The Constitution as a Sacred Document

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Conservatives and now the Tea Party have turned the Constitution into a sacred document - US Democracy a religion.  Over at the Lexington Blog at The Economist we are reminded that one of the guiding principles of the tea-party movement is based on a myth.

WOULDN�T it be splendid if the solutions to America�s problems could be
written down in a slim book no bigger than a passport that you could
slip into your breast pocket? That, more or less, is the big idea of the
tea-party movement, the grassroots mutiny against big government that
has mounted an internal takeover of the Republican Party and changed the
face of American politics.

Now a majority of the Tea Partiers have probably never read the constitution or the history of that document.  Here is the reality check.

When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the
victim. The framers were giants, visionaries and polymaths. But they
were also aristocrats, creatures of their time fearful of what they
considered the excessive democracy taking hold in the states in the
1780s. They did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone
slaves, should have the vote. Many of their decisions, such as giving
every state two senators regardless of population, were the product not
of Olympian sagacity but of grubby power-struggles and
compromises�exactly the sort of backroom dealmaking, in fact, in which
today�s Congress excels and which is now so much out of favour with the
tea-partiers.

That back room dealing made the Constitution a less than perfect document 200 years ago.  In fact Jefferson didn't think it would survive for 50 years much less 200.  And of course there was no way the founders could anticipate the issues facing the country today - that's right, they weren't dieties.