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Foreign and What?
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 Is there any hope of restoring
constitutional government in this country? Well, if there isn’t, things
are pretty bleak.
After all, our
elected officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution and to defend it
from “all
enemies,  foreign
and domestic.” Those last two words are
often overlooked, maybe because they apply to so many of the people taking
the oath. To restore constitutional government merely means ensuring that
our rulers take their own promise seriously.
When I’m
asked why I care so passionately who “Shakespeare” really was,
I explain that the Shakespeare myth closely parallels our constitutional
mythology. What may have begun as an honest mistake has become a fraud.
Honest mistakes
don’t stay honest forever. Sooner or later, if you won’t admit
a mistake, you have to lie, distort, and falsify evidence. People usually do
this in order to maintain positions of power. They can’t afford to
admit error.
With
Shakespeare, the fraud doesn’t consist in holding the traditional view
that he was the man from Stratford; it consists in denying that there can be
any room for doubt, when in fact there is abundant reason for doubt and an
abundance of intelligent doubters.
Similarly with the
Constitution. The fraud doesn’t consist in holding that the U.S.
Supreme Court may be right; it consists in holding that anyone who rejects
the Court’s interpretation must be wrong.
![[Breaker quote for Foreign and What?: The 'defenders' of the Constitution]](2007breakers/070116.gif) Most people, being
intellectually timid, rely on authority and hate to believe that the authorities
can err seriously. But all human authority is not only fallible, but, over time,
is virtually certain to err wildly.
The reason is
simple. Consider the Supreme Court. It presumes that the rulings of its
predecessors are correct and rarely overturns them. This means that after
a few generations, each ruling of the Court has presumed the rightness of
several previous rulings, each dependent on the one before it. The slightest
error in the sequence will produce further errors down the line.
Imagine what
would happen to automobiles if the engineers at Ford and General Motors
worked on the principle that their predecessors must have been correct in all
their calculations. Or how would you like to fly in an airplane constructed on a similar presumption?
Happily,
engineering doesn’t rely too heavily on veneration for authority. On
the other hand, religion does, because that is its nature. If God reveals
something, it is authoritative. The question is which model government
should follow: practical science or religion.
The answer is
obvious enough; the idea of the Constitution was that government was a
practical science accessible to ordinary people. That is what
self-government meant: Everyone should be able to read the
Constitution and join, if only by arguing and voting, in making laws in
accordance with its principles.
No
aristocracy or
priesthood had any special authority, because the very idea of such authority
had no place in self-government. No faith was required, because it was
agreed that suspicion, or “jealousy” of government, was the
only attitude that could preserve liberty.
But in the 20th
century, authority has returned in the guise of the “expert.”
’Tis he who tells us what our Constitution means, and who finds
complexities and ambiguities where we suspected none. The Supreme Court
has gradually changed its character from a body of men who had to justify
their decisions with reason and evidence to an authoritarian body whose word
is law (and whose stabs at logic only confuse matters).
In Federalist No.
78, Alexander Hamilton assured his fellow citizens that the Court’s
rulings would be no better than the arguments it could make for them. Now
the Court lays down the law by the sort of unarguable “arbitrary
will” republican government was supposed to save us from.
We have long
since passed the point where the Court’s vagaries might be excused
as honest mistakes. Several of its members would have been impeached and
most of its powers clipped, except that the other two branches of the
federal government have no more regard for the Constitution than the Court
does.
In short, the
Constitution is being “defended” by the sort of people —
domestic, of course — it’s supposed to be defended against.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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