The Wall Street Journal asked a collection of elitists how our Constitution could be improved; those wonders proposed five Amendments. I’ll address a few here.
Term Limits: One elitist proposed hard term limits of fixed numbers of years for everyone—Congressmen and judges and Justices. After all, it’s good enough for Presidents. Term limits would be useful for the political parts of our Federal government, but not for the judiciary. Even the 18 year terms he proposed would leave the judges and Justices too vulnerable to the politics of the day, through more rapid appointments and forced retirements, and not sufficiently tied to what our Constitution actually says. The statutes that also come before the courts, and that those courts must apply according to what they actually say, provide enough political involvement as it is; there’s no need to accelerate that, no matter that this Elitist wants to reduce that.
On the other hand, We the People would benefit from term limits for our Congressmen, but hard numbers like six and two terms for Representatives and Senators would excessively limit our choices of whom we would select represent us. Apply, instead, the term limits our prior Articles of Confederation applied to their unicameral Congress with its one-year sessions. Article V of that document limited delegates to Congress to three terms in any six years. That’s straightforwardly modifiable to provide for our bicameral Congress, and it would not limit our choices for representation, only the frequency of those choices.
Leave the judiciary with its current lifetime appointment on their good behavior.
Electoral College: Get rid of it? The “logic” here is that Presidential campaigns are driven too much by the States with the largest Electoral College contingents, and the smaller States get overlooked altogether. Leave Presidential election outcomes to the popular vote, instead. And: modern communications technology cures all. Eliminating the College, though, wouldn’t protect the smaller States. College contingents are based solely on the combined numbers of Senators and Representatives each State has, and the numbers of Representatives is determined solely by population. The same States that supposedly dominate the Electoral College election would simply turn their focus to the larger cities of States, leaving out the smaller urban areas even in those large College-centric States. Nothing material would change.
Leave the Electoral College alone. The current system is not broken.
Rethink the First Amendment: The Evil Rich have too much influence in political speech, and they need to be limited. What about modern communications technology cures all, though? Doesn’t that give the little guy as much influence as the rich guy? Of course it does. The beef here centers on the amount of money any individual or business can contribute to any politician, but here this Elitist fails utterly: he doesn’t suggest any concrete solution, much less an Amendment. Nor can he: on what basis would he limit a rich man’s speech to bring him down to a poor man’s level of influence (no one has ever suggested plussing up a poor man’s speech). Hard dollar limits would restrict the rich man far more than the poor man. Percentage limits (percent of what wealth measure, exactly?) would still leave the rich man with far more supposed influence. And what to do about contributions to causes rather than particular candidates? In the end, what’s the limiting principle here, that prevents further limits on speech no matter how Very Good the reasons might seem for limiting further? This elitist offered none.
We can brook no such restrictions on our free speech rights and remain America. This elitist tacitly recognized this (even if he didn’t recognize it himself) with his concluding thought:
We must return to a reading of the Constitution that recognizes its fundamental democratic commitments.
But that’s a matter for the courts and for Congress to do. No Amendment is necessary, nor could one work. No Amendment will ever alter any reading of our Constitution. Men and women will still read into it (and out of it) what they will, guided by how they’re educated to read it.
Equal Gender Rights: This elitist based the entirety of her argument on the need to ratify—finally!—the Equal Rights Amendment. She wants to enumerate a specific right to political equality for gender in our Constitution, claiming that the 19th Amendment, which granted sufferage to women, doesn’t go far enough. She even cited early feminists’ support for ratifying the 14th Amendment as a pathway for gender equality, but she missed what that Amendment says in its first Article:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
All citizens means all citizens; it does not exclude some citizens, women or blacks or citizens of whatever sort. It’s hard to go farther than the blanket statement of equal rights and equal treatment under law that that Amendment requires.
The strength of our Constitution lies, in part, in its blanket statements of rights and limitations. Once we start carving out exceptions or codicils to those encompassing statements of rights and government limits, the process will rapidly escalate and those exceptions and codicils will expand our Constitution to hundreds of pages and hundreds of thousands of words that will include increasingly internally contradictory requirements. In relatively short order, our Constitution would come to resemble the very aspect that Munroe Smith wrote, some 140 years ago, about judicial precedent:
When the old rule is sufficiently worm-holed…a very slight reexamination will reduce it to dust, and a re-interpretation…will produce the rule that is desired.
When the old constitution is sufficiently worm-holed….
Be better if Wonders like these would leave off their Elitist blinders and look at our nation and our Constitution with objective eyes. Be even better if we ordinary Americans simply ignored technocrats and Know Betters altogether, and consigned them to their Ivory towers.
