Thread: Liberals out to wreck Constitution

Submitted by SHNS on Fri, 08/20/2010 - 10:48 By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service Please, quick, someone stop these conservatives who want to amend the Constitution, screech utterly aghast liberals who long ago figured out a better solution when some portion of the document got in the way of a policy they favored.
It is to simply ignore this basic law of the land or perhaps argue it says something it doesn't or doesn't say something it does.
To be sure, there are times they embrace what they take as the Constitution's explicit intent. At the moment, they are doing that very thing in decrying talk by Senator Lindsey Graham and some other Republicans about possibly amending the document's guarantee of citizenship to people born in the United States.
The Graham concern is that this civic right is an incentive to illegal immigration and permits easy theft of something most Americans see as precious.
The left, and some conservatives, too, are against his idea on its merits -- to many, it seems, there is something almost holy about a practice duplicated by only one other nation in the world. But an even more fervent argument from some is that amending the Constitution is somehow akin to slinging muck at a work of art.
They've got it wrong. The amendment process preserves the work. Our central rights as Americans are in the Constitution as amendments. The birth guarantee itself is included in an amendment adopted after the Civil War to try to ensure that former slaves would not be abused. An amendment was added to the Constitution as recently as 1992. The right of 18-year-old Americans to vote was adopted in 1971. We had amendments in 1967, 1964, 1961, and 1951.
None of that's to say we should adopt amendments lightly, but the difficult process makes sure that won't happen, and amendments are far to be preferred to the attitude summed up in the caption of a cartoon I keep near my desk.
"Hey, the Constitution isn't engraved in stone," one cheery lawyer says to another as they walk in front of the Supreme Court building.
No, it's written on paper and could eventually be tossed to the wind if presidents, Congress and the court do too much dodging and weaving about its meaning as we've seen over and over again and as was rationalized in a deconstructionist, postmodernist view expressed by former Justice David Souter in a speech the left loved.
He said the Constitution consists of competing principles that judges must wrestle with as they come to understand not just the facts but also the deep, social meaning of legal conflicts. Sounds OK until you come to see how this formulation can be used to justify all kinds of departures from rather obvious constitutional implications as long as judges can point to some suggested sentiment in the document as a whole. Instead of constitutional order and rule by law, you then have unrestrained rule by an appointed elite.
If the Constitution needs additions or changes to conform to new understandings, the answer is amendment, and in any particular proposal, the question is whether it merits efforts at such an alteration. The Graham idea may not rise to the occasion, but does have merit. While this country admits a million legal immigrants a year -- more than all the other countries in the world combined -- illegal aliens rush in on top of that, competing for jobs with some of our most disadvantaged citizens and ultimately costing the society more than they contribute.
The illegal aliens constitute 4 percent of the population while giving birth to eight percent of the babies. Some four million children in this country have illegal parents, though an amendment would not necessarily mean -- and should not mean -- they would be disenfranchised. For all of this, there are simpler ways of dealing with the issue than an amendment, which would still be better than passing laws that ignore what the Constitution says.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/55986

Yes, there are many evils wandering everywhere.

Though, God foretold all of this many thousands of years ago, and He wrote it down for all to see.

What a brilliant move!