We The People

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence (sic), promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

So states the Preamble to the Constitution. These days, especially in Tea Party circles and by Ron Paul, the Constitution is cited for all sorts of things it does not contain. For example, our esteemed Tea Party member of the school board, , in an email to me cited both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence for the proposition that eminent domain was prohibited in the United States. Eichfeld likely thinks that all those roads we drive on were established when we still belonged to England and the King could use eminent domain. The concept is that the sovereign--in our case, the states, the federal government and other government entities including the school board--may take private property for public use, provided it pays the owner fair compensation. The Declaration, of course, is not law and prohibits nothing. The Constitution has no reference to eminent domain, which is part of the Common Law we inherited from the British. By the way, the “Liberty” referred to in the Preamble clearly referred to independence from England. Otherwise, Congress and the states would not have had to pass the first 10 amendments now known as The Bill of Rights.

Right there in the Preamble, as one of the purposes of the Constitution, is the phrase “promote the general Welfare.” Dr. Ron Paul thinks that the general welfare, for example, does not include the Transportation Safety Agency (those folks who inspect Dr. Paul and everyone else at the airport), and would replace it by “private property owners (being made) responsible for security.” The quote is taken from his official campaign website. If you are happy with that idea, vote for Paul and fly at your own risk.

Paul is unconcerned with Israel’s security. He is also opposed to our Navy defending our access to the Strait of Hormuz, through which one fifth of the world’s oil is transported and is now threatened by Iran. The election of Ron Paul would create a disaster so large that the United States could never recover, either militarily or economically. The notion that our founding fathers did not wish the federal government to be concerned with the welfare of our population is simply false and is contrary to what is clearly stated in the Preamble. Paul ought to take his own advice and read the Constitution.

There is a lot of blather in conservative circles that the “liberal Democratic judges” have somehow perverted the Constitution. The fact is that if any group has perverted the Constitution it is the conservative judges on the Supreme Court appointed by President Reagan and the two Bushes. The conservative stalwarts are Chief Judge John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy. They have been in the majority since the second Bush left office. 

The very conservative Chief Justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes, once said, “the Constitution means what the judges say it means.” Obviously, the “meaning” of the Constitution depends, from generation to generation, on the philosophy of the judges interpreting it. That fact is recognized even by conservatives, who have often pointed out that the next president and next senate will have a great deal of influence on the future of the United States by virtue of the president’s power to nominate and the senate’s to confirm all federal judges. The notion that the only true standard of interpretation is the “intention of the founders” is only the current theory now held by the Supreme Court’s majority.

By virtues of the extraordinary speed and reach of modern media, falsehoods or simply ignorant interpretation of what our government does and what it is empowered to do infect large numbers of our population as surely as . Democracy requires a population that resists easy solutions to complicated problems. Simple-minded popularists should never be allowed to captain our ship of state, especially when we are this close to the rocks.