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The Constitution Is Not Complicated

Lost amid all the debate over whether Harriet Miers is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court is the simple fact that our Constitution is an extraordinarily simple document. I thought it was a remarkable straightforward, easily comprehensible document the first time I read it. I was probably about nine or ten years old at the time.

I only began to appreciate its hidden subtitles when I read in my high school civics textbook that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" actually referred to the right of state governments to organize National Guard regiments. I was further perplexed when I learned that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" really meant that the Supreme Court could prohibit the free exercise of religion in schools, town squares, and other public places nationwide.

But I still didn’t fathom the true profundities of our Constitution until I learned that somewhere within it lurks the right of a woman to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. Try as I might, I still can’t find that clause in my copy. Perhaps I own the expurgated version? Maybe that bit was printed in invisible ink?

So you see, I have only recently come to understand that the real Constitution bears no relation to the one I found in my parent’s almanac so many years ago. That Constitution is purely ornamental, for display purposes only. It’s the one we put out to make a good impression when we have guests over to dinner. The real Constitution is a document so monumentally complex and abstruse that only a handful of experienced judges and legal scholars can even begin to understand it. Harriet Miers has probably never even read the real Constitution, so you can see why she’s not even remotely qualified to serve on the SCOTUS. She might even make a complete fool of herself and base her rulings on that quaint little document in my parents' almanac...

posted by The Jabberwock @ 10:46 PM