Published: May 14, 2008 03:24 pm            

Tar Heel Dispatch: The Constitution

Flipping through the channels the other night I came across C-Span, the public access cable channel devoted to covering national politics. They were covering a Senate Committee hearing on the subject of "political interference with environmental regulation."

One witness delivered a report citing hundreds of Federal scientists with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been subject to political pressure to suppress or alter federal research and other forms of manipulation. I spent the rest of the night trying to find the EPA in the Constitution. Days later, I still can't find it.

The truth is, the EPA isn't authorized by the Constitution. Federally funded scientists aren't either. Come to think of it, neither is the Federal Reserve, Department of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development or the Department of Labor.

My liberal friends think I'm crazy, but for some reason I just believe we should follow the Constitution. I guess I'm just a stickler, but they, on the other hand, don't mind bending and twisting the Constitution a little bit to fit their politics. It's a "living" document after all.

When they say the Constitution is living, they conjure up a beautiful symbolism. It's not some yellowed, dried up piece of parchment. It's a living, breathing organism. It grows and expands, as we mature as a society, to fit our needs and adjust to our changing attitudes. Brilliant!

But wrong. Constitutions by their very nature are the exact opposite of the enticing imagery liberals seduce us with. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in his recent 60 Minutes interview that constitutions are not meant to be vehicles of change, but rather impediments to change.

That's why the Constitution isn't meant to change through judicial interpretation. Besides the Constitution has an amendment procedure built right into it. If you want to change it, you have to get two-thirds of the House and Senate as well as three-fourths of all the state legislatures to agree.

Change is supposed to be difficult and slow. Liberals want to change it through judicial interpretation because it's much faster and easier to convince five Justices to interpret the Constitution a certain way than it is to go through the amendment process.

Justice Scalia is known for his unique "originalist" judicial philosophy. When he interprets the Constitution he looks to the original intent of the framers and the people who ratified the language at the time of ratification. Liberals tell us it's impossible to know what each individual who was involved was thinking at the time, plus a lot of their ideas were just plain wrong, such as slavery.

But the reason we need to look to the original intent is that if we reinterpret the Constitution to mean something the people who originally voted didn't mean, then we've essentially amended the Constitution while bypassing the proper channels. We have libraries full of books, pamphlets, correspondences, and written records of the ratifying conventions, so I think we can get a pretty good idea what they were and weren't thinking.

Maybe we really ought to have federal scientists, a Secretary of Labor, and studies of Grizzly Bear DNA in Montana. If the people want this stuff so badly, there should be no trouble following the rules and getting an amendment passed the right way. Changing the rules in the middle of the game through judicial review is just playing dirty.

The Ron Paul Revolution swept across the People's Republic of Chapel Hill a few days before the recent primary. It's a peaceful, very conservative revolution; they don't want dramatic change. They're not promising a Leninist "land, bread, peace" platform. All they want is a return to the original intent of the Constitution. And if you don't like the original, then use the amendment process.

Just before introducing Dr. Paul to a crowd of about 3,000 energized Paulites, Republican candidate for North Carolina's 4th District House seat, B.J. Lawson held up his pocket Constitution amid roaring applause. Lawson (who later won his primary) said Newt Gingrich got it wrong with his admittedly successful "Contract with America" which swept Republicans to power in the 1994 Republican Revolution. Lawson said, "we already have a contract with America: the U.S. Constitution!"

But a contract that can be rewritten through the creative minds of federal judges isn't worth the paper it's printed on. You can't create new rights and take away old ones on a whim.

Sometimes I wish there was a provision of the Constitution that clearly and explicitly said the government only has the powers listed in the document, and the people and the states retain all other powers and rights. Then I remember it already contains these provisions: the 9th and 10th Amendments.

A living Constitution means there is no limit to the role and scope of the Federal Government, except the good graces and imaginations of unelected, appointed judges. A living Constitution makes us a nation of men, no longer a nation of laws.



Tar Heel Dispatch is written by Tyler Younts, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Younts, who grew up in Farmer, has a passion for writing and for politics and for writing about politics. E-mail comments to news@randolphguide.com or directly to Younts at younts@email.unc.edu

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.