As we enter the start of another Supreme Court
term and Justices Scalia and Alito worship the written word of the US
Constitution even more than some Muslims who almost make the Quran a second god
(and Quranolotry IS more a concern in Islam than Bibliolatry among even
fundamentalist Christians), and as both Goody Two-Shoes/Tweedledee Romney and
Dear Leader/Tweedledum Obama fall all over themselves to venerate that piece of
paper, let’s look at what the Constitutional Founding Fathers got wrong.
First, for the “sake” of nation-building, “all
men” of the Declaration of Independence became all white men. Black slaves in
the south became 3/5 of a census abstract “person” for electoral votes; Indians
not taxed got excluded while Indians who wanted to live like white folks, even
with taxation, got chased to Oklahoma.
Second, ignoring the possibility of political
parties, even though the British Parliament already had different factions,
that were formed in part on political differences, and not just being “in” or
“out” at court.
Third, the electoral college, in multiple ways.
They didn’t consider winner-take-all possibilities. They didn’t allow for one
state having 65 times the population of another, as part of that (California vs
Wyoming) rather than 12.7 ties larger as in 1790 (Virginia vs Delaware,
including slave numbers). Juliet Lapidos at the NYT also notes this.
They didn’t foresee mechanical reapers changing
agriculture. Nor railroads, then cars and airplanes, overturning transportation
and connectedness. They had no idea of the Internet and what it would do. Nor
of atomic energy.
They failed to see that an ambitious and ardent
man could make the presidency a strong executive indeed, despite the fears that
most of them not named Alexander Hamilton had of that.
They failed to even entertain the idea of a
parliamentary government with a low-power head of state president, rather than
a king, blindly leaning too much on Montesquieu.
But, just as Christian fundamentalists don’t
want to hear that their bible was written by humans who weren’t only fallible
in a general sense, but short-sighted like other humans, unimaginative, and
sometimes downright wrong, so the Scalitos of the world will book no opposition
about the weakness, even wrongness, of the constitution.
Ditto for the Robert Byrds, who think “civics”
is another word for “worship the Constitution.”
Well, it’s not.
If you really want to know more of what’s wrong
with it, read “The Frozen Republic.”
