Some Thoughts on the Constitution

Almost 240 years ago a small group of remarkable men fashioned a document that until the last 80 years or so, stood up against the assaults of tyrants and despots. I think it is easy to maintain that the sole exception being slavery, a topic that many wise men of that era accurately predicted would tear our country apart... it was the single most eloquently written and most easily understood political document of the time. It is the definitive framework for our nation. Yet men have come to distort and misrepresent its written word and when convenient to do so; simply ignored it.

We are no longer a nation of laws but a nation of the ruling elite.

When it suits a purpose, interpretations have been attached that were never meant to be a part of it. One glaring example is the concept of a separation of Church and State. This notion was based on a private letter from Thomas Jefferson where he discussed a "wall of separation between church and state", as written in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. In that letter, referencing the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Jefferson writes: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." What seems to always be glossed over by Progressives, was Jefferson's concern that religion and worship be protected from the government not the other way around.

‘Progressives’ always like to claim the constitution is a living document, what they are truly saying is that the Constitution is whatever they want it to be at the moment. What was supposed to be left to individual state and city legislatures have now been usurped by the judiciary as sort of a super legislature. When applied to the Constitution the term living document is leftist propaganda used for evisceration of the Constitution and usurpation. It always increases federal power. It never reduces or limits power.

For the rule of law to even exist, the Constitutions meaning must remain fixed. It is not a living document, evolving and conforming to changing times or experiences. The only lawful remedy to such issues lies in the amendatory process. James Madison reminded Congress in 1817 that the framers had “marked out in the Constitution itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest.”

Thomas Jefferson believed the Constitution could and should be understood by the average person. But to understand it one must interpret it in light of its original intent. I suggest re-reading the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and read the works of the Federalist and Anti-Federalists and other founding works. The founder’s own words frame this argument.

Regarding the very notion of what the Constitution means, Jefferson said this: “On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”

Never have more apt words regarding this document been spoken.