Republicans Love the Constitution… To Death

Steve Benen surveys the recent right-wing enthusiasm for repealing Constitutional Amendments, from widespread calls to repeal the 17th Amendment which empowered citizens to elect their own Senators rather than have the States select them and also calls to repeal the 16th Amendment which created a progressive federal income tax (Nevada loon Sharron Angle has made a big splash calling for the repeal of the 16th Amendment, together with her desire to demolish Medicare, Medicaid, the EPA, and who knows what other underpinnings of civilization, but she is far from the only Republican saying this in these days of the teabag mob), to the recent spate of calls from the likes of now-notorious Randroid Rand Paul of Kentucky, Louie Gohmert of Texas and Duncan Hunter here in California to repeal the 14th Amendment, because it mandates birthright citizenship and so imperils white-racist hegemony which matters a lot if you are a white racist asshole.

The Republican Party's present-day Constitutional Demolition Derby comes, of course, in the immediate aftermath of the Bush Administration's orgy of faith-based initiatives and circumscribed "free speech zones" (in defiance of the 1st Amendment), warrantless wiretapping (in defiance of the 4th Amendment), indefinite detentions and show trials (in defiance of the 6th Amendment) and torture chambers (in defiance of the 8th Amendment), and that's just off the top of my head. (And, yes, one wishes the Obama Administration would have broken more decisively with this tendency than it has done, and it remains yet another part of the unfinished business of American Democracy in the midst of our present overwhelming distress that we compel this, whether our President and Congress is ready or not.)

However, as Benen reminds us, at the height of Bush Republicanism this rank indifference to the Constitution's published dictates was conjoined with an extraordinary enthusiasm for Constitutional supplementation:

[B]y the mid-point of his presidency, George W. Bush was on record supporting at least six different proposed amendments to the Constitution: (1) prohibiting flag burning; (2) victims' rights; (3) banning abortion; (4) requiring a balanced budget; (5) prohibiting same-sex marriage; and (6) allowing state-endorsed prayer in public schools. As a wise blogger noted at the time, Bush "really seems to think the Constitution is just a rough draft."

Given the interminable invocations of the Constitution among Movement Republicans, given the cynical farce of their minuets to "original intent" in the face of their ferocious activist dismantlements of the law, given their pious genuflections to calligraphy fonts and parchment-colored backgrounds for the online and on-Fox screeds in which they cry out for their white racist barefoot and pregnant prescientific corporate feudal warlord nuke muscular Christianist theocratic libertopian paradise, it is worth noting from time to time that this "Constitution" they so cherish would appear to bear only a tenuous relation to the actually-existing Constitution and refers instead to a more fanciful document for which our Constitution is but a placeholder, awaiting radical expurgation and expansion and utter transformation unto death.