The Dying Constitution

 

By David K. Shipler 

              Conservatives like to deride liberals who believe in a “living Constitution,” which has stayed alive by applying its core principles to the evolving conditions of society. But the opposing view, that the Constitution must be interpreted only as the Framers supposedly intended, will not conserve anything. It will, if taken to the logical end now pursued by Republican extremists in legislatures and courts, strangle the founding document by cutting it off from the present, from the oxygen it needs to nourish the rights it is meant to preserve.

              The radicals on the right have formed a continuum of anti-constitutional movements that run from street thugs to election workers to politicians and to Supreme Court justices. Paradoxically, they cite the Constitution as their guide: the January 6 insurrectionists shouting their affection for a Constitution they’d obviously never read (in particular the Twelfth Amendment on Congress’s vote-counting process). Republican state legislatures organizing myriad ways to undermine the next elections. And the Supreme Court justices who are orchestrating an insurrection of their own by twisting the Constitution to fit their personal ideologies.

The “conservatives” in robes say they are keeping the Constitution as written, but they are actually making it all too malleable. They are turning it into a blank check for whatever policy they wish to inflict on American citizens, whether erasing women’s abortion rights, establishing in the public square a state-sanctioned Christianity (not Islam, for sure), or expanding practically everyone’s right to carry deadly weapons. All this has provoked accusations from the left that the Supreme Court is forfeiting its legitimacy, but the larger danger may be to the legitimacy of the Constitution itself.

Guns Are a Symptom

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The United States of America is now without any sacred places. Churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues are not sacred. Worshippers have been shot to death in Iowa, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kansas, Colorado, New York, Ohio, Georgia, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Schools are not sacred. Children have been shot at 27 schools so far in 2022. Hospitals are not sacred. This year and last, in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota, patients and staff at hospitals and clinics have been targeted. There is no sanctuary.

                The vulnerable spaces are not only physical. They are also conceptual. They are areas of ideas and practice where democracy’s shared beliefs used to be protected by moral barriers—bulwarks that are now eroding. High levels of authority and influence openly corrupt the reverence for honest elections, the deference to the rule of law, the integrity of facts and truth. The society reels under a shroud of menace. There is a sense of disorder, instability.

                No wonder Americans rush to buy guns whenever a mass shooting makes the country recoil. People have grown afraid of one another. A great retreat from common ground is underway, a pulling back into individual sovereignty, where the gun is a tool and a talisman. Far from the fields and forests of the responsible hunter or the shooting range of the careful sportsman, the gunman who harbors fear or hatred buys a firearm to kill human beings, as many as fast as possible. Whether to defend his home and family, or to take revenge, or to serve a demented cause, he wields his weapon in a wilderness of distrust.  

                And so the gun is a symptom of a breakdown in America. The symptom could be treated, obviously; guns could be restricted in availability and capability. That is a task readily accomplished if citizens elected people who valued human life over political life. But even if that miracle occurred, the underlying society would not be healed sufficiently to obviate the gun as an object of desire.