NEVER TOLERATE TYRANNY!....Conservative voices from the GRASSROOTS.

What part does the US Constituiton play in our system of government today? ANYTHING???

We already gave up on the Constitution

Posted on January 1, 2013

W. James Antle III

Editor, The Daily Caller News Foundation

Two and a half cheers for Louis Michael Seidman, the Georgetown law professor whose “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution” was a dead fish wrapped in the New York Times op-ed page.

Seidman calls the Constitution “archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil.” He’s wrong, but at least he expresses his contempt for the rule of law openly and honestly, instead of insulting our intelligence with insincere twaddle about a “living document.”

The people who pretend to venerate our Constitution as a living document are most responsible for it being a dead letter. They are like parents trying to soften the blow of telling their children that Santa Claus isn’t real by saying he lives on in their hearts.

Imaginary Santas give no gifts and imaginary Constitutions protect no rights.

Seidman exercises his constitutional right to miss the point when he blames the fiscal cliff on the fact that revenue bills must originate in the House, or a “grotesquely malapportioned Senate.” But those are the Constitution’s procedural restraints, the equivalent of Robert’s Rules of Order. We got into this mess precisely by flouting its substantive limits on federal power.

Put simply, if the federal government only spent money on its constitutionally enumerated functions, there would be no fiscal cliff. No $1 trillion deficit. No $16 trillion national debt. No $84 trillion in unfunded liabilities for the major entitlement programs and other federal commitments.

It is the constitutional disobedience our man at Georgetown advocates that has the country perpetually on the precipice of financial ruin. He is merely complaining about a too-slow process of dividing up the spoils.

Having “freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation,” we now labor under new obligations we never freely chose. We look on helplessly as the bankruptcy of the government programs we depend upon fast approaches, unable to fix them. These programs are impervious to reform not because every state must have two senators or the president must be at least 35, but because “we the people” vote ourselves money from the public treasury.