Is there anything richer than a gaggle of smarmy progressives snickering at the conservative “Constitution fetish”? “Fetish” is the fashionable Left’s latest suggestive imagery turned talking point, a dig at the new Republican majority in the House, which began its session this week by reading the Constitution aloud. It’s as if Dracula were complaining about a crucifix fetish.
“Fetish,” like “tea-bagger,” slides easily off the tongues of the Big Thinkers who get their dithering law from Dalia Lithwick and their sophomoric style from Bill Maher. If there is no Obama to send a thrill up their legs, it takes an organic Constitution throbbing with active liberty to ring their chimes. The lifeless one read from the podium Thursday — which must have been, like, a hundred years old or something — leaves them limp.
Advertisement
If you really want to see what irrational arousal is like, though, get thee to the nearest faculty lounge or MSNBC set and hum a few bars of the Warren Court’s greatest hits. Like a hand reaching through the epistemological fog, you’d think Harry Blackmun’s impenetrable prose had been touched by Aphrodite herself. Sure, your average fetish-fixated tea-bagger may be satisfied by such humdrum fare as laying taxes, disciplining the Militia, and punishments cruel and unusual. But it took Blackmun’s exotic penumbras, the “Hippocratic Oath’s apparent rigidity,” and a touch of in utero “quickening” before the siren trio of Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter were up to seducing New York Times editors and one-note feminists with their hypnotic “Sweet Mystery of Life.”
Explaining (sort of) why Blackmun’s iconic Roe v. Wade decision simply had to be preserved despite its void of support in law and logic, they wrote: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” You’re telling me you think James Madison could compete with that?
“Existence” and “the universe” — we have czars for those now, right? There are no czars in that stale old Constitution Republicans were reading. There’s also no health care, no TARP, no General Motors, no AIG; no Departments of Justice, Labor, Health, Human Services, Energy, Education, Agriculture, Urban Development, or Transportation; no FCC, FTC, SEC, ICC, FDIC, FAA, FHA, or FEMA; no Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Adjustment Office, Economic Development Administration, Economic Research Service, or Economics and Statistics Administration; no Community Oriented Policing Services; no Bureaus of Public Debt, Reclamation, Transportation Statistics, International Labor, or Immigration Services; no Administrations for Children and Families, Native Americans, International Development, Battle Monuments, Toxic Substances and Disease — not even an Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Coordinating Committee or a Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds (I kid you not).
Projection, my dear, projection. The Left is full of fetishes, so they accuse the Right of fetishism. In its oldest use, fetishes are means of manipulating animistic spirits to make one's way in a hostile world. Christianity dispenses with such bondage, but the Left, having discarded the truth of God, has nothing left. Except fetishes.
Any American -- Democrat, Liberal or Progressive -- who is offended by the reading of the US Constitution, likely one if the four most important documents ever written, within the halls of the institution it founded, by members who have sworn to uphold it is as wrong-headed as a Catholic being offended by the reading of the New Testament by a Protestant.
Therefore, the reading of this document is definitely not the moment to drag up differences between our points of view and how the government it established is to be administered. Rather, it is a time to put our finger to our lips and reflect upon how grateful we should be that we have been endowed with this document and the institutions it established, because it is these very institutions that enable us to express our opinions and petty differences without fear. Therefore, standing on the shoulders of giants, it is up to us to continue this tradition of freedom to continue building the finest nation on earth.
Indeed. Yet another example of the "logic" of the left.
If the Supreme Court's constitutional interpretations are indeed etched in stone - a new set of commandments, as it were - when did this designation arise? Certainly not when Dred Scott was decided.
- To a liberal progressive: means Government ensuring you never have to worry about anything again ... Because they know what's good for you better than you do, or anyone else. The Governments role in ensuring the general welfare is valued above any individual freedoms or rights.
- To a conservative constutionalist: means self-determination, for good or for bad, where freedoms supporting individual choice, and individual accountability for the consequences, are valued above any Government role in ensuring the general welfare.
As I understand the eminent domain ruling (which is much weaker than McCarthy's understanding), the Supreme Court said this was a state-level issue. Finally something the Feds aren't taking over. If you don't want the state, county, or city to take a piece of property, pass a state law as we did in Texas.
The left and the Democrats sneer at the Constitution to their own grief. Either Americans understand this and will continue to register their disgust at the polls, or they don't, and will let the country continue its slide into lawlessness, decadence, and eventual revolution. Without a constitution, for government everything is allowed and for people, nothing.
If the "heart of liberty" is the right to define our individual concepts of existence, then there are a variety of laws being enforced in this country today that are blatantly unconstitutional, starting with those that prohibit euthanasia. Where were Justices Kennedy, O'Connor and Souter when Dr. Kivorkian was imprisoned for exercising his right to define his individual concept of existence? And what about the serial killer who releases his victims from a state he defines as non-existence?
"Just words, just words". Certainly they mean something. Or they are just ink on a page or dots on a screen. To liberals they are just dots on a screen. They mean nothing. They mean what you choose them to mean. And you can change them, it's your choice, you didn't really mean them when you said them, you were feeling different than you do today. You meant something completely different. That's why you are changing them, of course, that's it, I feel different today than I did yesterday. So really, they are just words.
If anything should be set in stone, it would be once laid waste those failed edifices enshrining the alphabet agencies, czarist bureaucracies, and Departments of Redundancy, to erect, from their ruins, twin colossal memorials of Roscoe Filburn standing with his bushel of wheat and another of Susette Kelo's house with her standing, pitchfork in hand, at the threshold of its door, both buttressed with the indelible banner: “Don’t touch my junk!”
To a Liberal/Progressive: Means Government ensuring you never have to worry about anything again ... Because they know what's good for you better than you do ... or anyone else. They value Governments role in ensuring general welfare above individual freedoms.
To a Conservative/Constitutionalist: Means self-determination, for good or bad, where freedom of individual choice and individual accountability for the consequences of those freedoms are valued above any Government role in ensuring the general welfare.
This article is truly not helpful. There is value on both the right and the left. Did Lincoln speak with contempt about his opponents? Did he inflame his constituents?
It's time to reflect on the sneering, contemptuous, hateful rhetoric that permeates political debate. It wouldn't be allowed in a professional debate and it shouldn't be tolerated in politics. It isn't helpful.
Thanks for reminding me of that wonderful tidbit that is the "jurisprudence of doubt." That phrase has always been a guilty pleasure of mine, as it is a nice encapsulation of the doughty skepticism of both government and man that many on our side of the aisle rightly think should characterize constitutional interpretation.
And, as per Kennedy's Law*, liberty can most certainly find refuge there.
(*Kennedy's Law: In any 5-4 Supreme Court in which Anthony Kennedy sides with the the Left-aligned bloc of the court, the case will be wrongly decided. In addition, if Kennedy writes the majority opinion, then the opinion will be incomprehensible. (And yes, Casey was 6-3, but it gets counted because it perfectly illustrates the above corollary.)
Why didn't the Republicans have a vote to read the Constitution on the floor? A roll call vote would point out those opposed to supporting/understanding the Constitution they swore to uphold. Another opportunity missed by the Republican bozos.
