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We often defend the line and letter of the Constitution by deferent respect for its authors, even though they saw it as imperfect and questioned its longevity.
Politics is about two rather different kinds of laws. Those choices routinely made under the framework of Constitutional Law and choices about that law itself.
The former is the everyday business of government—allocating resources and regulating behavior. In extraordinary times, though, it is the later concerning basic rights and values, i. e. the Constitution itself.
A Constitution constrains and enables. It is an attempt to sustain a political structure in the face of changing social and economic structures. It fits like a well-tailored suit or hangs like a scarecrow’s tattered garb.
More important for this opinion piece, it gains and loses legitimacy as it supports or opposes the interests of a country’s people. It was largely unquestioned when political conflict was overwhelmingly over who gets the better deal when it comes to government action. For most of our history, our system of government was weak central authority and a robust private system of property, production and trade. We took that to be both product and proof of “our land of liberty.”
We are not the same country today that we were 200 years ago. Global involvement on many fronts. Instant movement of word, image and finance. An industrialized society with significant monopoly interests, complex financial arrangements and a far larger and more diverse population and territory.
When a constitutional regime begins to impede necessary action, fails to address what many see as critical problems, people begin to doubt either a rigid interpretation of the founding document or the document itself. Then politics changes from a struggle over “pieces of pie” and becomes a struggle over fundamental issues of justice and human freedom.
We may be at that point. So much more today is problematic, i.e. at issue, contested, than in even the more recent past. The decisions that formed the basis of our past agreements are now the problems that limit our ability to chart a future.
And now, it seems to me, we wrestle anew with the very issues that confronted the founders but in a very different world. Today, politics matters, in ways it has not for over 200 or so years, as we revisit what is just and right.