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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM) North American (US South)Transcript
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introduction. The Constitution is dead. Many Americans worry that the Constitution is dying. Leading the chorus are those critics, mostly on the right, in whom the first initiatives of the Obama administration have awakened to concern. Dormant for eight years. Their arguments recall those made only yesterday by others, mostly from the left deploring the George W. Bush administrations supposedly unprecedented attacks on the Constitution. We have bad news for both sets of critics. The Constitution is already dead. It died a long time ago. To be sure, every politician claims to admire the Constitution, and government officials must swear to uphold it. When they get the oath wrong, they may even take it again. But what does their fidelity to the Constitution really amount to? In practice? Nothing. Even those who bewail our present constitutional crisis missed the much larger story. The assaults on the Constitution are not the work of one branch of government or of one party, and they did not emerge overnight. Every branch of the federal government has trampled on the constitution almost without interruption for close to a century. The crisis we face today is the culmination of decades of offenses against the Constitution, by Democrats and Republicans, justices, presidents and Congresses alike, all of whom have essentially rejected the idea that the constitution possesses a fixed meaning limiting the power of the US government. That idea was not a minor aspect of the Constitution. It was the very purpose of the Constitution.