Posted on 08/23/2006 5:44:19 AM PDT by Manfred the Wonder Dawg
“We do not insist that our medicine, our technology, or even our entertainment, all remain in an obsolete state; why would we demand that the law be given such treatment? It seems absurd to suggest that we can change the speed limit to reflect improved technology but we cannot interpret the Constitution to reflect improvements in society.”
A year ago, Slate magazine’s legal correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick, recounted this observation — from one of her bounteously sophisticated liberal readers — as a neat summary of the “doctrine” of a “living Constitution.” And a neat summary it is. How droll and obtuse that conservatives think the Constitution should remain anchored against the tides of change while those currents bring with them torrents of newfangled iPods and ever-changing gusts of news; one day about Britney Spears, the next day Paris Hilton. How very horse-and-buggy to suggest that the Commerce Clause wouldn’t change with the latest in slattern chic and personal electronics.
Anyway, that bit stayed in my mind ever since, and I think of it whenever the Constitution comes up in the War on Terror. Just last week was a case in point. Judge Anna Diggs Taylor issued a ruling that even legal scholars who like the outcome consider to be laughable in its reasoning. She held that the government’s Terrorist Surveillance Program is not only illegal but unconstitutional. The program, if you recall, monitors phone calls and Internet activity among al Qaeda members and affiliates without a warrant. The executive branch holds that it has the right to do this under its authority to collect intelligence for national-security purposes. These calls aren’t being monitored for criminal prosecutions but to “connect the dots” and prevent another 9/11.
It may turn out that the TSP is illegal, technically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, but we wouldn’t know that from Taylor’s decision. She cited almost none of the most relevant cases on the matter, and the upshot of her ruling is that even if Congress wanted to codify in law what the president has been doing under his own authority, it couldn’t because the founders never had any such thing in mind. “There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,” Taylor wrote, invoking the founders’ intent and betraying her own intent to issue as quotable an opinion as possible for the press.
You do see the irony here, don’t you? A coalition of pressure groups — Greenpeace, the ACLU, and a bunch of left-wing professors — are arguing that the Constitution must be immutably inflexible, adamantine in the face of changing times. The fact that al Qaeda is using new technologies the Founders could never have imagined is irrelevant, say the absolutists. If the government can listen in on bin Laden’s phone calls without a warrant, what’s to keep them from listening to a phone call between me and my aunt Sally?
Isn’t this just a bit hard to take with a straight face from the ACLU, which finds powers not created by the Constitution every day and periodically declares such inanities as the idea that the Constitution forbids teachers from reading The Chronicles of Narnia in class lest the tykes’ young minds be corrupted by hidden messages about Christianity? Such concerns would have left the Founders dumbfounded before the opening prayers of the Constitutional Convention.
Then there’s Greenpeace. Not noted for its abiding concern for constitutional niceties one way or the other, the environmentalist outfit claims that its constitutional rights were violated because the TSP had a chilling effect on its international communications. Had they been in negotiations with bin Laden to keep him from blowing up baby seals?
But, you might ask, aren’t traditional opponents of the living Constitution hypocrites? Liberals normally like their penumbras emanating and their Commerce Clause written in Silly Putty while we conservatives like our Constitution like our beef jerky — cold, dead, tough to chew through. So aren’t conservatives using a double standard, too?
It may depend whom you’re talking about, but I think not. Long before the concept of a living Constitution was hatched, the authors of the original version — as well as the courts interpreting it — understood that the executive branch has the authority and flexibility to conduct foreign policy and wage war. Terrorists may be criminals, but they aren’t merely criminals. They’re waging war against us and doing so in ways never imagined by the founders. They don’t want territory or treaties, and they don’t use armies and cannons. They want to make our own technology and freedoms into weapons they can use against us.
And so here is the real absurdity of the “living Constitution” school. Where the Constitution is supposed to be inert, they want it alive and mutating. But where the Constitution was intended to be flexible, complete intellectual rigor mortis has set in.
The problem with viewing the Constitution as a "living document" is that living things suffer from disease, ultimately decay and finally die.
( No more Olmert! No more Kadima! No more Oslo!)
What an absurd assumption.
Our society has not improved to the point where existing laws are obsolete.
Let me see, the writers of dictionaries should be able to change the meaning of words and thereby amend the constitution at will.
OOPs, Can't seem to find that method of amendmending the constitution anywhere, nor the implimentation of dictionary publishers as a 4th branch of government.
A thorough witch slapping is what this author should have received; technology improvements are physical, real and verifiable. "Improvements in society" are subjective, often illusory and subject to honest and intense debate.
The comparison is absurd.
They treat the Holy Bible the same way.............
Actually, the Founders had to deal with this problem, too.
The Barbary Pirates were the Islamic terrorists of their day. They siezed vessels, kidnapped, bombed raped and murdered, just as their bretheren do today. President Thomas Jefferson was faced with a trans-national enemy fighting without territorial ambition or traditional armies.
And what did Thomas Jefferson do? He built a Navy, he formed the Marines, and he sent them halfway around the World to kick Islamist butt.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Consitution DOES change: In fact, it was written complete with the method of change spelled out within the text. It's called the "Amendment Process."
Something that leftists (or anyone) who claims that we've got a "living Constitution" doesn't seem to understand is that as soon as a group of people are able to change the meaning of the Consitution to something they like, eventually there will be a group of people who change it to something that they won't like.
What other legal document do you think they'd support where the meaning of the words are fungible?
Mark
This is a crucial point never discussed.
Laws can be unconstitutional, too, but left unchallenged for long allows everyone to lose sight of that reality. Left unchallenged, they can exist for decades.
We must say it out loud and shout it often: laws passed by ignoramuses (constitutionally elected) distinguished only by their plummeting collective IQ, must be challenged immediately and often.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is probably unconstitutional, but we may finalize that determination way too late to save the probable thousands of US citizens destined to die in the next few years as a result of its "passage". "Mostly" Constitutional just ain't gonna hack it.
What I find ironic is that most of the complaints I hear about the SC's "living document" doctrine revolve around what people perceive as them interfering with Congress and "the will of the people". The USSC got it's lessons in "living document" revisionism forced down it's throat by FDR and the New Deal Congress, under threat of the Court Packing Bill.
Througout history that case has been made over and over again.
I agree. I believe that our society has suffered terribly due to mucking with the Constitution.
Not entirely correct... There was an element of territorial ambitions, insofar as the de facto governments in selected areas of the Mediterranean and North Africa were controlled completely by these pirates, by means of either large bribes or outright coups.
But, to me, the most important point is this. For the benefit of the morons inhabiting our largest coastal cities, let's repeat...
They siezed vessels, kidnapped, bombed raped and murdered, just as their bretheren do today. President Thomas Jefferson was faced with a trans-national enemy fighting without territorial ambition or traditional armies.
The total difference between then and now is that the pirates, then, never wandered outside they Mediterranean. If you were unlucky enough to have a coastline there, you were vulnerable. otherwise you were unaffected, unless you had vessels in the area.
They did not and could not travel thousands of miles for the sheer pleasure of destroying, without gaining booty at all.
If Jefferson was justified, we are orders of magnitude more so justified.
Overwhelming force underwhelmingly applied is not only a waste, it is national suicide in the most prolonged and painful form.
stupid alquedacrats with their rubber constitution
-Our society has not improved to the point where existing laws are obsolete.-
Exactly! Lefties are so busy creating new laws they never have time to enforce the old ones.
BUMP!
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