The US Constitution is one of the most accessible legal documents ever written. In 17 pages, the document outlines the scope of a limited national government that proved much more effective than the convoluted governments of the fuedal and empiral ages.
The secret to the Founders's success was that they limited the government and empowered the people.
To punctuate the fact that the Constitution created a limited government, the founders of the country added 10 Amendments (the bill of rights) at the end of the document. The last amendment reserved to the States those rights not given to the Federal government.
The document is an easier read than my auto insurance policy.
An interesting development in our progressive age is that our Representative treat this document as if it were written in some type of obscure Egyptian hieroglyphics requiring a the interpretive skills of an advanced Constitutional scholar to decipher.
It is true that a scholar could spend a life time researching precedents and interpretations of the document and barely scratch the surface of all possible implications of the document. This does not mean the document is inaccessible.
Scholars could spend a life times on almost any subject. A scholar could spend a hundred life times studying Rock and Roll. For that matter, there's a large number number of decidated rock scholars in our schools. The fact that there's a large body of knowledge surrounding Rock and Roll does not make the music inaccessible.
The fact that someone could spend a great deal of time studying a subject is not the determining factor in accessibility. Accessibility references the ease with which one can get started or to understand the basic concepts behind an idea.
Disneyland is immensely complex, but little kids go there everyday.
Of course the fog built around the Constitution isn't the result of the Constitution itself. The fog is the result of the great pains progressives have taken to skirt the Constitution in their quest for unbridled centralized power.
Through our nation's history, our ruling class has gone through bone bending contortions to turn the Constitution to their ends. This effort has created a situation where they, like the chronic liar, must employ a legion scribes to keep their stories straight.
2009 has been one of the worst years in American legislation history. Our progressive Congress wasted over half a year writing health care legislation that they know is in violation of the spirit of the Constitution. When confronted with the unconstitutionality of their dense and bewildering constructions (the bills number in the thousands of pages), they point to one of the most accessible pieces of law ever written and project their convolutions onto the Constitution itself.
Hopefully enough people will seriously look at the convolutions coming from Congress and rejects these games being played by our ruling class.
2 comments:
The constitutional obscurationists have been very successful. Most Americans today ignore the Constitution because it is simply irrelevant to what 'our' government really does. It has essentially become nothing more than an arcane data point on a historical timeline.
It's a juvenile technique, but surprisingly effective in the adult world. When you want to win an argument, you simply pretend that the words of the opposition is babble. If you use the right tone, then the guy with the reasonable idea will irrationally repeat the clear idea, and the guy with the convoluted mechination will appear the reasonable one.
I've fallen victim to this technique mutliple times. The only real problem with it, is it causes the group to follow bad ideas which can destroy the group. But that doesn't matter to the political mind.
When a politician creates a crisis. They simply see the crisis as an opportunity to grab even more of the pie.
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