Loving the Constitution

Nothing is likely to make you appreciate our Constitution more than a couple of hours in the new National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, even if you're dodging disrespectful 14-year-olds who think it cool to stick their fingers up the nostrils of the bronze (and life-size) statues of the 55 men who wrote our original Constitution in 1787.

Our hours there made us more than usually thoughtful about the threats to the Constitution in the past -- presidents have from time to time assumed that they could do pretty much whatever they wanted, only to be hauled back into (constitutional) reality by the courts. And it's made us especially thoughtful today about the threats to the Constitution posed by El Presidente and his guys, who think they need unusual powers to cope with terrorism.

Or the threats posed by Mr. DeLay of Texas and Rev. Rick Scarborough of Texas, and a thousand other current judge-haters from Texas and all the other States of Grace, who think that the judicial system is all that stands between them and a more "godly" nation. (We heard Laura Ingraham this morning on talk radio getting peeved because the Republican Congress doesn't just go ahead and "do something" about judges who don't do what "the people" want -- meaning, in this instance, the people who agree 100 percent with what Laura Ingraham thinks, which apparently would have included keeping Terri Schiavo vegetatively alive for a few more edifying "home movies.")

They're a threat to our Constitutional freedoms, make no mistake. As the editorial in yesterday's USA Today had it, "The religious right has long been pushing for the appointment of judges -- and ultimately Supreme Court judges -- who subscribe to its beliefs on issues such as abortion and gay marriage .... Some simply can't accept that every state and federal court that heard the Schiavo case upheld her husband's right to make medical decisions on her behalf. They want to substitute their own perception of morality for the rule of law."

The National Constitution Center will make you feel better about these sorts of penny-ante threats to our freedoms. We've withstood worse ... the Civil War, the crack-down on dissidents during World War I, the reaction of Southern state governments to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the attempt of Richard Nixon to exempt himself from the rule of law in the early 1970s. They were all dark times, some of them a darkness approaching the totally opaque. But a few brave men -- and a whole bunch of brave women -- stood up for "We the People," and I'm still counting on them today.