For those of you unaware this is the cover of the 10th Annual History Issue:
http://dc-cdn.virtacore.com/2011/06/TIme74.jpg
This is a long read ripping this to shreds that I thoroughly enjoyed reading.
Click the link for the full read:
http://patterico.com/2011/06/23/rich...nd-other-laws/
Seriously, this piece in Time Magazine is either utter bullsh-t, or he is literally incapable of reading and understanding the words of the Constitution and other related laws. I was so stunned to read this drivel in Time Magazine that I then looked up who the hell Richard Stengel is, and apparently he is their Managing Editor! And by the time you are done reading this post you will be stunned with the cluelessness on display.
So strap yourself in, we’re going to have an old fashioned fisking. And it’s a long one, because this piece is one of the most clueless pieces I have ever read on the Constitution or the law generally.
It starts off with the usual liberal claptrap that if the founders were not perfect soothsayers about the future, that this meant that we should just ignore the Constitution:
Here are a few things the framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.
It is a facially ridiculous argument. Yes, for instance, the founders didn’t know specifically that Adolf Hitler would rise to become the leader of Germany and plunge the world into war (a second time, no less) and murder millions of innocents (especially Jews). But they knew there was such a thing as war. And I find it odd that he asserts that the founders didn’t know about the concept of collateral debt, given that Thomas Jefferson endlessly whined about his and indeed the majority of the slave-holding founders were in the same situation (but generally less whiney than Jefferson about the whole thing). And in fact the existence of the atom has been theorized since Greek times, and verified to a significant extent by chemists in the 17th and 18th centuries. If you are going to assert that the founders didn’t know about certain things, maybe you should check to see whether they actually knew about them.
The aggressive stupidity continues:
What would the framers say about whether the drones over Libya constitute a violation of Article I, Section 8, which gives Congress the power to declare war? Well, since George Washington didn’t even dream that man could fly, much less use a global-positioning satellite to aim a missile, it’s hard to say what he would think.
So once again he is arguing that because the means of carrying out war has changed, that somehow we can’t imagine what the founders thought. The founders didn’t know about drones, but General Washington did know what war was and he knew that one nation’s military attacking another’s was war. The means by which we would kill each other today is probably wholly beyond his imagination, but so what? They didn’t limit their language to the means of waging war available at the time.
He goes on:
What would the framers say about whether a tax on people who did not buy health insurance is an abuse of Congress’s authority under the commerce clause? Well, since James Madison did not know what health insurance was and doctors back then still used leeches, it’s difficult to know what he would say.
Well, I can’t speak to what James Madison knew of insurance, but it did exist over twenty years before the American Revolution, (as well as many other forms of insurance) and contrary to his suggestion there was such a thing as health care in 1789. It was primitive by modern standards but there was some hope for recovery for the sick and the injured. And yet, we know what they considered commerce back then and it didn’t include any form of health care or even insurance.
And then of course he has to play the race card:
And what would Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned slaves and is believed to have fathered children with at least one of them, think about a half-white, half-black American President born in Hawaii (a state that did not exist)? Again, hard to say.
Well, actually I am pretty sure that Jefferson would have been appalled. His statement that all men were created equal meant only that they were born with equal rights. He did not mean that they were all literally equal in abilities and Jefferson himself was quite convinced of the inferiority of black people. That is all ugly, yes, and disappointing, but it’s the truth.
But we are not required to follow every preference of the founders, but only those actually enacted in the Constitution. The Constitution only puts a few restrictions on whom can be president and none of them reference the person’s race. Indeed, the Constitution doesn’t mention race at all until it is attacking racial discrimination in the Civil War Amendments.
The framers were not gods and were not infallible. Yes, they gave us, and the world, a blueprint for the protection of democratic freedoms — freedom of speech, assembly, religion…
There’s nothing wrong with that passage, but I want to note that when he talks about the original Constitution, he includes the Bill of Rights. Which is a perfectly reasonable approach—as I say, the Bill of Rights was ratified in the same constitutional breath as the original Constitution—but I want you to notice that. It will be significant later.
But then he has to again, ignorantly, play the race card.
but [the founders] also gave us the idea that a black person was three-fifths of a human being
Actually, no, the Constitution didn’t say that and they did not think that. What the Constitution said was that a slave would be counted as three-fifths. And not every black person in America was a slave, even at the founding. And don’t even get me started about how these half-literate commentators completely misunderstand the true outrage of the three-fifths clause. As I explained on my blog a while back:
It is always cited by people as proof that to the framers, a slave was 3/5 of a person. But ask yourself this: who was clamoring to count them as whole people for voting purposes? The South was. That should tell you all you need to know. The more persons who are counted in the census, the greater their power in the Congress. And the Southern Planters wanted to see their power increased by using the bodies of the slaves, without giving those slaves the right to vote. Then, in turn, they would use that increased power to block any measure to end or diminish slavery. So the slave would be used as tool to ensure the continuation of his or her own bondage…. [T]he outrage of the 3/5 clause isn’t that slaves were not counted as whole persons; it was that they were counted at all.
