By Grant Calder
I am a big fan of the U.S. Constitution. I carry a copy of it in my back pocket - a compact edition courtesy of the National Constitution Center. My students carry copies of it, too, though they generally keep theirs in their backpacks.
We spend several weeks every fall studying the document's seven articles and the Bill of Rights. Afterward, we continue to look at various sections and paragraphs almost daily as other sources make reference to the Constitution. And we examine the later amendments as we reach their ratification dates in our chronological survey of American history.
It had never occurred to me that Americans' devotion to their wonderfully spare and succinct blueprint for government might have a downside - until recently.
We face some serious challenges as a nation these days, and our representatives seem even less willing than usual to consider responsible solutions. Instead, they increasingly cluster around the Constitution, competing with each other to be seen as its true defenders.
Unfortunately, though, it's not the Constitution that needs protecting. It's the environment; it's our competitive position in the global economy; it's the triple-A rating of U.S. Treasury bonds.
The British worry less about defending their small-c constitution, which consists of laws, statutes, legal precedents, and writings on political philosophy accumulated over many centuries. But Americans distinguish between a single, few-thousand-word document written in 1787 and all of the related material that has built up around it since the summer of that year. And that doesn't even include our 50 state constitutions, the first 13 of which preceded the U.S. Constitution and provided models for it.
Brevity can be a strength, but our obsession with our big-C Constitution sometimes limits our perspective and discourages creative thinking about solutions to our 21st-century problems. In the worst cases, we use our allegiance to the document as an excuse to avoid innovation and experimentation.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia maintains that the Constitution is not a living document. How's that? The directions for altering it are built in!
Since the Constitution's ratification, it has been amended to, among other things, abolish slavery, give women the vote, and empower the people to elect senators. Clearly, a majority of the Founding Fathers would not have supported these changes, but who cares? Most Americans alive today do support them.
The tea-party movement wants every congressional act to specify the constitutional authority for it. And legislators already spend plenty of time constitutionally contorting themselves to make such connections.
Sponsors of the health-care bill, for example, claim that requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance is justified by the commerce clause of Article 1, which gives Congress the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This is a stretch. But the important question isn't whether the mandate is justified by the commerce clause. It's whether it's necessary to solve the problem.
We need creative, unencumbered thinking. We can decide which ideas are good ones, and the arguments we have about them need not, in most cases, revolve around their constitutionality.
I'm not suggesting a radical break with the past. We have repeatedly ignored the Constitution when it suited our ends, without even bothering about amendments. In 2002, for example, Congress voted to hand over its constitutionally delegated authority to declare war (on Iraq) to the president. In 1980, the Supreme Court upheld a congressional act creating "set-asides" for minority-owned businesses in federally funded public-works programs, even though the justices admitted the law was, strictly speaking, unconstitutional.
Our country's 1787 charter contains some important ideas, but it is not a sacred text. It does not hold the answers to the debt crisis, global warming, health-care inequities, international terrorism, or gun crimes committed by the mentally ill. In the search for constructive solutions to the problems of the day, it would help if we adopted a broader definition of constitution.