Friday, June 24, 2011

A new constitution? No thanks!

Time magazine and some CNN nit wit, Fareed Zakaria are wondering if it’s time for another constitutional convention. The answer is no. First off, in Zakaria’s case, he laments that there is no reason, given its relative population, why the state of WI should have the same number of senators as the state of NY. It’s as if the boob never heard of the House of Representatives. Fareed whines, that’s certainly not in keeping with one man one vote. It is if the one man is given one vote to select his senator, idiot.


Next, Time whines that the constitution is supposed to serve the nation, not vice versa. Not so fast Time. Military officers and many federal officers, including the president, are required to swear an oath to support and defend the constitution. That’s amazing. We do not swear an oath to the president, or the country, but rather the document that authorizes power for one and administers the other. How do you square that with who serves what Time?

In its open, Time has a rather long list of things that the founders never knew about, Lady Gaga among them. That was enough to make Lex want to turn the page, but I plowed on. In the game of poker, there are an infinite number of possible hands.  OK, there are a finite number of hands, but the variables given the number players and cards is beyond my small mind, so let’s go with infinite for this post. Get back to me if you can figure it out. The point is that the rules of poker apply to each hand.

And so it is with the constitution. It is a framework, a set of rules by which we play the game of life here in America. The constitution says we have a right to keep and bear arms. It makes no difference that Chuckels the dumb@$$ Schumer thinks it’s a bad rule. All Chucky has to do to change the rule he doesn’t like is get 66 senators and 38 states to agree. He can’t. So Chuckles decides to use the judicial branch instead of the legislative branch. That is a rule violation.

The P-BO, in one of his walk-in associate prof law classes, would describe the rules as “negative liberties” - a description of what the government can’t do to us. I’m fine with that. It is a far better situation for the average American to know what the rather small list of things that his government cannot do to him than an endless laundry list of the things it can.

There is a huge difference in traffic laws in Europe and the US. In Europe, if it is not expressly permitted, it is illegal. If there is no sign at an intersection indicating a u-turn is OK, a u-turn isn’t OK. In America, unless there is a sign expressly forbidding a u-turn, the u-turn can be made consistent with other laws - usually at least 120’ clear vision in both directions. It seems easier to me to look for the large U circled in red with a slash through it than to ask “Mother may I” every time I want to make a Uy or any other move on the streets. So better to have negative liberties than to ask the government's permission every time something comes up.

Currently our constitution consists of about 12 type written pages plus amendments. How many pages would the Time Magazine’s and Fareed Zarkaia’s constitution be if it tried to account for all of today’s technologies and those unforeseen technologies of the future? You’d have a 2,700 page monstrosity that nobody would read and nobody could understand. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Where have seen that before? 2,700 pages nobody has yet read or understands? It’ll come to me in a second.

But all of that is ancillary to the main reason that, aside from amendments, we shouldn’t be tinkering with our constitution. There aren’t ten people currently serving in public office with the temperament, wisdom and judgment necessary to go tampering with our current document. And there is no one who has reached even the first rung of the 40’ ladder that George Washington metaphorically scaled to over see constitutional deliberations in 1787.

You know how all of this would go down. Demo-Dopes would send their best Dopes, loud mouthed obnoxious know nothing creeps like Chuckels the clown Schumer and Maxine no brain Waters. Republicans would send milquetoast dopes like Lindsey Gramnesty who think the point of the exercise is to see who will be the first to “reach across the aisle.” No thanks. Let’s just keep playing by the rules we started with.

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