America's Timeless Constitution

Federal Limits: A staffer with the Washington Post has dissed one of this nation's two founding documents and is rightly getting flak for his lack of knowledge. But the problem goes far deeper.

In an interview last Thursday on MSNBC, Post blogger Ezra Klein complained that "the text" of the U.S. Constitution "is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done."

He also claimed, without challenge from the MSNBC host, that the Constitution "has no binding power on anything."

On the same day, Klein, who also took incoming House Speaker John Boehner to task for confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, the country's original founding document, lamented in his blog that "the Constitution is not a clear document."

Before being edited to correct his errors of chronology, we understand that Klein first wrote that "written 100 years ago, when America had 13 states and very different problems," the Constitution "rarely speaks directly to the questions we ask it."

Klein's problems with accuracy are bad enough. (The Constitution was adopted more than 223 years ago, and there were 46 states a century before he roamed so wildly in his blog.) But they aren't his worse offense.

That lies with his regard of the Constitution as an archaic document that says only what he wants it to say. This, of course, is typical of Democrats and left-wing journalists — which is to say most journalists. In their view, the Constitution is a thin and watery "living document" that changes with the times.

To which we say: If the meaning of the Constitution is open to personal interpretation, then it means nothing at all.

It would be easy to mock Klein, muse that he should not try to read any of the classics written before World War I and even take a cheap shot at candidate Barack Obama, who told a crowd in 2008 that he had visited 57 states.

But the problem is not public misstatements. The problem is a corrupt worldview that has as its foundational principle the notion that government can grow ever bigger through what is essentially mob rule. It has no room for standards that can't be violated by a lawmaking majority and refuses to accept any checks on its ambitions. (Note Klein's contention that the Constitution has "no binding power on anything.")

What the left refuses to admit is that the Constitution is a document of universal and timeless principles. It is amendable and in its original form still speaks to us today through its humane protection of individual rights and necessary limits on government power.

There is no policy question so tightly twisted that it can't unwind it, no legal puzzle too confounding for it to resolve.

It is written in a vernacular far more straightforward than the baffling statutes written today by lawmakers who maim our language. If it is confusing to the political left, clear understanding is no further away than a copy of the the Federalist Papers.

Consider the Second Amendment, which for decades has been a knotty passage for the left, and allow James Madison to illuminate. "Americans," Madison wrote in Federalist 46, "have the right and advantage of being armed — unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."

The left also has trouble with the Constitution's Commerce Clause. Congressional Democrats believe that rather than the Constitution's barring them from interfering in private matters, the clause somehow has given them the authority to overhaul the nation's health care system.

The passage, however, was included in the Constitution not to expand federal power but to prevent the states from enacting trade barriers with one another.

In Federalist 42, Madison wrote that the federal power to regulate commerce was granted to relieve "the states which import and export through other states, from the improper contributions levied on them by the latter."

The Constitution is not a musty piece of parchment good only for museum viewing. It is the framework of our republic and the underpinning for our very freedom.

As the world around us becomes increasingly complex, its simple brilliance becomes increasingly evident. It deserves respect, not the contempt heaped upon it by the left.