Katy Perry concluded her performance at Sunday night’s Grammys posing triumphantly against an enormous projection of the Constitution, eliciting cheers and applause from the approving audience.
It was a scene straight out of a Tea Party rally.
After years spent mocking conservatives’ impulse to invoke the Constitution, the Left now appears to be adopting the same strategy.
Consider Meryl Streep’s headline-making speech at a fundraising gala for the Human Rights Campaign last Saturday. Streep, a vigorous supporter of liberal causes, spent a sizable portion of her remarks pontificating on new threats posed to our founding principles.
Addressing the president, Streep predicted that by the end of his time in office, Donald Trump will have alerted America to the dangers of an increasingly powerful executive branch.
“He will have woken us up to how fragile freedom is. His whisperers will have alerted us to potential flaws in the balance of power in government … How the authority of the executive, in the hands of a self-dealer, can be wielded against the people, their Constitution and Bill of Rights,” Streep said.
Were those very words shouted through a megaphone at a Tea Party protest against President Barack Obama, nobody would suspect a thing.
Any reflex to reflect positively on our founding documents is a good one, but it is a bit puzzling to watch the Left literally applaud the Constitution now after allowing it to serve as a punchline for years.
In 2011, Slate sneered at “the Tea Party’s new Constitution fetish.” A writer for Time quipped, “Tea Partyers treated [the Constitution] as though it were handed down from the heavens,” referring to the movement as a “cult of the Constitution.” A Newsweek article smugly mocked Tea Party adherents for taking “their Constitution worship very, very seriously” and for looking to the document “as if it were a holy instruction manual.”
Add to all of this the Left’s routine efforts to slander the Constitution as racist and sexist.
Just last year, the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement told students at the University of Missouri, “The people vowing to protect the Constitution are vowing to protect white supremacy and genocide.”
Does that apply to noted Black Lives Matter supporter Katy Perry?
If the Left is going to adopt its own brand of “Constitution worship” for the Trump era, perhaps it would be wise for liberals to revisit the standards of conduct they established during the Obama years first.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
