This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 12, 2009 - "The trouble with ignorance is that it picks up confidence as it goes along." — Arnold Glasow
In his passionate keynote address to the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Rush Limbaugh first explained that he and his fellow conservatives "love and revere our founding documents."
He then continued, "We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom -- and the pursuit of happiness."
That's an interesting comment in that the preamble to the Constitution makes no mention whatsoever of inalienable rights, a Creator, happiness or universal endowments of any kind. That language can be found in the Declaration of Independence -- a document composed 11 years before the Constitution was drafted. Perhaps Rush should suspend his adoration of the founding documents long enough to read them.
If anybody in the CPAC audience took note of their hero's faux pas, they made no mention of it. Then again, when the entirety of the resident intellectual's higher education consists of one year at Southeast Missouri State -- where, according to his mother, "he flunked everything" -- it's a fair bet that his admirers are not overly concerned with historical minutia such as which document actually says what.
In fairness, the right wing holds no copyright on constitutional illiteracy. Periodically, some aspiring do-gooder from the Birkenstock Brigade will advance the notion that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment makes capital punishment unconstitutional. That argument fails on two fronts:
First, public executions continued unabated before, during and after the Constitutional Convention. If the founders had outlawed capital punishment, they were apparently unaware that they'd done so.
Second, the Fifth Amendment provides that "No person shall be held to answer for a capital ... crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury ... nor be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law ..." There you have it: To be tried for a capital offense, one must first be indicted and to be executed, the accused must be afforded due process of law.
As the Fifth Amendment obviously precedes the Eighth, the founders had already set down the rules for the death penalty before they banned punishment that was cruel and unusual. It is thus not illegal to kill people; it is only illegal to kill people illegally.
The common ignorance of the documents upon which the republic was founded is of more than academic concern. Just as opposing armies can both believe that God is on their side, political adversaries often cite these papers as justification for their positions on issues about which the actual documents have little or nothing to say.
The Declaration of Independence was a rather uppity letter sent to King George III to advise him that his North American colonies were in revolt against the British Crown. He took this news badly and the Revolutionary War ensued. Though the signers cited the inalienable rights of man as justification for their rebellion, their immediate complaint involved "taxation without representation."
The body of the Constitution is a blueprint for a national government. It was written in Philadelphia in 1787 at a convention initially called to amend the Articles of Confederation -- the original supreme law of the land. Though much of the text is procedural in nature, it created a union of independent sovereign states. Hence the motto "E Pluribus Unum," or "Of Many, One."
Appended to the Constitution, and ratified contemporaneously with it, is the Bill of Rights. The American equivalent of Great Britain's Magna Carta, it consists of the first 10 amendments, drafted by the founders to limit the power of the federal government they'd just designed.
As originally framed, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. The individual states remained free to pass internal laws as they saw fit, regardless of the provisions of the Bill. It was only after the Civil War, when Congress feared that the former Confederate states would use the apparatus of state government to deprive the newly freed slave population of its civil rights, that the 14th Amendment was ratified imposing due process obligations on local authorities.
In the non-Limbaugh version of the preamble, the framers sought to "secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity ...." They never presumed to tell future generations how to live their lives and left us no hint as to which laws to pass or what issues to debate.
Rather, they provided us with the means to determine our own destiny, believing as they did that a nation of free people could best govern itself. And that is a notion that is worthy of our love and reverence.
M.W. Guzy is a retired St. Louis police officer who currently works for the city Sheriff's Department. His column appears weekly in the Beacon.