…because they want to get rid of it.
Louis Michael Seidman is a law professor at Georgetown University. Who knows, he may have been Sandra Fluke’s ConLaw professor? On Dec 30 he penned this op-ed in The New York Times, aptly titled “Let’s Give up on the Constitution”.
Yes, it will tick you off, but read it so as to soak up the extent to which leftish overreach has gotten in just 60 short days.
Now, Seidman’s article does not raise a new theme here. Just Google-search “Constitution Obsolete” and you will find dozens of articles along the same line, especially over the past twelve months. Expand that search and you will find the subject goes back many more years, and, as we know, the theme was bandied about in academic circles as far back as Charles Beard during the Wilson era.
On practical grounds, Seidman’s thesis even finds derision from the Left, as Laurence Tribe of Harvard, first among equals of Constitutional Law scholars sets out in his Jan 3 response, chastising Seidman more as a senior professor might a poorly written exam essay by a student than as a point-by-point slap-down of the argument itself. In short, Seidman’s case is very thin. If the Constitution is to be cast aside, Tribe wants no less a luminary than himself to write its obituary. Georgetown? Indeed!
Conservatives have known for a generation at least that this sort of anti-constitutional talk runs rampant among the academy’s legal community. It’s what gave us Obama in the first place. But what’s noteworthy in this case is that it has been publicly ballyhooed, not by the DailyKos, not by People’s World (the official organ of the Communist Party), not by the New England Journal for Arcane Rhetoric and Gibberish. Instead, Seidman’s thesis is championed by no less than the Gray Lady Herself, The New York Times.
It should be noted that only fifty years ago such public utterances would have meant jail time for both author and publisher; the charge, treason and sedition, i.e., the direct advocacy for the destruction of the very document every public official swears an oath to. The very pillars of the Republic. Far worse than the release of the Pentagon Papers, and just a cut below the Rosenberg’s selling of A-Bomb secrets, this would have been perilously close to a hanging offense in another, not too distant day.
(A day of reckoning still awaits, so don’t worry.)
But the pull quote isn’t Seidman’s case against the Constitution, trite and paltry as it is, but his Johnny-come-lately admission that he’s confessing himself a rank opportunist here. And a cowardly one, at that:
“As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is.”
An off-hand confession like this cost Mitt Romney’s dad, George, the 1964 GOP nomination.
Hell, this guy’s my age, and only this year has he decided which side he’s on? This, and an upcoming book (no free plug here, so look it up), explains everything. Having sat on the sidelines, cheering (out loud) for neither side, and finally deciding, after 40 years of waffling, that he thinks he’s picked out the winning side? Better get on the gravy train while the gittin’s good.
And in the circles he runs, and wants to run, he’s established in his article that he will become the most slavish of second-bananas behind whoever the Top Bananas might be, who were committed from the very beginning. I can see Seidman running to get coffee for Van Jones right now, just antsy with anticipation that he might earn an invite on Ed Schultz’s MSNBC mainliner, Mr Ed. in the second year.
By seeing Seidman’s motives here you can understand the whole point of his article, for it is a cliche-ridden resume to the powers that be that he’d make a worthwhile go-fer for the 2nd-Term Obama team in some capacity. (I quit looking for those kinds of jobs when I was 29.)
A coward as well as a craven opportunist, as “Hail fellow, well met” a chap as you can find these days.
Which brings me back to the New York Times.
If there was ever a doubt who the Constitution was written for, and that it clearly was not written for these snot-nosed dilettantes, it is their stark admission here that the only thing that stands between these self-appointed elites and complete mastery over the common folk of America, is the Constitution.
And they (The Times) think now is high time to pull that moribund document from our clutching dead fingers.
A little bit of a call to arms, so stay watchful and alert.
Laisser les bons temps rouler.
