IT is a pretty artificial thing, this reverence for the Constitution that has been a thing we have to struggle against to gain equality, no groups more so than Black People, Native People, Women, poor people, workers, etc. When you count those up, minus the rich, the privileged, the white the male,etc. pretty much most of those who have had to struggle against the Constitution is WE as in "We the People".
I think that reverence is a phony, forced thing, the same stuff that regional mythology is based in, the cultivated and cheap form of pride, the equally cultivated and cheap form of resentment - often based on conveniently placed blame when those who have power and influence over our lives, generally those who are wealthy and powerful in our own regions, states, municipalities gull us into believing that instead of them it's someone from somewhere else in the country who is robbing them, cheating them, looking down on them.
There is no rational reason for anyone to look on the United States Constitution as being anything but a highly self-interested document which benefited mostly its writers, their families, their class, which was made very difficult to amend and that amendment process being open to bribery and manipulation of the kind that I just talked about, the reason that people as rational as Charles Pierce is (rightfully) deeply fearful of what could happen during another Constitutional Convention which, sorry, Charlie, we may get whether or not we want it so we should take a cold, hard look at what we've already got for what's wrong with it. Not a little of the things which the estimable Charles Pierce rightfully fears is either encouraged by the document as written or is a product of those words which are there being distorted into the "right to lie" in the mass media which is always going to be be in service to the rich who own it or the rich they share a common cause with or who can pay the best.
But the sanctity which we are demanded to show to that document is irrational in the extreme, in no form is that sanctity more irrational or dangerous or disingenuous than the "origlalists" the "strict constructionist" or other forms of phony fundamentalism that claims that the "original meaning" of "the founders" is discernable in a way that will be certain enough to base court rulings on. In the form which this latest hack who the Republican-fascists will put on the Court, Barrett, that dishonesty takes on extreme forms that even Scalia was too honest to claim was doable.
The stupidity of future generations being ruled by the minds and thoughts of long dead men was so obvious that one of the foremost of the "founders" though not a member of that
Convention, one of those who was advising Madison et al, Thomas Jefferson thought it was stupid and probably dangerous for a Constitution to not lapse after 19 years, a new one to be made by new people in a new generation. It was probably one of his better critiques of constitutional government.
There is no reason for the thoughts of rich, white, slaveowning or sharp businessmen and 18th century lawyers, all white, all male, many of them I'm informed of rather seamy and dishonest, all of them (including John Adams) rather viciously racist and bigoted to be given the status of certain divination of absolute truth and absolute wisdom. I pointed out that in their zeal to avoid the democratic election of the chief executive, the president, their machinations and schemes almost immediately fell into chaos so bad that they had to ammend the process - though determinedly not doing the most obviously moral thing, making it a direct-election by the will of the majority. The Constitution they wrote was a satanic deal which promoted slavery and enabled its continuation and expansion which led directly to the Civil War and which was twelve years after that ended used to re-establish de facto slavery under the Jim Crow era. It is being used similarly today to overturn the laws of the 1960s which briefly ended Jim Crow and there is little reason to doubt that the Roberts Court with its super-Republican-fascist majority will lose little time in ending the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts or to effectively destroy them and anything like egalitarian government in the United States.
Look at the character of those who have claimed the mantle of "originalism" "strict-construction" and the various slogans and buzz words who the neo-Confederates and the oligarchs who have made common cause with them, just as they did at the first Constitutional Convention and what they do with their "original reading" of the words of the Constitution. They are uniformly anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, oligarchy favoring, racist and sexist pandering hacks. That is as true of the Black member of the Roberts Court as it will be for the Republican woman who is about to be put on it, some act of God notwithstanding.
They can do that because of the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic texts that are embedded in the document which we are all supposed to pretend is a gurantee of "Equal Justice Under Law" the lying words carved over the entrance to the Court which has, in fact, been the most anti-equality, anti-justice branch of the federal government for almost all of its history. It was the source of the Dred Scot decision, it was the source of "separate but equal" it was the source of "money is speech" it was the source of "corporate person-hood", etc. It is that because the words of the Constitution are anything but a guarantee of equal justice under law.
As we are seeing the Republican-fasicist party which the majority are part of and which they generally and rather openly favor in their rulings is doing its best to ensure that there are no reliable elections in which all eligible votes are permitted to be cast and counted and made to count (as if that's even theoreitically possible under the Electoral College). In the coming years the Constitution as it is manipulated in the hands of the Roberts Republican majority will become the foremost weapon to use against equality, to use against justice to rule against the actual election of the government by We The People.
I'd say it's well past time we stopped kidding ourselves that there is any chance for egalitarian democracy under the Constitution which every effort to obtain that has had to fight against. The fascists get better at doing it every time they make headway and they've made more headway against egalitarian democracy in the period in which the Warren Court, as making progress in "liberty" started on the idiotic road of giving them the tools to overturn equality and democracy, starting with its rather stupid "freedom of speech- freedom of press" rulings. If those worked to produce equal justice under a democratically intended body of law, we wouldn't be in the place we are today.
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