My point for the morning, then, is a simple one. There is the Constitution, as an actual legal/historical document, and then there is the idea of the Constitution, as a fetishized Platonic ideal that exists separate from the messiness of reality, in the heads of those who need to worship a text rather than read it. There is so much of the Constitution that is just messy, compromised or badly worded that anyone studying it without the rose-colored glasses of a need to treat some American historical document as divine cannot help but see idiocy all over it. Some of it was the nature of compromise, like the Senate. Some of it was historical view of morality and immorality, like slavery. And some of it was just bad wording. It was a document written by people.
The problem comes about when anyone treats it as anything else. Recall, for example, the messiness of the GOP attempting to hold a ritual reading of the full text of the Constitution on the House floor at the start of the 111th Congress, right after "Tea Party" protesters helped them retake control of the House in 2010. The "Tea Party" protesters were the fashion disasters in tri-corner hats, who didn't have a clue about the text of the Constitution. And I don't know shit about fashion, nor care in the slightest. I ruthlessly ridicule anyone who does, so if I'm calling you a fashion disaster... Anyway, it was only after the GOP locked themselves into this promise that anyone remembered that the lines about slaves counting as 3/5 of a person weren't actually removed from the document. They were just later amended, so chaos ensued as the GOP tried to figure out how to "rewrite history" and pretend that the Constitution doesn't say what it actually, literally says.
Read that thing sometime. It has some good stuff in it! I love that First Amendment! Yup, definitely my favorite! It also has some really bad stuff in it, some of which was bad wording, some of which was compromise, and a lot of which is just head-scratch-worthy.
Nobody beginning from first principles would create the Senate. It was a deal to get the southerners on board. The Constitution is not a principled document. Understanding that, what do you do? How do you think of the document, and how do you respond politically? What you don't do is fetishize the damned thing. We are bound by it, but that doesn't mean we have to pretend that it is a principled or immutable document.
