What do patriots who aren’t patriotic do to pretend to be patriots?  Same thing religious hypocrites who aren’t religious do to pretend to a greater morality than others, proclaim their purity first, louder, more frequently and with greater bellicosity than anyone else.  So what do those who have no respect for the Constitution do but proclaim themselves protectors of it, strict constructionists, even as they continue to try to append unnecessary amendments to it, to subvert it into something more to their advantage and preference? 

So you have Congress voting on an amendment to ban flag desecration in order to honor the freedom that the flag symbolizes by diminishing in fact the freedom that the flag only represents in abstract. This is a little like buyers of a rare and beautiful work of art who throw away the art and frame the packing crate to hang on their wall.  How people who allegedly slavishly revere the authors of the Constitution have suddenly managed to uncover so many flaws and errors in the text that have gone unnoticed in the previous 11 score years of our history has never been adequately explored.  It seems the self-proclaimed protectors and defenders of the Constitution have decided the Constitution needs to be protected from everyone except themselves. 

Not only have these strict constructionists decided the framers allowed too much freedom to slip into the document, they determined that there wasn’t enough room for bias written into it either.  Thus the ban on same sex marriage amendment.  As the danger of a threat to the institution of marriage had already subsided and was being denied by the states, the strenuousness of the congressional effort to protect it may legitimately be seen as gratuitous to the need. 

Yet even knowing that marriage wasn’t threatened, and their constitutional amendment to protect it wasn’t going to pass, they brought it to a vote anyway for purely short term political purposes.  Even though these politicians ostensibly (and by law) must represent all Americans equally - we all pay their salaries after all – they assure us that blind justice is too equalizing a constitutional force to continue to be endured.  Therefore they’ve found it expedient to try to cheat up one corner of the blindfold on Lady Justice to give us a peek at just which group of Americans they currently find it easiest and most politically profitable to publicly despise.  Who can doubt that once they loosen this blindfold, and thereby negate its purpose, there won’t be many other subgroups of Americans whose rights they will suddenly discover it incumbent on the nation to permanently infringe?

          True, bottom feeding politicians have always been around to try to gain political advantage by exploiting the worst hate, intolerance and temporary intemperance of their peers by polarizing the country for their own narrow advantages.  But few in history have been as outlandishly anti-American as the current crop of politicians who would use the Constitution itself as a crude plaything and toy to enshrine their venom and temporary hate filled prejudices into irreversible law.  Even slaveholders were classy enough not to try to amend the Constitution merely to tell us how much they hated blacks.   

Of all the partisan attempts at the trivialization of our sacred Constitution these amateur anti-constitutionalists have subjected us to over the last number of years, the all time classic for nerve may be the so-called balanced budget amendment.  This story begins with a corrupt group of politicians who conspired to give us massive budget deficits throughout the eighties - accumulating more debt in twelve years (1980-1992) to a degree which was greater than the debt accumulated in the first 200 years of our history.  They did this in response to no crisis or toward any discernible investment nor improvement in the nation’s future.  

To disguise their guilt, carelessness and venality, the same people who created the debt then proposed an amendment to the Constitution to insist they stop.  In this instance, since the Constitution is nowhere opposed to their doing the jobs they were hired to do, “constitutional amendment” is probably too strong of a term.  As there has really never been anything to amend but their own behavior maybe a “ban on congressional incompetence amendment” to the Constitution would have been a more accurate title.  Anyway they actually proposed rewriting the founding document of the nation to add a sub clause to tell them to start honestly doing the job no one was stopping them from doing in the first place.  Amazingly, this cheerleader or chastity belt amendment/fraud only failed passage in Congress by a single vote. 

Obviously they were trying to stir up a national controversy that debate over such a worthless constitutional amendment would have inspired in this instance merely as a sort of whipping boy or dirty rag of misdirection to hide their own political corruption underneath, not to make them start doing their jobs but to allow them to continue not to.  Their manifestly bad intentions were amply proven the next time a member of their party was in the White House.  Since 2000 George Bush and the party that sponsored the balanced budget amendment, even though they inherited a large budget surplus, have added an additional 2.7 trillion to the deficit.  Even the hypocrites have had a hard time not blushing at the red ink.

Now, if you think that these amendments are innocuous to the well being of the nation and are just political frauds perpetrated on the people for short term political gains by disingenuous politicians, you aren’t wrong.  But when taken together in terms of their precedents and unintended consequences, they represent not just a timid, questioning knock on the door of our independence but a deadly serious, jackbooted attempt to kick it in with both feet. 

As precedents, as if by design, just these two innocent sounding amendments recently proposed would begin to squeeze freedom from both ends.  On one hand they would limit the sacred right of public dissent against political corruption while with the other they would codify the divisive poison pill of prejudice into a document carefully and specifically written to preclude it.   

The only document in the country preserving our equality and freedom is suddenly being viewed by these geniuses primarily as a tool to restrict them.  In nearly two hundred and twenty years no one has ever found it necessary to do anything like this before, what’s changed?  Are all the burning flags contributing to global warming?  Is someone actually opposing opposite sex kids from uniting to marry just as they always have?  Is our freedom suddenly in such surfeit today that it must be curtailed?  Or is this just a complete degradation of the lack of quality and of principles of the people we have in office today?

Tellingly, they hardly seem to care when they don’t succeed in passing these amendments.  But that very lack of seriousness itself indicates a profound lack of reverence and respect for the document unknown to our experience. Their fiscal mismanagement has already mortgaged the economic future of the country. Yet in abasing the Constitution for an extraordinarily fleeting advantage through the next election they seem more than willing as well to hazard the timeless fundamentals of our nation’s heritage and play dice with the nation’s future. When you consider the high intellectual quality, seriousness and unselfish integrity the founding fathers displayed in originally crafting the document, to watch these far less serious and capable and honest people so ready to compromise its deepest principles by casting them like chaff into such careless political chasms can’t give America any great comfort as to the current quality of her leadership.

So far the Constitution has only barely avoided irredeemable damage by chance, a hair here, a thread there and a stray vote now and then.  But like crude and spoiled children unable to handle the chain saw of power they’re playing with, just because they haven’t done permanent harm yet, doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying until they have. 

          Along the same Freudian lines of free association, though not involving a fraudulently conceived amendment, Congress recently decided to “debate” the war in Iraq merely to disguise the fact that they had no intention of seriously debating the war in Iraq.  Though the responsibility of declaring war is their direct Constitutional responsibility, they initially abdicated it and gave blanket approval to a totally unnecessary war.  This despite not bothering at the time of the request for the enabling legislation to ask one cogent question, put forward any intelligent critique, set any limitation, or stipulate any viable method of consultation or additional oversight as the war progressed.

          After three years, when the Iraq war has proved such a fiasco of theory and mismanagement, three years of complete incompetence, dishonesty and malfeasance, not by the military but by the stuffed suits in Washington, you might expect that it would lead to some soul searching, a fierce accounting of mistakes, an apology or two or even a few timely and pertinent questions about a reassessment of or even adjustment of policy.  Wrong as wrong can be.  They only revisited the war not to debate it (and finally start to do the job they never did in the first place), but to rubber stamp their own dereliction.  This debate was not about doing the right thing at all but hiding behind phony procedures and partisan cant and won’t to perpetuate the wrong ones.  What do we pay these guys for again?

What’s most maddening is the cynical, bland and banal determination with which they categorically refuse to do their jobs.  Not only do they conscientiously avoid doing the proper things the Constitution specifically demands of them, and demand specific constitutional authority before they’ll quit doing all the damaging ones it doesn’t expressly prohibit, but rather than honoring it as a sacrosanct guarantor of our freedom they would debase it as a crude partisan tool to destroy them. 

What we may actually need is a cattle prod amendment to the Constitution because it is one thing to elect someone to Congress but quite another to force them to work.  Clearly we would have to get them to do exactly the opposite of everything they are currently doing if we are to get them to finally begin doing the jobs we have been paying them to do all along.

          But what can you expect but constitutional neglect when even those who claim to be strict constructionists and lovers of the Constitution, the Supreme Court Justices themselves, back along this same continuum, have been quick to subvert it.  How else to explain the decision in Bush v. Gore?  Whatever the eventual outcome of the election chads hanging in the balance, and history will certainly judge the outcome of the 2000 election to have been extraordinarily harmful to the nation, the Supreme Court had no business deciding it.  Whatever the original intent of the Constitution none could reasonably conclude that it should fall to a bare majority of Supreme Court members to decide a close election according to their own questionable political debts, prejudices and affiliations.

          Their interference was not only contrary to the Constitution and every conceivable aspect of the separation and balance of powers, but contrary to all the previous states’ rights rulings of the justices who decided it.  It was one of the most brazenly egregious political power plays in our history, totally against the Constitution, common practice, the American people and a slap in the face of our democracy and the value and validity of our free elections.  Quite simply it was an open faced collusion by one branch of government to dictate the future of a second branch of government by overruling and undercutting the third.  It was an effort by the Supreme Court, essentially (and successfully), to pack itself.  In the process they intentionally subverted democracy and the Constitution by weakening the ability of the American people to control and trust in the operations of its own government. Is it any wonder that Congress respects the Constitution so little when the Supreme Court doesn’t? 

          When you factor in all the other short sighted and small minded efforts by the Bush administration to end run the Constitution, thwart legitimate and constitutionally mandated congressional oversight, politicize and blur separation of church and state, put forward misleading information to the public and to ignore ethical standards and international law; there begins to emerge a pattern of systemic constitutional contempt and abuse that is completely unprecedented in our history.  If you then consider the unprecedentedly sweeping privacy and executive privilege claims by the administration along with the odd and insidious signing statements designed to undermine legislation even as it is being signed into law by the President, and the whole bizarre unitary executive theory of the President who would be king and you come to the inescapable conclusion that these institutional changes are not so much designed to protect the nation’s security but to insure the politicians’ security from the nation. 

Taken as a sum, the Chief Executive, backed by supine politicians in both the Congress and the increasingly politicized Courts, has cynically inflamed a temporary crisis to unilaterally demand what amounts to permanent and unchecked martial law over us.  When possible they have secretly proceeded to absorb these powers to themselves de facto, without recourse to any prior consent, consensus, oversight, discussion or approval.  In many respects George Bush II has tried to appropriate more actual unchecked authority and power over the people of the United States and our institutions than George III held over us at the time of the revolution.  At this writing only a few of the most extreme and dangerous of these efforts have been barely held in chain by the few sinews of political opposition, honest judges and public disapproval left. 

 All of these contemptuous maneuvers by our current political leaders are direct symptoms that arise from the disease of pretending to do a job they have no ability or aim to do while becoming increasingly determined to deny anyone else the possibility of ever doing them in their place.  We have never had people in government who have so crassly and comprehensively either betrayed, put up for sale, misused or left unused their offices as these we have now.

The only common denominator in all of their varied assaults on the Constitution from every direction is the vacuity of purpose and ethics at the core of their conception of government.  It is the raw pursuit of unassailable and undemocratically applied power that motivates them. The money changers have inhabited the temples of our democracy.  It is not the God referred to on our currency that they place their trust in, nor the freedom the flag and the Constitution exemplify, but the lust for the money itself and the power it represents they grovel to.  They have proven they will deface the halls of Congress with the graffiti of their careers and rewrite the Constitution in crayon and misuse our most sacred documents, institutions of democracy and even their own faith as pawns in their small minded pursuits and corrupt political games.  In so doing they show a complete contempt and disregard for the American people and the institution and democracy they are sworn to preserve, protect and defend. 

          Prudence would caution that we should be aware at least of the possibility that techniques even more callous, damaging and devious might soon be employed against us.  As the public slowly awakens to the threat they represent and begins to redress the democratic imbalances that this political class has intentionally created, they will undoubtedly become more desperate to protect their increasingly unjust and unsustainable hegemony on power.  People this corrupt and undemocratic in the day to day management of their offices historically become even more extreme and vicious as they sense their dishonestly acquired and expanded prerogatives of office begin to be taken away from them.  In their growing weakness they are becoming more reckless and dangerous day by day.  It would be a mistake to underestimate the lengths politicians will go to hold onto power they have long since ceased to deserve.