Congressional Republicans’ decision to read the Constitution aloud on the floor of Congress has forced some Constitution-contemptuous liberals further out of the closet, which is an instructive development to behold. Blogger Ezra Klein of The Washington Post told MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell that the constitutional reading is “a gimmick,” and “the issue of the Constitution is not that people don’t read the text and think they’re following; the issue with the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done.” Columnist E.J. Dionne, also with The Washington Post, expressed similar irreverence for our founding document. Dionne lamented that the tea party movement has treated the Constitution “as the equivalent of sacred scripture.

Yet as Gordon Wood, the widely admired historian of the Revolutionary era has noted, we ‘can recognize the extraordinary character of the Founding Fathers while also knowing that those 18th-century political leaders were not outside history. … They were as enmeshed in historical circumstances as we are, they had no special divine insight into politics, and their thinking was certainly not free of passion, ignorance, and foolishness.'”