How Do We Preserve Our Constitution?

There is a healthy aspect to the current political buzz about the Constitution, its drafters’ intent, its elasticity, and whether it should or should not be read to allow the constant erosion of state’s powers by the Federal Government. The document is not written only for lawyers and judges to understand. It is not filled with the arcane, fractured, language all too common to the law in our days, but is for the most part easily understood.

However, the tortured meanings read into it by our judges often boggle the mind. Flag burning becomes speech; providing for the general welfare now includes “rights” to abortion (formerly a felony); “gay marriage” becomes a Constitutional right – protecting a relationship the founders considered a crime. The formerly sacred freedom of contract gives way to the government forcing individuals to buy health insurance.

There is an old adage in law that close cases make bad law. Why? Because the the stretch to do justice in one case, implies rules that don’t work at all in similar cases. Prime example: The high court made a huge stretch of the commerce clause to let Congress order whom a restauranteur must serve – so stop racial discrimination (a seemingly good end). Since then, the plain meaning of “interstate commerce” is so distorted in the case law, that Noah Webster himself would barely recognize the words, and there seems to be nothing that Congress cannot govern through that clause.

So what’s a country that value freedom and the Constitution not bent all out of shape to do? We must curt-tail our reliance on the rulings of the one court of nine judges on some of these earth-shaking issues – especially where they rule against the majority views in society. Remember that the Constitution its self does not give to the Supreme Court unbridled power to overturn statutes or acts of the President. Those power was developed by the Court itself by John Marshal in Marbury v. Madison and related rulings.

Trouble is, the rule is so deeply revered it would take a Constitutional amendment to alter it. Despite all the hundreds of pages of citings and distinguishings of precedents, the judges really do just what they think is right in the end. It’s a poor lawyer indeed who cannot wind his way to the desired result in these seemingly close cases. These decisions tempt one to side with the old Welsh definition of a lwayer: “He wiggles in and wiggles out and leaves the people all in doubt of whether the worm that made the track was going to hell or coming back.” We cannot rely on the rule of law alone when bad judges sit.

So what is a solution? That we labor with all our might to put into public office capable people with faith in god and high moral standards, with the emphasis on the latter. We get plenty of talented people – but too few upright, strictly honest, people of integrity. If we get more of these kinds of people in public office, we will get more appointed to judgeships, and they will be more receptive to the kind of inspiration of the almighty that made our founders great.

Without a good dose of these, which seem sadly lacking today, we will continue to get wayward, unguided leadership into forbidden paths such a gay marriage, trampling of personal freedoms, abortions on demand, and denigration of personal responsibility.