About ten years ago, in the summer of 2001, Bob Dylan said this in an interview with Robert Hilburn of the LA Times:
I am not a forecaster of the times. But if we’re not careful, we’ll wake up in a multinational, multi-ethnic police state — not that America can’t reverse itself. Whoever invented America were the greatest minds we’ve ever seen, and [people] who understand what the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are all about will come to the forefront sooner or later.
This morning on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Constitution is being read aloud, by way of a symbolic beginning of this 112th Congress. Amazingly enough, this is the first time this has occurred in the history of the United States.
Now, this act is obviously not the end of anything, and it doesn’t mark the beginning of Nirvana. Politics goes on, and the Republicans are not pure as the windswept snow on the prairie, and things will continue in large part being messy and unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, as symbolism goes, it is important. It is symbolism, after all, which also has substance; the Constitution is not just a coat of arms or a picture to be invoked, but a collection of statements in quite plain English, which together map out what the U.S. federal government was intended to be allowed to do, and what it should be proscribed from doing.
It has been interesting to hear some critics, including some members of Congress, describing today’s planned reading as a gimmick. After all, the oath of office which every member of Congress swears, states:
I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
The Constitution being so fundamental to the duty of each member, one would think that the mere reading of it would not be controversial. It doesn’t take that long, after all. I think that to the degree contemporary politicians are discomfited by the reading of Constitution it is a good measure of to what degree they have been blown off course by their own egos, by their own poor education, by power-hungry ideologies — or by all three.
The 112th Congress certainly ought to keep the Constitution front and center in the months ahead, and so this is an appropriate beginning, and new rule that each new bill must cite its constitutional authority another good step. The very dramatic results of the 2010 midterm election were driven in significant part by voters who heard and understood arguments that America was straying way too far from the principles of its founding documents. Voters in the “mushy middle” who cause the dramatic swings in such historic elections are generally phobic of ideology; while polls show that most like to think of themselves as commonsense conservatives, they are turned off by what they perceive as excessive partisanship or ideological jargon. But they were not turned off by the argument that, in dealing with the current challenges and crises, America would do better to get back to founding principles rather than continue to drift further away from them. And in the political battles to come, those who were elected and empowered by these same voters need to remember to continue bringing the argument back there, especially when it risks getting bogged down in the mud of special interests, giveaways to this group or the other one, expediency, and excessive regard for political comity.
