Constitution: Is it for us, or against us?

It is amazing how easily the American people have let the hood be pulled over their eyes as they are led on their way to political slaughter.

No, I’m not talking about the elections of 2008, 2010 or 2012, but rather the “fundamental transformation” of our U.S. Constitution from a document that protected “we the people” from the government into a tool the government can use to control us.

Year after year, the people have had fewer rights and the government has had more control. Don’t just blame Barack Obama. This transformation has been engineered over many years by many presidents, both Republican and Democrat, and ratified by courts that have been packed with progressives. Congress has been complicit in the transformation by its very pronounced silence.

We may or may not still live in a republic, but if we do, it is by the grace of God, not the efforts of our politicians. And the way our Constitution has been manipulated, it is unlikely we will have a republic long, as God is not prone to help people who refuse to help themselves.

Until we shake the death hood off and see for ourselves that we are standing on the edge of the gallows, there is no chance to avoid our imminent fate. And since the noose around our necks is the very Constitution we love, it is going to be nigh on impossible to wake people up before it is too late.

It used to be said that the Constitution is not a “suicide pact.” Of course, the same thing also might have been said about the Bible before Jonestown. Now, we know better. Ruthless people can always turn our hopes and dreams against us — use our innocence to manipulate us into violating our own best interests, and indeed our own survival.

It was Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg who, in a 1963 ruling, wrote that “while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.” This concept, however, goes back much further than 1963 — to the very founding of our nation, in fact, and we might more appropriately refer to the words of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote:

“A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means.”

Nor was Jefferson the only president to recognize the importance of preserving the country AND the Constitution by occasionally putting a higher value on the first than the second. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus illegally during the Civil War. FDR rounded up thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II at least partly from a legitimate fear that some of them still had allegiance to the Japanese emperor.

No one likes such exercises of brute power, but the necessity of “preserving the union” should be a foregone conclusion to most Americans. Practically speaking, without the actual country of the United States of America to enshrine it, the Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper. Kill the country, and you have turned the cherished rights of the Constitution into mere nostalgia.

Today, it appears to many of us that the Constitution itself is being used against us. This complicates greatly the effort to preserve the country, because now in order to save the Constitution, we must first do significant surgery on it. Before you scream about the “crazy right-wing assault” on the Constitution, do yourself a favor. Ask your Uncle Allen whether or not he is glad a bunch of surgeons cut him open and sliced the cancer out of his belly to save his life, or whether he wishes he could have died then and there just to say he was whole.

Our Constitution is just like Uncle Allen; it’s got cancer, and it’s not going to be cured just by good intentions. Without action, the outcome is predictable, certain and fatal, so we need to get over our fear of blood, take out the knife and start cutting.

Where to start is a good question. There are many places where the Constitution has been co-opted by vested interests who do not share the common interests of “we the people.” I will address some of those points of concern in a future column, but for now it is enough that we begin to agree that something needs to be done.

Unfortunately, many people who love the country have been fooled into thinking that changing the Constitution is the equivalent of rewriting the Bible. It isn’t. The Constitution isn’t God’s law, but man’s law, our American law, and we Americans — “we the people” — have the right to change it, using the amendment process that is prescribed for just such a purpose.

Yet more and more, liberals have been screaming about Republicans trying to  change the Constitution as if they are committing treason. The Democratic talk-show host Bill Press wrote a column recently entitled “The Constitution Works, Don’t Change It.” In it, he says, “Republicans are coming up with another phony crusade to amend the Constitution.”

He’s talking about the effort to revise the 14th Amendment, but it doesn’t matter what he is talking about. When he talks about a “another phony crusade,” he has made his point. In his mind, no effort shall be made to amend the Constitution by conservatives without it being phony. No doubt, he has forgotten that it was Republicans who led the crusades to end slavery with the 13th Amendment and to ensure that former slaves were guaranteed full citizenship in the 14th Amendment. I presume he doesn’t think those were “phony” crusades.

And what makes an issue phony? Clearly, to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you need to garner huge support in both Congress and among the several states. The bar is set incredibly high for a compelling reason —  to ensure that changes made DO reflect the will of “we the people.”

But that should not restrict the right of all Americans to seek to amend the Constitution in any way they see fit. There is nothing phony about participating in the civic dialogue and engaging in a constitutionally prescribed process to shape the law of the land through persuading public opinion.

One can bet that Bill Press and his colleagues on the left do not ever use the term “phony crusade” to describe the amendments that gave women the right to vote or that set the voting age at 18. These were good liberal causes that improved our nation through recognizing limitations in the original Constitution that ought to have been corrected.

The same privilege to work to improve our nation should extend to all citizens. Do not let the Constitution be used against you, and do not let politicians or anyone else shame you into thinking you have no power as an American citizen to influence your government. It is time that we get creative about using our power as citizens to restore the republic that was handed to us in 1787 by our Founding Fathers. If we do not think ourselves worthy to amend the Constitution, then we are not worthy of the Constitution — period.