Face the facts: U.S. Constitution is dead document with no meaning

By David McElroy · June 29, 2012

The U.S. Constitution is dead. We might disagree about when it died or what to do about it, but it’s time to admit that the piece of parchment that our civic religion taught us to revere is cold and dead.

The body of the Constitution is still trotted out from time to time. A few quaint parts — mostly a few among the Bill of Rights — that courts still want to pay attention to get some lip service. Other parts are blatantly ignored. Yet other parts are “reinterpreted” to mean whatever the people in power need them to mean. But the document itself as a whole — the meaning of the words as the writers and ratifiers understood them — is empty. It’s like some sick civic version of the bad old movie, “Weekend at Bernie’s.”

For many conservatives and libertarians, there is no more cherished political idea than that of “returning to the original meaning of the Constitution.” It’s time to be honest and blunt about this. It would make just as much sense to talk seriously about looking for dinosaurs today. They’re extinct. They’re not coming back. And neither is the actual meaning of the Constitution.

The fantasy of bringing back the Constitution in its actual meaning keeps being shot down, time after time, but people hopefully return to it like an abused wife returning to a husband who beats her. Those of us who believed a return to the Constitution could change everything keep being disappointed. The latest example was Thursday when the Supreme Court let the worst parts of ObamaCare stand.

Many of us looked at the text of the Constitution (and the written intentions of the framers) and found it incomprehensible that anyone with a functioning brain could say that there was anything in the text that gave Congress the right to demand that every American buy health insurance. The authority just isn’t there. Not only that, but the Ninth Amendment and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution specifically state that any power not granted is reserved to the states and individual people.

If you read the text, the meaning is clear.

But the legal profession has the theory that the Constitution is a “living document,” which seems to be a fancy way of saying it can mean almost whatever a legal theorist can come up with and then convince the justices is in accordance with today’s society — regardless of what the text says. (If you don’t believe me, try to find the legal reasoning for the Roe v. Wade decision in the Constitution. It’s not there. Whether you favor legal abortion or not, the legal reasoning that justified the decision is nowhere to be found in the text of the document.)

Many people who favor a strict interpretation of the Constitution seem to forget that doing so would mean giving up much of what they’ve come to see as modern life. They’ve come to expect the job situations to be “fair” — whatever that means — and they’ve come to expect government to watch out for the safety of their food and drugs. They’ve come to expect government to make sure that certain things are “fair.”

The problem is that most people have very different points of view about when government got so far out of control. For conservatives of a certain age, it was during FDR’s New Deal period. For some a bit younger, things got offtrack during the ’60s. For even younger conservatives and libertarians, it might have been during Bill Clinton’s presidency (which doesn’t even make sense, for the most part). And, now, we have hundreds of thousands — probably millions — who believe that it’s now, that things weren’t too far off until the presidency of Barack Obama.

Which version of the Constitution do all these people want to return to? A return to the real, original version (even as modified by amendments) would change everything you know. That would scare most people. Do you want to draw the line at the New Deal? You’ll accept every abomination up until then, but nothing more? Or do you want to accept everything up until the last decade or so? Just where do you want to draw the line?

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t call for a return to the Constitution without going back to the original text — and most people aren’t willing to go that far. They like a government that protects them and takes care of them. They just don’t want it to go “too far,” however they define that.

We’re not going back to the original Constitution. The patchwork mess that it’s become is irrational and unjustified by honest reasoning. It’s time to admit that it’s dead. It’s time to rethink what we want society to look like.

The Constitution is dead. Continuing to drag its body out to pretend we can revive it is useless. We need to let it go and figure out where to move forward. There’s no return to the past.

You’re always going to be disappointed if you put your faith in a mere piece of paper with fancy words on it. And when you trust men and women not to abuse the power they claim to rule over you, you’re always going to find yourself betrayed.

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