Instapundit guest blogger Elizabeth Price Foley effectively rebuffs Washington Post article:
“Tea Partyers Love the Constitution So Much–They Want to Blow it Up.”
All I can do is shake my head and feel sorry for the ignorance this column displays.
Apparently, Ms. Rampell has forgotten her basic civics, and doesn’t realize that these calls for amendment by “right-wing Constitution thumper[s]” would employ Article V, which provides a lawful, supermajoritarian and republican process for amending the Constitution. Article V–which has been used 27 times to amend the Constitution–is evidence that the founding generation did not consider the original Constitution to be “perfect.” Indeed, the first ten amendments–the Bill of Rights–was ratified only two short years after ratification of the original Constitution.
Ms. Rampell fails to grasp that it the method of changing the Constitution–i.e., the process employed–matters to a “Constitution-thumper” because, well, the Constitution allow for amendments only via the processes set forth in Article V. To a liberal/progressive, by contrast, the method of constitutional change is irrelevant, so long as the Constitution changes in the “right way”; it’s only results, not process, that matters.
Thus. to a liberal/progressive like Ms. Rampell, it is perfectly fine for five liberal/progressive Supreme Court Justices to “amend” the Constitution with a stroke of their outcome-oriented pens. In Ms. Rampell’s eyes, using Article V’s legitimate, supermajoritarian, republican processes to effectuate constitutional change is so time-consuming and republican, it’s downright silly, and maybe even dangerous. Surely, it’s much better to just let elitist, liberal/progressive Supreme Court Justices alter the Constitution on the people’s “behalf” (unless of course they want to overrule decisions such as Roe v. Wade or roll back the Commerce Clause).
“Constitution-thumper[s]” believe in the Constitution–and this includes employing its only legal mechanism for alteration, Article V. Given the Supreme Court’s long history (since about 1937) of misconstruing the Constitution to serve liberal/progressive ends, calls to change the Constitution and restore its original vision is far from hypocrisy. It’s the height of principled constitutional conservatism. But I wouldn’t expect someone like Ms. Rampell to get that.
