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CPR on the ‘Living’ Constitution

Kudos to the Republicans — and to those Democrats who took part — for reading the Constitution aloud during the opening session of the House of Representatives. Kudos, too, to Rep. Bob Goodlatte for coordinating the effort. Even if they did flub things a bit, the reading shows their hearts, at least, are in the right place.

It’s too bad reading the Constitution hasn’t long been a practice at the beginning of each new session of Congress. If it had, perhaps our country wouldn’t be in the shape it’s in today. But now begun, it’s a practice that should be continued. Legislators — as well as the public — need to be reminded of what the document they’ve sworn to uphold actually says.

From all the hubbub, though, you’d think the Constitution — instead of being the document that established our government — was some weird manifesto trotted out by a peculiar cult that unaccountably managed to gain control of the House of Representatives.

Democrats, of course, likely do view the Republicans as a peculiar cult. And since the Constitution — in the now infamous words of Washington Post staffer Ezra Klein — “was written more than a hundred years ago” and is, therefore (in his mind, anyway), “confusing,” many people probably do see it as a weird sort of manifesto. After all, it wasn’t texted, tweeted or posted on Facebook, so how relevant can it really be?

With apologies to Chesterton, and Klein notwithstanding, the problem isn’t that Congress has tried following the Constitution, and found it old and confusing. The problem is that Congress has found the Constitution much too constraining and left it unfollowed.

Constraints being so despised in this progressive age, it’s no wonder many in Congress (and elsewhere) prefer to imagine the Constitution to be a living document, endowed with life by the deified judiciary and spreading like kudzu ever since to cover whatever aspect of American life the lawmakers — with only our best interests at heart — want to control.

But constraining government is exactly what the framers had in mind. The men who created the Constitution had a clear understanding of both human nature and the seductive nature of power on the human psyche. They also understood what too few today are willing to see: that freeing the Constitution from constraints has, ironically, the effect of making citizens less free.

Which is why the framers didn’t create the “living document” lawmakers and judges like to think they did. Neither did they create an inflexible document that couldn’t be changed to meet the exigencies of the times. They did, however, make the process difficult so we wouldn’t confuse exigency with fancy, necessity with notion.

Yet as pleased as I am with the Constitution’s reading, and as much as I’d like to see it continue, I doubt it will have any real effect. We’ve moved so far now from the Constitution the framers created that, however many times the Constitution is read on the House floor, it’s likely to act as little more than a bittersweet reminder of what we’ve lost rather than as the brake it should be on the government’s power.

Despite the best of intentions, lawmakers and judges won’t easily relinquish the power to control our lives. With the blessing of the unconstrained Constitution, they’ll continue doing more and more for us even as they take more and more from us — freedom, independence, personal responsibility, self-reliance — until the living Constitution finally drains the life right out of us.

Linda Whitlock is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.