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Jewish World Review August 11, 2010 / 1 Elul, 5770 Constitutional Amendments and Citizenship Rights By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
It's like clockwork. Whenever conservatives propose a constitutional amendment, progressives suddenly rediscover the delicate gears of the Constitution and the horrible dangers of "tinkering" or "tampering" with its precision craftsmanship. Consider the sudden brouhaha over the idea of revising the 14th Amendment to get rid of automatic birthright citizenship (which would make us more like that alleged progressive nirvana known as " "While everyone recognizes that there are problems with our immigration system in this country," But wait a second. Progressives love to tinker with the constitutional design. They simply do it by stealth, by appointing But when conservatives who talk about reverence for the Constitution also want to update it in a way that is actually consistent with the "genius of our constitutional design," they are hypocrites and radicals. Liberal devotees of the "living Constitution" always made a fair point. The Founding Fathers never envisioned a world with jet planes, split atoms, stem cell therapies, one-click porn or Hence, liberals claim, we need an evolving Constitution that, as President Obama writes in "The Audacity of Hope," "is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world." But as legal analyst The issue is not whether the world is ever-changing, but whether judges should treat the Constitution as ever-changing to meet their own agendas and desires, often over the lawfully expressed preferences of voters, legislators and the founders. Still, if the Constitution is unclear or inadequate, what's a strict constructionist to do? Propose changes, and you're dubbed a hypocrite and a radical for wanting to "tinker with the genius of our constitutional design," or else you're guilty of hypocritical conservative judicial activism. The relevant fact is that central to the genius of the Constitution's design are the mechanisms to change it. That process is arduous, requiring long and deliberate debates at the national and state levels. (In over two centuries, thousands of amendments have been proposed, 33 have been approved by When discussing the Constitution on college campuses, students and even professors will object that without a "living constitution," blacks would still be slaves and women wouldn't be allowed to vote. Nonsense. Those indispensable changes to the Constitution came not from judges reading new rights into the document but from Americans lawfully amending it. From birthright citizenship and gay marriage to flag-burning and gun rights, I trust the American people to change the Constitution when necessary (after lengthy debate) more than I trust five out of nine unelected justices with lifetime tenure, hiding behind closed doors and away from TV cameras. What are the opponents of "tinkering" afraid of? I suspect sullying the genius of the founders takes a distant backseat to their real fear: losing a fair fight.
© 2006 TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
