Let's Read It So We'll Know What's In It

Yes, my friends, I must admit I had a great sense of schadenfreude watching the botoxed face of Nancy Pelosi having to read from the Constitution on the second day of the new Congress. She knew she had to do it, but it must have seemed to her like being required to down an entire bottle of castor oil. There they were. All those Democrats being introduced for the very first time to the foundational document of the greatest Republic in history.

I kept waiting for San Fran Nan to lose it and start shouting "it's alive, it's alive!" Once I realized that wasn't going to happen, I re-ran the moment just to determine if she had her fingers crossed. No luck there either. Just imagine the humiliation. She's lost her throne, her plane, her perks, and much of her influence, and now she's required to read from the very document that guaranteed the people the power to kick her skinny arse out of that seat.

Prior to the bipartisan reading of the document from the well of the House, several liberal Democrats made it clear they were unhappy. Sort of like the early Renaissance Church authorities who wanted the Mass to be heard in Latin only, lest the peasants find out what the priests were really telling the congregations and what the Bible actually says. You can never find an Inquisition when you need one. Lefty Representative Jerry Nadler (D-NY) was incensed at even the suggestion of a reading of the Constitution. "It's a stunt," he said, "and it [the Constitution, I presume] is irrelevant to the issues we have to face. It's as if the thing was some kind of sacred document."

There were a few legitimate complaints, however. Talking heads kept yammering about "which version" of the Constitution was going to be read. Huh? There's only one version. What they were actually trying to say is "will the Constitution be read straight up?" The answer, sadly, was no. And it gave some demagogic Democrats a legitimate reason to complain, even if for the wrong reasons. In order to avoid having to read the portions of the original Constitution, sans the Bill of Rights and later Amendments, the Republicans went all politically-correct and deleted the portions relating to slavery and slaves as being only three-fifths of a person.

Their excuse was that there was no point in reading portions of the Constitution of 1789 which had subsequently been changed or eliminated as a result of later Amendments. That left the Democrats an opportunity to complain that the agony of black slaves was being ignored by the redacting Republicans. And Jesse Junior Jackson wasted no time tossing that theory into the ring.

Instead of walking on eggs, the Republicans should have been touting the glory of a document so rich in the rights of man and the responsibilities of government that it provided for change when those goals were being suppressed or ignored. What's the point of the Civil War Amendments if not to rectify the most major error the Founders made? What could the Supreme Court have based its decision in Brown v. Board of Education on if there were no Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments?

Of course we can always count on the New York Times to get it all wrong. They missed the part about the politically-correct redacting (which would have been a legitimate ground for criticism). All they heard was that those damned Republican right-wing reactionary fascists were going to read the Constitution. Using the device of the backhanded insult, they commented: "Surely the Republican leadership is not suggesting that African-Americans still be counted as three-fifths of a person." Anyone who knows the Times knows that the historically-ignorant and constitutionally deficient editors were inferring that the Republicans meant exactly that. I'm guessing they don't know that those annoying Civil War Amendments are part and parcel of the Constitution.

All of that said, this was a patriotic gesture which will not produce new legislation nor change the minds of doctrinaire liberals and leftists. They will still consider the Constitution an impediment to good governance. But at least, probably for the very first time, Democrats were forced to read from the Constitution, out loud, in Congress, in front of cameras broadcasting to the world, or face explaining why they found the document so repulsive. I'm rather amazed at how few of them choked, gagged or teared-up. They're better actors than I would have thought. It was ninety minutes of joy for those of us who love the Constitution, and ninety minutes of agony for those who think you're just supposed to make things up as you go along.

That's my take on the worthiness of taking time out to read--really read--the Constitution. It was merely symbolic and a gesture to patriotism and the love of limited government, but couldn't we all use a little more of that in our lives?