Democrats are being urged by their “thought leaders” to pump it up: recent headline in Politico: “Democrats Should Be Less Boring; To avoid a midterm wipeout, the party should focus less on dry policy issues and more on eliciting an emotional reaction.” And in the meantime, lefty activists are drinking ever higher-proof rum rations. For instance, The Nation magazine’s Elie Mystal took excess to new levels of wretchedness when he said on MSNBC:I wouldn't call the Founding Fathers racist misogynist jerkfaces, but I'd allow that their view of the humanity of women and black people needed work. Nonsense like the 1620 Project aside, you can't read 18th-century accounts of anything without receiving shocks: casual anti-Semitism, casual assumptions that black people were subhuman, casual assumptions that women were chattels. Okay, so it's not stunning that the original Constitution didn't reflect many modern changes to these views. On the other hand, the Constitution didn't leave us helpless to correct any flaws we might come to see in the couple of centuries after it was adopted. It contains within itself an orderly procedure for amendment, which we've used dozens of times successfully, usually even without a war for impetus. How much better off would we be if instead of relying on rogue Justices or defiant legislatures or deranged protesters, we simply got to work on amending the Constitution when we discover we have a national consensus in favor of the upgrade? A dilemma for pro-abortion zealots, however, is that they don't have the national consensus they pretend to have. At most they have a strong majority in favor of butting out of the abortion decision very, very early in gestation. They have only a small minority in support of abortion on demand through the last nanosecond before birth, if not after.The Founding Fathers didn’t recognize abortion as a fundamental right because the Founding Fathers were racist, misogynist jerkfaces who didn’t believe that women had any rights at all!
Knee jerks
Elie Mystal is a nut, but I'll grant him that we can explain certain failures of the Constitution only by the benighted views society took of certain issues in the 18th century:
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I'd like to run a PAC named the "21/21 Movement". In the 21st century we should have learned and applied the lesson of the 21st amendment. If something seems to be a great idea, so much so that the public, the Federal Congress, and the state legislatures all support it, try it. (18th amendment -- Prohibition) Run with it a few years, and if the public/Congress/States decide they'd made a mistake -- repeal it.
We CAN try, survive, and correct mistakes. And in trying we can, sometimes, make real progress.
We can and should repeal or revise the 17th amendment about direct election of the supposedly more stable, deliberative, body of our bi-cameral Federal legislature.
We can and should revise the 12th amendment, such that the candidate at the top of the ticket doesn't have the power to foist Dan Quayles and Kamala Harrises upon us. (Yet we still want the Teddy Roosevelts and Harry Trumans to be parked safely in the VP slot, out of the spotlight, until and unless God intervenes to give his favorite nation the leader called for.)
A constitution should impose time limits on duration of "executive orders". And term limits on those serving in the House of Representatives would perhaps make those persons more nearly and actually 'representative' of their constituency. A process by which federal courts can remove one of its own member, or term limits chosen by and imposed on its own members, could be authorized. Perhaps we can finally settle the question of capital punishment ("unusual" ?) by amendment.
There's a risk of making a document too long. But the downside of inferring constitutional intent via penumbras and emanations is, by now, quite clear. Try a century doing something differently.
The comfort from reading 18th C American documents comes from reading things from centuries earlier than that. For the rights of women, blacks, Jews, etc in particular, the contrast is remarkable.
Most of us tend to respond to the world as if history began the day we were born, but some of us at least try to stretch back a little farther.
Clearly things were worse earlier on many fronts, but my point was not to criticize the Founding Fathers in comparison to the rest of human history. They were fabulously ahead of their time in many ways, and superior to us in many ways as well. Nevertheless, there were some blind spots.
The point is that we were completely free to fix the blind spots as they became apparent to us over the next couple of centuries. We didn't have to keep looking at the flaws in the Constitution with horror and condemn the entire document and the system it outlined. Nor did we have to ignore the parts we disliked or undermine them with dishonest jurisprudence. We just had to follow a legal process for amending the Constitution whenever we became sure we could improve it.
Yes, the Founding Fathers (and Abigail Adams, at least) were fabulously ahead of their time. They also tried to build in some flexibility for those who thought differently later. The Jacobins and Bolsheviks were less radical, keeping power much the same, just giving it to a different group.
"The Founding Fathers didn’t recognize abortion as a fundamental right because..."
Ironically, whatever comes after that admission is irrelevant to the validity of the Alito draft opinion; it merely seeks to establish that, in fact, the Founders did not recognize abortion as a fundamental right that was somehow secretly encoded into the text.
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