The Constitution: Bush had to destroy it in order to save it.

[Fovea]

Discuss.

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Only thing wrong with that statement is he has no interest in

saving the constitution.

[Marleyb]

2. no, he just wants to exchange it

[TahitiNut]

3. He's got it in "protective custody" at Gitmo.

:puke:

[NMMNG]

4. Boosh doesn't give a darn about the Constitution

It's just a "GD piece of paper" to him.

[Lexingtonian]

5. No more and no less than Republicans have since Brown v Board.

If you take things at face value, it sure seems like the consensus interpretation of the Constitution is disintegrating all over the place.

If you look more closely, what's really going on is that Republican courts and Republican lawyers and legislatures are everywhere in contests of power trying to disenforce or void the weaker side's rights of Equal Protection, Due Process, and Immunities & Privileges (i.e. Bill of Rights enforcement) to the extent possible. Of course, this leads to all kinds of illogical dilemmas and results and incoherent doctrine. In practice it means a net deprivation of citizens of power, aka civil rights. And that power they are depriveed of is grabbed and taken by the most widely trusted, traditional, institutions and Establishments- i.e. business owners, Church leaders, the Presidency, the police, etc. And away from the poor, the sick, the formerly incarcerated, the simple workers, ethnic and gender minorities.

The Constitution still lives in the heart of its People, so it isn't destroyed by any means. But there is a strong sense of our rulers and many Americans obeying a corrupt version.

This isn't new. Prior to the Civil War, the desire to maintain black slavery led the planters to take control of the federal government and pervert interpretation and enforcement of the Constitution to protect 'the institution' until the North could take no more. The Fugitive Slave Act could not coexist for long with the Bill Of Rights- one of the two was going to destroy the other. The planters ultimately wrote themselves a Confederate Constitution in 1861- it's actually very interesting to compare to the federal one of 1787. (Sadly, a lot of people on the Republican side behave as if the Confederate one won out.)

What we have now is a country polarized between two readings of the Constitution, again. The American historical pattern is to let a bad reading fester and expand until it becomes unsustainable and intolerable, then to destroy the principle or problem that created this misreading. The adherents of the failing corrupt reading tend, as its demise looms, to justify clinging to it from paranoia and apocalypticism about the social condition. Puritans couldn't let go of the Bible as political guidebook in the early 1700s, monarchists couldn't let go of the British Crown in the 1770s and 80s, planters couldn't let got of slavery in the 1850s and 60s, male chauvinists couldn't permit suffrage in the 1910s and 20s, and in the Nineties and now it's full citizenship for women, gays, former criminals, and brown skinned people generally that is pretended to mean demise of the nation.

[Fovea]

6. Very good.

I enjoyed your answer.