supreme Court itself became an instrument for the expansion of federal authority.

Stengel is another one of these modernists, perceiving the Constitution’s limits as a hindrance to progress: “[W]e cannot let the Constitution become an obstacle to the U.S.’s moving into the future with a sensible health care system,” et cetera.

The Constitution says nothing at all about health care, of course, but Stengel’s enthusiastic phrase “moving into the future” conveys his idea of the past as bad place, where things were not “sensible” because of those silly old-fashioned limits on federal power.

Horse and buggy. Powdered wigs. Private health insurance.

Which of those things doesn’t belong on the list? Continue reading ‘A More Perfect Union’? →