Jonah Goldberg: Constitutional Amendments and Citizenship Rights
[Jonah Goldberg writes a column for the LA Times.]
It's like clockwork. Whenever conservatives propose a constitutional amendment, progressives suddenly rediscover the delicate gears of the constitution and the horrible dangers of "tinkering" or "tampering" with its precision craftsmanship. Consider the sudden brouhaha over the idea of revising the 14th Amendment to get rid of automatic birthright citizenship (which would make us more like Europe, by the way). Here's Angela Kelley of the liberal Center for American Progress on Sen. Lindsey Graham, who started the amendment chatter: "He's not one to tamper with the Constitution, so I'm surprised he would even suggest this."
"While everyone recognizes that there are problems with our immigration system in this country," Elizabeth Wydra of the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center tells NPR, "my perspective is: Let's try to fix this through legislation and not tinker with the genius of our constitutional design."...
Liberal devotees of the "living Constitution" always made a fair point. The founding fathers never envisioned a world with jet planes, split atoms, stem cell therapies, one-click porn or MTV's "Jersey Shore." Similarly, the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment would be stunned to learn, in July of 1868, that they had just created an adamantine right for homosexuals to marry one another and receive state benefits to boot, as a federal judge in California recently decided (overruling, I might add, the will of California voters)....
When discussing the Constitution on college campuses, students and even professors will object that without a "living constitution" blacks would still be slaves and women wouldn't be allowed to vote. Nonsense. Those indispensable changes to the Constitution came not from judges reading new rights into the document but from Americans lawfully amending it....
Read entire article at LA Times
It's like clockwork. Whenever conservatives propose a constitutional amendment, progressives suddenly rediscover the delicate gears of the constitution and the horrible dangers of "tinkering" or "tampering" with its precision craftsmanship. Consider the sudden brouhaha over the idea of revising the 14th Amendment to get rid of automatic birthright citizenship (which would make us more like Europe, by the way). Here's Angela Kelley of the liberal Center for American Progress on Sen. Lindsey Graham, who started the amendment chatter: "He's not one to tamper with the Constitution, so I'm surprised he would even suggest this."
"While everyone recognizes that there are problems with our immigration system in this country," Elizabeth Wydra of the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center tells NPR, "my perspective is: Let's try to fix this through legislation and not tinker with the genius of our constitutional design."...
Liberal devotees of the "living Constitution" always made a fair point. The founding fathers never envisioned a world with jet planes, split atoms, stem cell therapies, one-click porn or MTV's "Jersey Shore." Similarly, the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment would be stunned to learn, in July of 1868, that they had just created an adamantine right for homosexuals to marry one another and receive state benefits to boot, as a federal judge in California recently decided (overruling, I might add, the will of California voters)....
When discussing the Constitution on college campuses, students and even professors will object that without a "living constitution" blacks would still be slaves and women wouldn't be allowed to vote. Nonsense. Those indispensable changes to the Constitution came not from judges reading new rights into the document but from Americans lawfully amending it....