Dear Reader (and the little green man in my head, who said you’re not going crazy, you’re just a bit sad. ‘Cause there’s a man in ya, gnawin’ ya, tearin’ ya…)
A reader, though not necessarily you or the parenthetically mentioned green man above, wrote me and asked a good question. How would you like to be the poor Chicago family leasing Rahm Emanuel’s house? If Rahm can’t prove his residency, he can’t run for mayor – and, as we all know, Chicago Democrats are unshakably committed to the letter of the law. No words come more quickly to mind when I hear the phrase “Democratic mayor of Chicago” than “fidelity,” “probity,” “decency,” and “rectitude.”
So if it really came down to it and the Doe family’s (they’re real name is being withheld to spare them being cleaved into a million pieces by Rahm Emanuel dressed in a garbage-bag suit and hairnet) living in Rahm’s house was all that stood between him and his dream of ruling Chicago like Tina Turner ran Bartertown in Beyond Thunderdome, is there any doubt that he would go all Ike Turner on those poor people? He’s probably already hanging upside-down like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, doing gut crunches and calling their daughter on the phone.
What Is It about the Windy City?
We’ve all read a bunch of times that Rahm has always dreamed about being mayor of Chicago. And I read somewhere once that Obama also dreamed and schemed to be mayor of Chicago, too, until he realized it would be easier to ride to the planet’s rescue on a rainbow-colored Pegasus. What is it about the Chicago mayoralty that is so seductive and appealing? Does the mayor get to do stuff in Chicago – eat ribs in bed? run with scissors? kill a man with a baseball bat to make a point over a dinner meeting? – that mayors don’t get to do in, say, Scranton? Help me out here.
Who Worships the Constitution?
So you may remember that last week I mocked Dahlia Lithwick – Slate’s legal eagle – for her bizarre and ignorant suggestion that Congress isn’t supposed to consider the constitutionality of laws they’re writing. (I would link to last week’s G-File to remind you but, alas, Chaka says that the technology hasn’t been invented yet and it would be easier to simply have an intern print it out and run it over to each and every one of your houses). Well, here in G-File land, last week’s mockery is this week’s analysis!
So here’s my column on the topic. An excerpt:
A progressive blogger, meanwhile, writes in U.S. News & World Report that such talk of requiring constitutionality is “just wacky.”
Before we get to the historical niceties, a question.
Does anyone, anywhere, think legislators should vote for legislation they think is unconstitutional? Anyone? Anyone?
How about presidents? Should they sign such legislation into law?
Yet, according to this creepy logic, there’s no reason for congressmen to pass, obey, or even consider the supreme law of the land. Reimpose slavery? Sure! Let’s see if we can catch the Supreme Court asleep at the switch. Nationalize the TV stations? Establish a king? Kill every first-born child? Why not? It ain’t unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says so!
And of course, that means the president can’t veto legislation because it’s unconstitutional, because that’s apparently not his job. Wouldn’t want to “encroach” on the judiciary!
Of course, reasonable people understand how absurd all of this is.
There’s nothing in the Constitution – nothing! – that says the Supreme Court is the final or sole arbiter of what is or is not constitutional.
While I was slaving away at the law library researching that column, Michael Tanner pretty much wrote the same thing before me. But I also ran across this “Lexington” column in The Economist on “the perils of constitution worship.” I couldn’t squeeze it in to my column, so I wanted to address it here.
The “Lexington” piece isn’t awful in all of its particulars, but it is awful – condescendingly awful – in its generalities. It takes the views of a few liberal academics as if they were dispositive and pretends that the Tea Partiers touting the Constitution understand it less than (the Red Tory) Lexington does.
Then there’s this revealing passage:
More to the point is that the constitution provides few answers to the hard questions thrown up by modern politics. Should gays marry? No answer there. Mr Klarman argues that the framers would not even recognise America’s modern government, with its mighty administrative branch and imperial executive. As to what they would have made of the modern welfare state, who can tell? To ask that question after the passage of two centuries, says Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution, is to pose an impossible thought experiment.
For starters, one needn’t ask what the Founders would have made of the modern welfare state. One need only ask whether the modern welfare state is in fundamental disagreement with the Constitution the Founders (and succeeding generations) left us. Lexington’s claims notwithstanding, even the most dogmatic originalists don’t read the Constitution to find out what the Founders thought, they read the Founders to find out what the Constitution means. Big difference there. But according to liberals, conservatives are really worshipping the Founders and using the Constitution as a Ouija board to commune with them.
More importantly, what was that bit about the Constitution and gay marriage? I’ll save you the effort of scrolling up. Lexington writes: “More to the point is that the constitution provides few answers to the hard questions thrown up by modern politics. Should gays marry? No answer there.”
This is either revealingly ignorant or revealingly sneaky. First of all, why write “should gays marry”? I don’t think anyone on any side of the debate thinks the Constitution answers the question of whether gays should marry. That’s left to Bible classes, eHarmony chat rooms, and conversations during boring commercials at Oscar parties.
Okay, maybe this is a British idiomatic thing – like calling trucks “lorries” and elevators “lifts” or French Fries “chips” – and he really means “can gays marry.”But wait, that can’t be right either. Why? Because virtually none of the crazy, right-wing Constitution idolaters thinks the Constitution answers that question either. Look around, it’s the Left (plus Ted Olson) that’s arguing the Constitution allows gays marriage, not the Right. Progressives think the thumbs-up on gay marriage can be found in a forgotten corner of an emanationof some constitutional penumbra underneath some Betamax tapes of the 1979 Canadian Men’s Figure Skating championships, because (as I’ve been saying for years) progressives think the Constitution is like Felix the Cat’s magic bag: Look in there long enough and hard enough, and you can find anything. They are the ones suffering from magical thinking, not us.
Meanwhile, we alleged Constitution worshippers argue that the Constitution issilent on such issues, which is why some want to amend it to protect traditional marriage (I’m probably not one of them, by the way). The reason I thinkLexington’s comment is so revealing is twofold. First, it shows that Lexington really doesn’t understand the argument he’s mocking. He assumes the tea partiers are opposed to gay marriage, so they must think the Constitution backs them up.
Second, the whole point of these supposedly crazy “tenthers” is that the U.S. Constitution is not some kind of shrunken monkey paw that grants wishes to liberal social planners who want to make everyone into wonderful happy people. Ask a liberal if something can be good and necessary and progressive but also unconstitutional, and he’ll likely meltdown like an android in “I, Mudd” [BROKEN LINK] being told his ears are green. Heck, when Tom Coburn asked Elena Kagan if the Constitution prohibited the federal government from forcing everyone to eat their vegetables three times a day, she said, in effect, golly that’s a really tough question but probably not.
What Lexington fails to understand is that conservatives see the Constitution as a very basic, albeit brilliant, thing. It can do only what it can do. It’s a noun. The Left sees the Constitution as a verb, an alchemic means to make all good things possible, so long as “good things” is defined as the liberal agenda. Those who assert that conservatives see it the same way are simply projecting their vision on those (of us) who do not share it.
In Other News
Proud to be Right is out next week. I’m not going to hector you mercilessly to buy it or anything like that. I’ll save such hectoring for the next book I actually write rather than lightly edit (it’s coming, it’s coming). Still, if this is the sort of thing that interests you, please give it a gander. Here’s Jim Antle’s generous review in the Washington Times.
Oh, and here are the details for next week’s panel on the book:
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 6TH @ 7:30PM
Georgetown University
White Gravenor Hall / Room 201A
Washington, DC 20057
Roundtable Discussion / Book Signing
With Jonah Goldberg, Todd Seavey, Helen Rittelmeyer, and Ashley Thorne
Event co-hosted by the Georgetown University College Republicans and the Young America’s Foundation
I really had a grand time out in Ohio at the Ashbrook Center this week. It was one of the best days on the road I’ve had in a long time. Very smart people, fun conversation, enthusiastic and serious students, scotch, steak, good times. I’ve been to scores of campuses over the years and I don’t tout schools too often, but having a kid at the Ashbrook Center would be money well spent. Peter Schramm, a true scholar-hero, is too kind to me here.
On a different note: This is a pretty funny video documenting the salesman’s plight. Very, very bad language ahead.
I remember watching a speech by Tom Wolfe in which he said something about how hard it was to write Bonfire of the Vanities, since every time he had a good make-believe idea, reality would screw him by producing a real-life event that tracked too closely to his fictional idea. That’s how I felt when I read this story in the Telegraph, which has completely undercut my screenplay:
Lesbian martial arts expert frees under age lover in Indonesia.
A lesbian martial arts expert has staged a jailbreak to free her underage female lover from protective custody where she was being “cured” of her attraction to women, according to reports.