Three constitutions

There are three constitutions on offer to the mass media, today, the liberal constitution, the conservative constitution, and the libertarian constitution.

[Aside:

OK, lately thanks to the Christian right there is a peculiarly Christian conservative constitution out there.

I am ignoring that and looking at the constitution of more or less secular, though not especially secularist, movement conservatism.

Think of Buckley or Goldwater.

Or Brent Bozell.

/Aside.]

Of the three, the conservative constitution is globally the least dishonest, though it’s far from entirely that, I think.

On their view, the constitution we have is pretty much the one everyone agrees we had prior to the Civil War, with some minimal and very specific modifications made afterward that did not fundamentally alter much of anything.

In particular, the constraints of the Bill of Rights and several others in the body of the unamended constitution that had originally applied only to the federal government continued to do so after the Civil War, they say.

The Civil War amendments were certainly not intended to and did not change that.

As I personally would put it, the equal protection clause of the 14^th refers only to the kind of protection that is the first duty of the state, the protection of each individual’s person and property by its coercive power to prevent or punish crime.

The due process clause restrains the executive from lawless depredations, does not mean life, liberty, or property can only be taken in punishment for a crime after a trial, and apart from that places no constraints whatsoever on what laws the congress or the states may pass.

And the privileges and immunities clause only prevents the states imposing a kind of second-class citizenship invented for blacks, themselves just affirmed to be citizens not only of the United States but of the states in which they reside by the citizenship clause of that same 14^th Amendment.

Let us assume, for example, that as Hugo Black supposed the privileges and immunities of a US citizen include the protections of the Bill of Rights.

But then the privileges and immunities clause would mean that no state can create a sub-normal class of US citizens who do not enjoy those rights, all of them being available to all US citizens against the federal government.

The conservatives would read these clauses in a manner at worst only a little broader than my own while both the libertarians and the liberals insist the 14th Amendment effected exactly the revolution in the US government the conservatives and I deny, nearly all of them relying on a bogus reading of due process with only a few relying on one of privileges and immunities, a strategy increasingly popular with liberal and libertarian academics.

But, anyway, the constitution pretty much everyone agrees we had prior to the Civil War was already more than a little bogus.

Both the presidency and the judiciary had already seized and used more power than was licitly theirs.

And even the congress had more than once stretched a point and had its way.

And that has never been fixed, and is not likely to be unless amendments are passed to given them as honest holdings what are now and have always been stolen goods.

The National Bank?

The Louisiana Purchase?

An absolute right to nullify federal or state acts in the name of the constitution, lodged in the hands of life-tenured and wholly irresponsible judges who cannot be second guessed by anyone but other judges, later?

Pshaw.

Oh, one more thing.

The liberal constitution features a Supreme Court promoted to a nine member, life-tenured constitutional convention in permanent session whose innovations can never be refused and whose existence as such is nowhere authorized in that document.

And those innovations are aimed, they always say, to keep the document in tune with the needs and mores of a changing, modern society.

But in reality they are just changes wanted by liberals but so hopelessly unpopular when imposed that they stand no chance of legitimate adoption as amendments.

In contrast, the conservative constitution features a nine member, life-tenured constitutional convention in permanent session whose innovations can never be refused, but who will never depart a single jot from a totally honest adherence to the real meaning of the document that nowhere authorizes their existence, when they are all Republicans.

As for the libertarian constitution, well, I dunno.