When the poet Dylan Thomas said “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” he was talking about old people and their demise. But the powerful phrase could also instruct us on other issues, such as fighting against the death of our Constitution, which oddly enough is most endangered by those who refer to it as “living.”
Historians remind us it is the foundation of our nation, this Constitution, the product of hundreds of years of British history and growing enlightenment about liberty, self-government and the achievement of order through rule of law.
Drafted by men who had studied that history and their own colonial history, who had immersed themselves in the lessons of ancient civilizations and studies of European governments, whose high idealism coexisted with insightful realism, the document has endured through decades of those who would dim it.
While not the bright force it once was, it is still there, still explicitly heeded sometimes and always a reminder of the grand dream this nation set out to realize.
Protecting and restoring it are crucial, and the wrong replacement for retiring Justice John Paul Stevens could put it in further jeopardy. Republicans should be prepared to resist if President Obama nominates someone whose judicial philosophy shows it disrespect, even if the dissenters stand little chance of keeping the person off the Supreme Court. What they can do is help elucidate the nature of the peril and what’s at stake, bolstering the constitutional cause the next time around.
They should especially watch out for any nominee who tells us what at least one of those prominently mentioned for the job does – that this 18th century document just won’t serve in the 21st century if taken too literally.
The liberal call today is for a “living” Constitution that somehow instructs us by its spirit. The Republicans can answer that a consequence of this theory is judicial oligarchy, rule by men and women making reference in rulings to their own moral understandings, their own whims, their own sense of self-importance.
The Republicans can also argue, as defeated court nominee Robert Bork has argued, that the Constitution’s basic principles still have validity and can still work, that they are broad enough to accommodate developments over the years. For instance, Bork has observed, it takes no particular imaginative leap to see that freedom of the press as guaranteed by the founders should be understood as freedom of any means of journalists informing the public about what’s going on, including radio and television.
He rightly dismisses the contention that, in order to know what various constitutional passages are all about, you would have to see into the minds of the authors. You instead do the same thing you do with current laws- you read them – and maybe, for some assistance, you check out some history and what the authors themselves wrote by way of explication.
Obviously, different people will sometimes come up with different interpretations. The point is to take these passages seriously, not simply to desert them as no longer relevant.
And by the way, while few on either the left or the right would want an extensive rewriting of the Constitution, the founders did provide a means to enact amendments, and if there is some large area begging for revision, let the proponents give this mechanism a try. What we do not need – what ultimately could give us a terrible dying of the light- is what we have been getting too much of: amendment by judicial fiat.
Rage against that Republicans, and do not worry too much about politics. The job is to safeguard the nation.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
