Sorry for the radio silence — lots of odds and ends.

I really enjoyed Seth Lipsky’s book, The Citizen’s Constitution, which I reviewed for this month’s issue of The New Criterion (subscription required). I’m not sure I agree with Seth’s observation that the Constitution “more than anything else,” including “race, religion, national origin, language,” commands our loyalty and “defines what it means to be an American.” As he deftly demonstrates, there is vast disagreement about what our fundamental law says — and even about what it is. (Read, for example, Ed Whelan’s illuminating NRO profile of Goodwin Liu, Obama’s Ninth Circuit nominee, who has contorted the Constitution into a vehicle for radical social change.) So if the Constitution is the touchstone of American-ness, who really knows what that is anymore?

What I love about the book, though, is that it really is about a citizen’s Constitution, not a lawyer’s. The book is not thematic — it’s an annotated guide that takes the Constitution’s provisions in order — and it does not adopt a particular school of interpretation (e.g., Scalia’s originalism, Breyer’s “active liberty,” etc.). But it harks back to what, not so long ago, was a deeply held American conviction that ordinary people could make their arrangements and resolve their problems without armies of experts. We were a confident people that trusted our common sense and favored the discretion of well-chosen officials acting within a strong system of divided powers over the notion that we’re so smart we can regulate life with a zillion antecedent rules. Seth observes that the Constitution runs about 8,000 words, making it less than one-third the size of the Obamacare mess.