When I worked in radio, the air personalities at my station
had a little game called Dead or Alive. They would throw out the name of a
former celebrity and take calls from listeners as to whether the individual in
question still walked the Earth. After a while, they would reveal the answer,
with information about what that person was doing now, if, of course, he or she
was still in a position to do anything except decompose. A fun game for its
time, now rendered obsolete by Google and sites like Wikipedia.
The game itself is still very much alive, though, where our
Constitution is involved, and has a lot of players these days, thanks largely
to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. It is now widely known
that he believed the Constitution to be a “dead” document. Meaning, this is
what the Founding Fathers and their successors wrote, and they knew what they
were doing, so the job of a Supreme Court justice is to interpret the law, not
add to it. But is it really dead?
Well, one obvious question that arises is, if the
Constitution is dead, why has it been amended so many times? These were things
that were added to the document, which means that from the get-go, it has been
clear that it must not have been perfect or specific enough, and the courts and
the Congress, and even the Founding Fathers themselves, felt the need to fuss
with it. And those very amendments had to be undone in some cases. Like
Prohibition, for instance.
There really is no such thing as a dead document, even if
it’s revered. Moses came down from the mountain with those stone tablets with
10 commandments on them. But human beings just can’t leave things alone – the
Jews over time came up with something like 600 other sacred rules that had to
be followed. Moses had enough trouble bringing down the Commandments. He’d
still be up there if he had to schlep down all the other stuff too.
Most of us agree that our Constitution is brilliant, and we
admire the prescience of our Founding Fathers for creating it, with all those checks
and balances. But trying to get into their heads doesn’t always work. When we
try to get into someone else’s head, most of the time we are still running
around in our own. The Founding Fathers, of course, couldn’t possibly have
foreseen all the situations their document would have to be applied to.
The problem with sacred documents is that they need
interpretation. So we have arguments over whether corporations are people or
whether we all have the right to bear arms. The courts are there to settle
these arguments. But the settlements themselves are no more sacred than the
original texts. They get fussed with. The Founding Fathers, in their wisdom,
knew that was going to happen, and made provision for it.
Maybe their greatest legacy was the knowledge that it’s
dangerous to let words become too sacred. Through all the tinkering that goes
on, we eventually arrive at principles that stand out as universally valuable.
That love doesn’t have anything to do with gender, or that equal does not mean
separate. But are corporations really people? I have a feeling someone’s going to
be getting back to us on that one.
