David McElroy

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.

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When I was younger, one of my neighbors came over and said he had something important to talk about.

“I have good news,” he said as he waved a piece of paper. “I’ve just signed the neighborhood constitution. It’s going to keep you safe and free. You’re not going to have to worry about a thing, because I’m going to take care of you. Best of all, I’m protecting you against attacks from space aliens.”

I’d never considered the notion that I needed to worry about being attacked by space aliens, but the more I thought about it, well, it seemed like a good idea to have someone protect me from them. And Mr. Madison seemed so sincere, so I figured he must be right.

Not much changed at first. I went on living my life and kept to myself. Every now and then Mr. Madison would tell me that I needed to change something about my house or my yard, but it was no big deal. Mostly I was relieved because the aliens hadn’t attacked.

Mr. Madison couldn’t do all of the protecting and ordering himself, so he deputized members of his family to help out. He only appointed the best, of course, so they had my best interests at heart. That’s what they told me, anyway.

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The public media community around the country is outraged by the recent firing of two top staffers from Alabama Public Television. The commission that manages the network fired the executive director of APT along with his top assistant. Publicly, both sides just said there was a disagreement about the future direction of the network, but there was much more going on.

Conservatives who control the commission had asked for the network to consider showing a controversial 10-part series by a Texas minister named David Barton who considers himself a historian. (His only educational credential is a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University.) The American Heritage Series presents this man’s view of the United States as a Christian nation and tries to debunk any notions that the Founding Fathers weren’t dedicated Christians.

The professionals at Alabama Public Television reviewed the material in Barton’s series and outlined why it was a bad idea and possibly illegal. The matter was supposed to be discussed at a commission meeting, but the commission went into executive session and fired the two instead.

At first blush, it seems that the story is simply that conservatives were unjustly trying to push their views onto the professional staff and fired them when they wouldn’t go along. That’s obviously what happened, but there’s a bigger issue here to me.

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