WE THE PEOPLE

The batshit crazy Congressional patriots, like Matt Gaetz (the child molester) and QAnon kook Marjorie Taylor Greene (who stalked the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland), have just started a new group called the America First Caucus in order to defend the Constitution and Anglo-Saxons (white people). And all the Trumpsters, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, and other white supremacists are always preaching and wailing about the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution. Crazy people in camo go around shoving pocket Constitutions into other’s faces, yelling, “READ IT!”

So, I decided to do a little research on this revered document that has suddenly come back into vogue, and I found a good story in the New Yorker by Jill Lepore about the history of all modern constitutions.  Turns out the vast majority were the product of war. People get violent and scared and they feel compelled to protect their rights with words. Sometimes rulers create constitutions in return for taxes, so they can wage more war. And freedom of the press is uniformly selected as the most important right. Imagine that …

Ours, like most Constitutions of the 1700s, was cribbed from Montesquieu’s 1748 “Spirit of the Laws”, which in turn led to Catherine the Great’s Russian Constitution called the Nakaz in 1767 — twenty years before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. And the first American Constitution was actually produced by the colony of New Hampshire in 1776. Every other colony quickly followed suit. Constitutions were a dime a dozen by the time the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787.

The American origin story claims the U.S. Constitution was the enlightened brainchild of James Madison and the Founding Fathers. But, in truth, they were essentially well-read plagiarizers and drunken pitch men. And there was very little original thought involved.

Trump showed us the fragile nature of our Constitution, refusing to honor subpoenas, rigging the Justice Department, milking the government like a dairy cow for his personal financial benefit, claiming the President was above the law, colluding with a foreign adversary, refusing to accept his 2020 defeat while trying to overturn the election results in Georgia by strong-arming their Secretary of State, and leading a violent insurrection against Congress.

Where the hell was the Constitution of the United States when we needed her?

As constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson recently said, “To the extent that we continue thoughtlessly to venerate, and therefore not subject to truly critical examinations, our Constitution, we are in the position of the battered wife who continues to profess the ‘essential goodness’ of her abusive husband.”