Hate to be a Broken Record, but….

This morning, the American Constitution Society blog referenced a recent report from the Associated Press:

“The Associated Press has provided new details about a push by the nation’s largest Tea Party umbrella group to teach the Constitution in public schools using materials from an organization that promotes the Constitution as a divinely inspired document.

As originally reported by Mother Jones, the Tea Party Patriots are encouraging public schools to participate in “Constitution Week” in September by utilizing teaching materials from the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a group that ACS Executive Director Caroline Fredrickson called so outside the mainstream that even the conservative Federalist Society would object to its materials.

Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer participated in a daylong seminar with NCCS last year, and reported:

If its public school curriculum resembles anything like what I witnessed, it has no place in the nation’s classrooms. Among other things, NCCS uses materials written by Skousen suggesting that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a lost tribe of Israel; Skousen claimed this meant the Constitution may have been inspired by God, who intended for America to be a Christian nation. The very same bogus history has been perpetuated by the white supremacist movement.”

When the public schools fail to teach real history–when most “social studies” classes are taught by people hired for their ability to be athletic coaches rather than their ability to teach American history or the constitutional architecture–students are defenseless against this sort of propaganda.

Here’s a proposal for those of you reading this. Ask the next three teenagers you encounter to answer a couple of these questions: what was the Enlightenment? What are checks and balances?  What does the Establishment Clause do? How did the 14th Amendment change the Constitution?

My guess is the results of such an experiment wouldn’t be very pretty.

Car Talk

When the federal government decided to bail out Chrysler and GM, I’ll admit I was torn. I am inherently skeptical of “too big to fail,” and I’m convinced that we have way too much corporate welfare. I’m a believer in free enterprise, defined as a genuinely level playing field, where private businesses all play by the same rules, and sink or swim on their own merits. But I also recognized that we were in the midst of a recession that might well have become a depression. The economy was so fragile–and the probable loss of American jobs that would accompany bankruptcy was so massive–that we really didn’t have a choice. I figured the taxpayers would lose a lot of money, but on balance, that would be cheaper than a depression.

I was wrong.

Yesterday, Chrysler repaid the nearly $5.9 billion lent to it by the administration, including fees and interest payments — and it did so six years ahead of schedule. Not only has Chrysler paid us back, but together, GM and Chrysler have added 115,000 new jobs since emerging from reorganization.

It was a gutsy call, and it paid off. But I’m sure the “Party of No” will explain it away, or credit the Bush Administration, just as they’ve tried to do with respect to another gutsy call–taking out Bin Ladin.

Cato on Immigration

The Cato Institute has recently published an analysis of proposed Immigration Reform, and concluded that comprehensive reform is overdue. The entire report is worth reading (I don’t have it in electronic form, unfortunately), as it methodically disposes of a number of charges that are routinely leveled at undocumented workers.

One of the interesting studies cited in the report comes from Texas, of all places–a state rarely known for progressive policies, or for policies based on evidence of any kind, for that matter.

One of the arguments routinely made by those demanding that undocumented persons be deported is that they are an economic drain on the American economy. In December 2006, the Texas comptroller of public accounts looked at economic activity by illegal immigrants, and issued a report concluding that such individuals had “produced a positive effect on the Texas economy and state budget.” The Comptroller estimated that the loss of the approximately 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in the state would have translated into a loss of 17.7 billion dollars to the state in 2005.  The Comptroller further estimated that state revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceeded what the state spent on services to that population by 424.7 million dollars.

This research seems consistent with estimates that undocumented workers leave something on the order of two billion dollars in Social Security each year–money withheld from paychecks under phony Social Security numbers that cannot ever be claimed by those from whom it was withheld.

Comments

Global Indy

If there was ever a visual reminder that the world is changing–that even landlocked Indianapolis is part of a new, global economic order–this website is it.

We aren’t going to solve tomorrow’s problems if we spend all of our time and energy retreating into yesterday’s prejudices and fighting to maintain the status quo.

Comments

What Ted Said

My upcoming IBJ column.

Right now, Americans are deeply involved in one of our periodic debates about government spending and the budget deficit. Important as that is, I am more concerned about our civic deficit—the widespread lack of basic constitutional literacy.

In these pages a couple of weeks ago, recently-retired Indiana Justice Ted Boehm made a strong case for the importance of civics education in a democracy. He focused especially on the need for an educated citizenry that appreciates the constitutional separation of powers: the assignment of different duties to different branches of government. His concerns are well-founded; barely 36% of Americans can even name the three branches, let alone explain the theory behind separation of powers and the role of the judiciary.

I agree with everything Justice Boehm said in that column—and then some.

The research is depressing. Fewer than half of 12th grade students can define federalism. Only 35% of teenagers can correctly identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. Only five percent of high school seniors can define America’s system of checks and balances.

The consequences of this civic deficit are profound and alarming.

For one thing, when a country is very diverse, as in the United States, it is particularly important that citizens know the history and philosophy of their governing institutions; in the absence of other ties—race, religion, national origin—a common understanding of constitutional principles is critical to the formation of national identity.

A shared understanding of our most basic institutions is also necessary if we are to have productive—not to mention honest—political debates. When citizens are ignorant of the most elementary facts of our founding history, when they lack even the most rudimentary familiarity with the Founders’ philosophies (and yes, that’s plural, because the architects of our legal system were not a monolithic entity), they are easy prey for the propagandists, buffoons and conspiracy theorists that populate the airwaves and thrive on the internet.

Case in point: David Barton and his Wallbuilders have been around for a long time, offering a carefully edited—and inaccurate—“history” to those who find provisions of the actual Constitution inconvenient. He is a joke (or worse) among American historians and legal scholars. Recently, however, his revisionism has been embraced by Tea Party members of Congress, most notably Representative Michelle Bachmann. Among other things, Barton claims that state and local governments are not bound by the provisions of the Bill of Rights, because the Founders intended it to restrain only the federal government. He doesn’t mention that the 14th Amendment—adopted in 1868—changed that.

Students who have had even the most basic government course ought to know enough about the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment to reject this sort of nonsense out of hand. But clearly, they don’t. The result is that political discourse has become an exercise in which people occupying different realities talk past each other.

People who are civically literate can and do have good-faith differences of opinion about the application of constitutional principles to new “facts on the ground.” (Should the 4th Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable” searches prevent police from using information from your cell-phone provider without a warrant? What about NSA data-mining?)

I sometimes introduce discussions of original intent by asking my students what James Madison thought about porn on the internet. Madison could not have envisioned cyberspace, of course, but he had strong opinions about free expression. I don’t expect students to agree about what Madison’s position would be, but I do expect them to know who James Madison was.

Increasingly, they don’t.

Comments