More On The Constitution

So yesterday I mentioned how I was in agreement with Jeff at Caerdroia about the problems with the current expansive interpretation of the Constitution. Today, though, it hit me that I don't agree with the main premise of his post which was that we need a new Constitution.

Our current Constitution represents an ideal that we are constantly striving towards. We may never get there, but it is the ultimate goal for us politically.

America is a land of strivers. We try and try and try to achieve the impossible - and quite often we succeed. Our Constitution gives us something concrete to shoot for.

Now it's true that ever since FDR stacked the Supreme Court the literalist interpretation of the Constitution has been under attack. Government has expanded and morphed in ways that the Framers never could have imagined. And I don't disagree that we have moved away from the original intent of the Constitution, which was to limit the power of government.

But there is hope. While reading an article in the Washington Dispatch, I came across this (talking about Reagan):

For the previous fifty years, the premise had been that the government had a role and responsibility in just about everything. All problems, real or contrived, were appropriately within the scope of government action. The debate had been about what was the best way for government to address a problem. How large a role should the government have? How much should it cost? How should the program be structured? Was it better to have the problems addressed by the "efficient" Republicans or the "compassionate" Democrats? How would the government program be most effective so that we got "the biggest bang for the buck"?

Republican or Democrat, Ike or FDR, Nixon or Kennedy, Ford or Johnson, the details may have differed but the underlying debate was based upon the same premise....the government had a role and a responsibility.

Reagan changed that debate. The debate became about whether the federal government should be involved at all in addressing a problem. Perhaps the government did not have a role in every corner of life and economic activity. Perhaps by being involved, the government not only did not help, but made things worse. This was a dramatic change and if Reagan could not implement or enact all he wished, he had taken a very important first step, a step that had to be taken before action and accomplishment could follow.

We're trying to undo fifty years of damage, most of which was caused as a reaction to a great calamity (the Depression). The process won't be easy, as evidenced by the fact that it took fifty years just to change the nature of the debate. Those were just the first baby steps in swinging the pendulum back towards sanity. It will be a long and tiresome process to reign in the expanse of the federal government, but it is something we can do.

If we want to.

And our Constitution will sit there as the end goal of the effort. It will be the beacon that we strive for.

To replace it with a mediocre document would be to ignore the American mindset. It would almost be an admission of defeat - a statement that we couldn't live up to the expectations of the Framers.

And I don't believe that that's true. We can live up to those expectations. We can honor the wisdom they passed on to us in that document.

In order to have a successful call for a Constitutional Convention, people would have to be educated on what is so wrong with the current system that it requires a radical overhaul. If that kind of effort can be organized, it needs to be used to educate people on why they need to elect representatives that actually respect the document and don't just look at it as a hindrance to their unfettered access to political pork.

Then we could keep striving for the elusive ideal and we wouldn't have to change the Constitution.

Let the other countries wimp out on their goals. We need to keep working towards ours.