Constitutions & Enshrining Ideas

Anyone who reads the United States constitution, or any of the great documents of declaration; those that espouse high virtues of liberty and brotherhood; the commonwealth of mankind; anyone who peruses these texts with some little understanding cannot help but be moved by such grand ideals.

But is there a real danger in such reverence?

In the United States the constitution faced a major test early in its life in the Dartmouth Ruling. The 1819 ruling showed that the revered document was not an infallible vehicle of the popular will. In this case the courts found government interference with private education to be unconstitutional.

And last December the Virginia healthcare ruling (Tomasky, 2010) followed a similar course, effectively barring Federal government attempts to interfere in healthcare provision, on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and set up a supreme court date to resolve the matter (MacAskill, 2011).

But there are just as recent and much more troubling attempts to use the US constitution to prevent the federal government using its mandate to enact various socially progressive measures. Arizona Bill SB1433 has been described as all but secession (Montini, 2011), leaving people in Arizona angry at attempts to legitimise, after-the-fact, controversial legislation (Sullivan, 2010), such as Arizona's discriminatory immigration laws. That such a bill made it to the senate of Arizona all, let alone come as close as just six votes from passing (del Puerto, 2011), demonstrates the difficulties that documents like the US constitution face.

Here lies the difficulty of sovereignty. When the old authorities are cast down and republics set in their place, the way in which the people shape the world they share to the benefit of the community has to be very carefully laid out. In the case of the US constitution, it has become a battle ground for interpretation, much as Voloshinov described language in his works.

Whatever our words, we must never be careless in our use of them. Thomas Jefferson, the principal force behind the words in the Declaration of Independence and the Federalists behind the US constitution, held a duty not just to ideals, but also to clarity. Meaning is never so set that an author can be held entirely to blame for the reception of those ideas by an audience. But this shouldn't lessen the responsibility, on both author & audience, to be clear.

We must remain wary of reverence, lest we enshrine ideas to such a degree that we can no longer effectively scrutinise them and our pathways to opposing injustice become blocked.

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References:
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+ Michael Tomasky's 'Healthcare repeal votes and Democratic strategy'; in The Guardian; 3 February 2011.

+ Ewen MacAskill's 'Obama faces re-election hurdle as health reforms go before supreme court'; in The Guardian; 14 November, 2011.

+ E.J. Montini's 'Arizona to secede (without OFFICIALLY doing so)'; in The Arizona Republic February 2011.

+ Laura Sullivan's 'Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law'; on NPR.org; 28 October 2010;

+ Luige del Puerto's 'Senate says ‘no” to state nullification bill'; in Az Capitol Times; 2 March 2011.