(James Ostrowski is an attorney in Buffalo, New York and author of Government Schools Are Bad for
Your Kids: What You Need to Know and Political Class Dismissed:
Essays Against Politics." His latest
book is Direct Citizen Action: How We
Can Win the Second American Revolution Without Firing a Shot. See his website.)
The
Constitution is not a contract, however, since many view it as such, it
will be useful to assume for the sake of argument that it is a contract. Would
you sign a contract with a private firm that gave that firm sole power to
interpret and enforce the contract? Would you sign a contract with a
roofer that, in effect, allowed him to charge you $15,000 and not put a roof on
your house? Only a fool would do so, yet, the Constitution is precisely
such a sham “contract” as it gives the other party to it sole power to
adjudicate any disputes about it. It is yet another nail in the coffin of
conservatism that its chief ideological bulwark, constitutionalism, turns
out to be a sophisticated hoax!
As if the above flaws were not enough,
constitutionalism has other problems insofar as it purports to be a
bulwark against progressivism. Surely, many constitutionalists believe
that the constitution is a statement of various underlying objective truths
about the world, human nature, government and politics. This overlooks
the fact that progressives are pragmatists, that is, folks who reject the
notion that there is an objective reality outside our minds that we can know
and express in words understandable to other people. To cite a
constitution to a progressive is like speaking Mandarin to a Martian or English
to a wall. It’s a pointless exercise since pragmatists reject the notion
of objective truth and are solely interested in the practical consequences of
ideas and words. Thus, in the Pork Lawsuit, the five progressive judges
in the majority, including two conservative Republicans, no doubt believed that
state government must have the tools of economic development to compete with
other states and countries that have them. They were oblivious to whether
the Constitution of 1846 was true or not. It was, in 2011, no longer
practical. The
bottom line is that the 90 percent of the public that is progressive, elected
progressive governors who appointed progressive judges who gave us a
progressive result, the Constitution be damned!
