[I had originally planned a series on historical inaugurations this week, but I don’t imagine too many of us want to be thinking about the inauguration any more than we have to. So instead, I’m gonna go with a suggestion from my wife, using the occasion of MLK Day to highlight a handful of historical quotes, from him and others, that our conservative commentators and politicians tend to get very wrong!]
On three complex
Constitutional quotes that conservatives consistently over-simplify.
1)
The
2nd Amendment: I said a good bit of what I’d want to say about
the minefield that is the 2nd Amendment in that hyperlinked Saturday
Evening Post Considering History column. I’m not going to pretend that for
those of us who are for stringent gun control the amendment is a slam-dunk in
our favor, as it’s much more complicated than that—and that’s the thing, it’s
really quite complicated, historically as well as legally. 2nd
Amendment absolutists refuse to recognize those layers, and that’s a deeply problematic
over-simplification.
2)
The
10th Amendment: The balance
of federalism and “states’ rights” (a phrase not specifically found in the
Constitution) in the founding era was at least as complicated as the question
of guns, and the very brief 10th Amendment doesn’t do much to
resolve those complexities. But I think there is a crucial part of that brief amendment
that has been consistently overlooked by those who argue for “states’ rights”: that
the powers not delegated to the federal government “are reserved to the States
respectively, or to the people.” That is, there’s a third powerful party in
this framing in addition to the U.S. and the states; and when it comes to
current controversial issues like whether individual states have the power to pass
restrictive abortion laws, I’d argue that conservatives are overlooking the
people’s power in that equation.
3)
“We
the People”: I began that hyperlinked book with an extended discussion of
why I believe that opening phrase of the Constitution’s Preamble represents a truly
striking and significant choice, locating the new nation’s identity not in law
or religion or any other overarching frame we might expect, but in the human
community itself. That entire book project was an attempt to argue that we
haven’t meant just one thing by that phrase, though, and more exactly that the
conservative emphasis on a homogeneous white America as our origin point is at
best just one perspective and at worst (and what I would really argue) a mythic
patriotic perspective with very little basis in history or reality. At the
very least, we can’t let that perspective dictate what we mean by “we the people,”
no more than any other part of our Constitution.
Next misread
quote tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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