Tag Archives: Constitution

Seeing What We Want to See

I’ve decided that people don’t really read for information–instead, we (and I include myself in that “we”) read for validation. We look for evidence that supports what we already believe. It is one of those all-too-human tendencies we need to fight.

We see this selective approach most clearly in the way people read the bible. It amazes me how often we hear about men ‘lying with’ other men, and how seldom we hear about caring for the poor or ‘least of us,” although the ratio of the latter to the former in the actual bible is something like 30 to 1. We also see it in the ways people approach the Constitution–it never ceases to amaze me how many people are ‘purists’ when it comes to the Second Amendment but are perfectly willing to ignore, say, the Establishment Clause.

Currently, the left and right are again doing battle over Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. The left fails to recognize the context of Rand’s philosophy; she was reacting against the excesses of Stalinism and Marxism that she had experienced first-hand. Her anger with the injustice of a system where everyone was supposed to live for the proletariat led her to exalt a somewhat exaggerated individualism. Viewed from our own time–where individualism, greed and selfishness have run amok–her prescriptions can seem excessive and inhuman.

But it is the selective reading of Rand by the right that is most instructive–and amusing. As Martin Marty recently pointed out in his newsletter, Sightings, the right has embraced Rand’s unrestrained capitalism and conveniently overlooked the fact that she was an equally ardent pro-choice atheist.

Rand created a world with two types of human: productive supermen, and venal looters. She didn’t deal with the foibles of real humans, who tend to be neither. What I find ironic is the number of people who think they are John Galt (productive superman) when Rand–with her pitiless, black-and-white worldview– would rather clearly have categorized them as James Taggert (‘sniveling looters’).

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Tea Party Originalism

David Schultz is a colleague (and co-author of my recent textbook, American Public Service: Constitutional and Ethical Foundations) who has written a timely article for Salon. It’s the sort of article that should be read by the very folks who won’t read it, because it actually takes one of the Tea Party’s avowed purposes—constitutional originalism—seriously.

“With reverence and awe, Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party pay homage to the original Constitution and framers who drafted the document in 1787. The House of Representatives, in a nod to them, began its session this year by reading it. Bachmann even brought Antonin Scalia to a seminar on the Constitution for members of Congress, where the Supreme Court justice instructed members to read the Federalist Papers and follow the framers’ original intent. Moreover, many of the Tea Party’s political positions, such as opposition to President Obama’s healthcare reform program, are rooted in their adherence to the original document.

But what if they actually got their way? If a Tea Party constitutional reading suddenly took sway and we returned to the original document as conceived, what would the American republic look like?”

David begins by pointing to the obvious: the right to vote wasn’t part of the original constitution. Voting rights were largely left to state law, and in 1787 most states limited the franchise to white, male, Protestant property owners, age 21 or older. There was no direct popular voting for president or the United States Senate, and there wasn’t even language that addressed voting for members of the House of Representatives. It took the 17th Amendment, adopted in 1913, to allow for people to vote for their senators (an amendment many Tea Party activists wish to repeal), and the 19th Amendment before women could vote.

As David points out, Michelle Bachmann—self-proclaimed devotee of the Constitution—could neither vote nor serve if we still followed the original document. The Senate wasn’t chosen by popular vote originally, and the President still isn’t.

“Even if we consider the Bill of Rights, which was adopted in 1791, to be part of the original Constitution, there are still many limits on its use. Most importantly, as written, the Bill of Rights limited only national power — not state power. Notice how the First Amendment begins by declaring, “Congress shall make no law. ” … a state could take an owner’s property through eminent domain without compensating him.

Subscribe to an original intent reading of the Constitution and states are free to disregard individual rights, including free speech, property, religion and others. States did just that in the early years of the Republic and into the 20th century before the Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to apply Bill of Rights provisions to the states. Most recently, the Supreme Court (with Scalia supporting it) used this incorporation tactic to apply the Second Amendment right to bear arms to states. A Tea Party constitutionalist could not have done this. So much for states as protectors of individual freedom.”

Then of course, there are aspects of the original Constitution that even most Tea Party members find inconvenient. In their much-ballyhooed reading of the constitutional text on the floor of the House at the beginning of this session, these fearless defenders of originalism simply omitted that pesky provision about slavery.

It’s hard not to see similarities between the way so many of these “God and Country” zealots read the Constitution and the way they read the bible—very selectively.

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Framing the Framework

Eliot Spitzer may be defective in sexual morality (not to mention taste), but he made a very important point in a recent speech reported by ACS–the American Constitution Society.

As the ACS blog put it:

Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, during a keynote speech at an ACS event examining corporations’ influence on the federal courts, said that progressives have been far too passive in the debate over the meaning and reach of the U.S. Constitution. Spitzer called the Constitution a “wildly progressive document,” and urged progressives to stop being silent about the richness and vitality of the nation’s governing document.

“I think we are about to lose the Constitution,” Spitzer said at the Feb. 8 “Federal Courts, Inc.?,” event. “I don’t mean in some dramatic way, like it’s going to be ripped away from us. But I do mean, just as we lost the conversation about what government should do, just as we lost the ability to speak with pride and vigor and define what a government can do for our communities, because we failed to make a counter argument, we are losing the narrative about the Constitution, because we are letting the other side claim it.”

Spitzer continued:

The Constitution is a wildly progressive document. It is an amazing thing. We all appreciate that. But our failure to stand up and defend it permits them to claim it. This charade of reading an edited version of the Constitution on the floor of the Congress, as though some how the parts of it we don’t like didn’t exist, as though somehow therefore they can have both an originalist interpretation, but ignore the originalist pieces they don’t like; I mean the internal incoherence of what they do is so palpable. And yet we don’t stand up and push back and say ‘Shame on you, stop, read it, see that there were warts in this document, see that it has grown, see how wonderful it is, and understand it because it has a dynamic and has grown to show us where society can go. We’re quiet. I would have loved to see the president push back on that – in the State of the Union. I would have love to see him say ‘I want to read the Constitution to you, and explain to you what it means, and how it grows.’

A Constitutional Culture

In the wake of the horrific shooting in Tucson last month, PBS’ Mark Shields made an “only in America” observation.

“This is America, where a white Catholic male Republican judge was murdered on his way to greet a Democratic Jewish woman member of Congress, who was his friend. Her life was saved initially by a 20-year old Mexican-American gay college student, and eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon, all eulogized by our African-American President.”

There, in a nutshell, is what most of us would consider the triumph of American culture—the fact that the nation has moved, however haltingly, toward a vision that allows all of us to be members in good standing of our society, equal participants in our national story, whatever our religious belief, skin color, sexual orientation or national origin.  What makes us all Americans isn’t based upon any of those individual identities, but upon our allegiance to what I sometimes call “the American Idea”—a particular worldview based upon an understanding of government and citizenship that grew out of the Enlightenment and was subsequently enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

American culture is not threatened by immigrants who come to this country because they find that worldview attractive, but it is threatened by an appalling lack of civic literacy.

One recent survey found only 36 percent of Americans able to correctly name the three branches of government. Other research has found that fewer than half of 12th grade students can describe the meaning of federalism; that only 35.5% of teenagers can correctly identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution; that barely a quarter of the nation’s 4th, 8th and 12th graders are proficient in civics, with only five percent of seniors able to identify and explain checks on presidential power.  I could go on. And on.

The consequences of this ignorance are profound.

Self-government requires a civically educated citizenry. When a nation’s citizenry 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, and devotion to, constitutional principles is critical to the formation of national identity.

Devotion, however, must be based on genuine understanding of the history and context of our constituent documents if it is to enable, rather than impede, deliberative discourse. When pundits and politicians make constitutional claims, citizens need sufficient education and knowledge to critically evaluate those claims.

Right now, Americans are embroiled in one of our recurring debates about the adequacy of public education.  It’s a vital issue, but while we are addressing it, we need to recognize that deficits in civic literacy don’t just threaten democratic institutions. Such deficits have real and deleterious consequences for fields as diverse as science, religion, and public education itself.

Math and science are important, but creating informed, empowered American citizens able to recognize and resist demagoguery is even more so.

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When Will We Ever Learn?

There was an anti-war song from the sixties that I always loved, titled “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The refrain was “oh, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”

I’ve thought about that refrain a lot lately, as America has increasingly retreated into one of the ugliest nativist episodes in a history dotted with them. It’s ironic, in a way, that just as we seem poised to accept the justice of GLBT claims for equality—a recent CNN poll actually found a slim majority in favor of same-sex marriage for the first time ever!—hostility to immigrants and Muslim-Americans has become vicious. And make no mistake, this mindless lashing-out at those considered “other” threatens all of us who come from groups that have been or could be demonized, because it strikes at the very heart of what it means to be an American.

What makes Americans out of our diverse and disparate population is fidelity to a certain set of social/legal principles; a particular approach to the age-old question “how should people live together?” The very heart of that approach is our belief in judging people on the basis of who they are and what they do—on the basis of their behavior rather than their identity. It is that fundamentally American approach that has allowed the gay community—and Jews, and Catholics, and African-Americans, among others—to argue the unfairness of discriminatory stereotypes used to justify unequal treatment.

The arguments against the community center/Mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero are based on just the same sort of anti-American stereotyping that we recognize as pernicious in other contexts. Treating all Muslims as if they are terrorists is no different than treating all Germans as Nazis, all Catholics as pedophiles, all Irish as drunks, all women as weak and emotional, all gays as promiscuous. Every community that has fought for the right to have its members treated as individuals rather than as part of some monolithic whole, and every American who believes in our constitutional principles, should be standing up for our peaceful Muslim neighbors.

I know we’ve been through times like this before, but I can’t help worrying that the internet has dramatically increased the reach and immediacy of the craziness. Propaganda outlets like Fox “News” and political opportunists like Newt Gingrich play on the fears of the economically and socially insecure. It has never been easier to disseminate outright lies: Obama is a Muslim who wasn’t born in the U.S., the Imam of the proposed Mosque is funded by Saudi Terrorists, illegal immigrants are having “anchor babies” who will be raised as terrorists and sent back into the country to attack us…Ridiculous as these and similar claims are, there is a cohort that really does believe them.

They believe them because they want to. And in today’s media environment, it is so easy to create a “bubble” where you hear only those things you want to hear, listen only to those who will feed your paranoia.

My friends and family are tired of hearing me say this, but here’s my theory of what we are living through right now. A group of old, pissed-off white guys (and they are disproportionately old and guys—the average age of Fox’s audience is 65 and it’s largely male) woke up one morning and looked around. There was a black man in the White House, a woman running Congress, gay people getting married, brown people speaking Spanish. And they are throwing a world-class tantrum. They want “their” country back: the country that privileged white, heterosexual, Protestant males over the rest of us.

I hope and believe that this is a final eruption—a last gasp of spleen and bigotry—before their cohort dies off. But it is doing a great deal of harm while it lasts.   

When will we—and they—ever learn?

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