Article V

Article V is also part of the Constitution:

There has been a slew of commentary criticizing the TEA Party movement for being shackled to the Constitution. I'd like to go over two points that the comments seem to miss entirely.

Mr. Ezra Klein's formulation of the idea is this:

Before people start tut-tutting me for even posting such heresies, I'd just add that Klarman is stating an obvious reality that others hide. The GOP says, "We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers," and then promotes an amendment to change birthright citizenship. The Tea Parties are largely based on reverence for the Constitution but are simultaneously pushing for a Balanced Budget amendment. I think this sort of instrumentalist approach to the Constitution is proper, of course, but I also think people should be honest about the underlying assumptions.

The distinction between amending the constitution and ignoring it is not a small one, but it seems to be lost on some of these authors. Perhaps someone, somewhere has suggested that the Constitution is a divinely received document that must never be altered. By Mr. Klein's own examples, though, the TEA Party is not guilty of this. The idea is not that the Constitution should never change; it is that it should change always and only through the means laid out in the Constitution.

Article V provides the rules for this process. Notice how Mr. Klein's examples work. If there is a Balanced Budget Amendment, it will be an actual amendment to the Constitution. If there is a revision to birthright citizenship, it will result from an amendment to alter the language of the 14th Amendment.

The TEA Party's commitment to the Constitution should be comforting, not only to progressives but to everyone. Amendments through the Article V process can only succeed if they have both wide and deep support. There's no reason to be afraid of a movement that is committed to that process.

The only radical changes that a movement committed to the Article V process can create are in areas where the government is already in wide variance from the provisions of the Constitution. Of course, that is just why our progressive friends might be alarmed. They know they haven't bothered to amend the Constitution before instituting their program.

The young progressives often argue that it is nearly impossible to get simple legislation passed, with the Senate requiring sixty votes to accomplish anything. That is true, if you are trying to do something so radical that sixty Senators don't want to sign on for it. Part of the point of emphasizing the Constitution is to take stress off the Republic by limiting the use of the Federal government as a bludgeon to beat other Americans into conformity.

Consider the other bugaboo of these articles, which is the TEA Party's invocation of the 10th Amendment. Let's look at the text of that amendment.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The good news for the young progressive is that the 10th Amendment shows that every program they might like to institute is fully Constitutional. Almost anything you can dream of can be enacted -- at the state level.

If the 10th Amendment were fully enforced, it would result in a massive reduction of the size and power of the Federal government. The power to shape the social safety net would reappear at the state level, where state governments could consider the realities of their budget and carefully sort out just what kind of net they really want. We would have fifty models instead of one. Mr. Klein could have his preference, and so could the staunchest conservative.

A perennial problem with democracy is that it always leaves an unhappy minority. This model has the advantage, though, of letting that minority move to somewhere that suits them better. American's diversity means that when we use the Federal government to try to modify behavior, we force people with very different morals and values to comply with our own. The 10th Amendment gives us a way of avoiding that tension almost entirely. People can live just as they like, in the state of their choosing -- whichever one suits them best.

Once that is accomplished, America will be a more stable place. Stability is part of the goal. The TEA Party movement is mostly made up of established, middle class families. They don't want to destroy the country. They just want to stabilize it. The best way to do that is by a clean adherence to the permanent will of the People, as codified in -- and occasionally amended by -- the Constitution.