Let's Teach Liberals the Virtue of a Dead Constitution

How do you like your constitution? Living or dead?
Conservative Jonah Goldberg
says he’d rather have it dead.

What, you say?
“Without a ‘living’ constitution, slavery and other such evils would still be constitutional!”

Come now. Tell the truth and shame the devil. Slavery and women’s suffrage were achieved with
the dead letter of the constitutional amendment. When we talk about the “living” constitution
we are talking about judge-made amendments to the meaning of the constitution.

The sad truth is that liberals will only discover the virtues of a dead constitution on the day
that their
ox is gored by the living constitution.
For twenty years, liberals loved the independent counsel law enacted in the aftermath of
Watergate. It was the most tremendous fun to put Republican officials on the rack. But when
Republicans started using the law to investigate President Clinton and his administration, then
liberals suddenly discovered that they didn’t like the idea of an independent counsel at all.

What would be a good issue to start on, to teach liberals about the danger of a living constitution?

“Experience keeps a dear school,” Benjamin Franklin said, “but a fool will learn in no other.”

All Power Corrupts...

Just in time for the contradictory Supreme Court decisions regulating the public display of the Ten Commandments, the
indispensible Lee Harris
explains what is going on.

There is nothing ludicrous or stupid about the Supreme Court issuing murky or contradictory
opinions. When people ask you to make decisions about every little thing for them, you
take advantage of it. Because when people let you decide everything for them, what you
have is power.

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that those with power had an unlimited
right to exercise this power, and observed that they invariably will seek to push this right to
the utmost extreme that they can get away with -- anticipating Lord Acton’s
famous remark about the corrupting effects of absolute power.

Even back in the nineteenth century foreign observers noted the exaggerated respect that
Americans had for the Supreme Court. And in the era of the liberal court since 1954 of course, liberals
have made a national cult out of the Supreme Court because the court was willing to share
power with them.

Fortunately, Spinoza also remarked that there is a way out of this nightmare. Eventually people
get fed up with the abuse of power, and they rise up to “cast out the few who have arrogated
to themselves mastery over the fate of the many.”

The trouble is that people with power seldom go quietly into the night.

Ignore that Laffer Behind the Curtain

Democrats are still holding their hands in front of their eyes refusing to believe in the supply
side revolution, but the rest of us can take a look at the facts from government tax collections
this year.

Supply side economics says that the critical factor in economic performance is the marginal
rate of taxation, i.e., the share of your next dollar of income that the government demands. In the
Bush 2003 tax cuts:

The capital-gains tax (for gains held at least one year)
was cut to 15 percent from 20 percent while the maximum tax rate on corporate dividends
was slashed to 15 percent from 38.6 percent.

This year, according to
Michael T. Darda,
there has been a “45.2 percent fiscal year to date surge
in corporate tax revenues and [a] 35 percent jump in non-withheld (i.e., capital gains) receipts.”
In any estimation, this has to be remarkable.

What’s that? Oh, of course, I agree Democrats. This surge in revenue just couldn’t be due to the supply-side Bush tax rate cuts.
It just couldn’t be. No, there is no chance. Not a chance in hell. No, there must be another reason,
a completely different reason. But whatever the reason is, it couldn’t be the result of a healthy expanding
economy responding to the Bush tax cuts, the Bush tax rate cuts.

Steyn: Burn Baby Burn

What do you think we conservatives are? Wimps? You think we need a
flag-burning amendment to deal with a few lefties burning
our flag? Why, the whole point about Old Glory to
Mark Steyn is that

A flag has to be worth torching. When a flag gets burned,
that’s not a sign of its weakness but of its strength. If you can’t stand the heat of
your burning flag, get out of the superpower business. It’s the left that believes the
state can regulate everyone into thought-compliance. The right should understand that the
battle of ideas is won out in the open.

So we don’t need no flag-burning amendment to the constitution.
Go ahead lefties, we say. Be our guest. Be like the sainted Rachel Corrie why don’t you.
Burn baby, burn!

Mehlman Accepts the Challenge

The Republican faithful always complain that Republican leaders have no spine, that they cave
before egregious Democratic attacks and run for cover. But it looks as though the GOP is ready
for a rumble on the Karl Rove flap, in which Democrats everywhere are expressing outrage at
Karl Rove when he said:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9-11 and the attacks and prepared for war;
liberals saw the savagery of the 9-11 attacks and wanted to
prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

Says
Ken Mehlman on the Democratic reaction:

It’s outrageous that the same Democrats who stood by Dick Durbin’s libeling of our
military are now expressing faux outrage over Karl Rove’s statement of historical fact.
George Soros, Michael Moore, MoveOn and the hard left were wrong after 9/11, just as it
was wrong for Democrat leaders to stand by
and remain silent after Dick Durbin made his deplorable comments.

And then he backs it up with pages of quotes from liberals and Democratic angel George Soros recommending
a restrained therapeutic response to the 9/11 attacks.

What would the Democratic Party be like if its activists were all falling over each other to recommend
a therapeutic response to the rise of the dreaded religious right?

Did the Profs Cry Uncle?

All of a sudden, according to
David Horowitz, it seems that the academic establishment has called for a peace
process in the academic freedom wars. For the last couple of years Horowitz has been campaigning for
universities to adopt his Academic Bill of Rights, a manifesto
“that would foster intellectual diversity, fairness and equity in higher education.”
For his pains, Horowitz has been “compared to McCarthyites, Maoists, and Orwellian thought police by some of [his] overheated opponents.”
But now

The American Council on Education and a coalition of 22 college and university
associations, including the American Association of University Professors (who had declared our
bill a “grave threat to academic freedom”) have issued a statement that endorses the central
principles of our bill
and represents a great step forward in the academic freedom struggle.

Is it real, or is it Memorex? Only time will tell, of course. But the safest thing to do is follow
the money. Universities are non-profit entities that collect money from students, foundations, corporations,
alumni, and government and then spend it. The ideal situation for a university administration is for
happy contributors to give money without strings attached so that the university can spend the money
as it thinks fit. Of course, this ideal situation never obtains. The university is always under
pressure from a variety of special interests that each applies pressure to the university to spend money in a way
that benefits the interest. The job of the university administrator is to judge where the
sweet spot lies that will maximize contributions with the minimum of pain. But the bottom line is:
he or she will do whatever it takes to keep the money flowing.

Beware of Close Relationships

Marriage is a problem. On that we can all agree. And so a number of people have decided to do something about it. Let’s replace family law with “close-relationship” law, they say.

Suzanne Fields gives us a little intro to the close-relationship movement and a report about changing ideas on marriage in the academy.

Influential advocates from politically correct academic and legal organizations sneer at traditional marriage as another bad example of “ethnocentric” thinking that promotes “old-fashioned ideological stereotypes.” These advocates accuse the law of dismissing “diversity.” By diversity they mean the experience of racial minorities, women, single parents, divorced and remarried persons, gays, and lesbians. A large body of social science and psychological data demonstrate that not all forms of parenthood are equally child-friendly, but these advocates say that’s merely a point of view to be replaced by “close relationship” law.

It becomes harder and harder to parody the thinking coming out of our universities. But maybe the challenge to marriage is a good thing. It’s good for us to fight for our beliefs; it helps us understand who we are and what is important. As a well-known American once said: “Bring it on.