by Tom Ontis

Created on: July 19, 2008

The Constitution is the law of the land, like it or not. I'm certain that at some point, everyone who has looked at it has said "this is wrong." The ultimate arbiter of our Constitution is the Supreme Court, like it or not. The Court sometimes gets it wrong, in my opinion. When the Court ruled in the late 1800's that it was ok to have separate facilities for black people, that became the law of the land. By the mores of the day, it was a correct opinion. Much as we would like to think so, all courts are subject to political pressures. It took more than 50 years for the Court to rule that separate facilities, in the case of schools was 'inherently wrong.' It took another few years beyond that for the Court to decide what the term 'with all deliberate speed meant." It really meant yesterday.

The Constitution has only been changed from its original form 27 times, the most recent being about 6 years ago when Congress and the state legislatures passed an amendment that said Congress could not give itself a pay raise an ensuing election had taken place. That amendment had been proposed in the early 1800's and sat around for nearly 200 years.

The Constitution is so difficult to amend because it should be. Two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three quarters of the states must approve an amendment to the Constitution. (Remember that an amendment is any kind of change, not just an addition.)

In the mid-1990's, amid furor over a flag burning case from Texas, the Court ruled that that was not illegal and that it constituted a form of free speech. In ensuing debate, Robert Bennett, senator from Utah, one of the more conservative states in the union said on the floor of the Senate: "We cannot change the Constitution just because we disagree with a ruling by the Supreme Court," I stood up in my living room and applauded. (I oft quote the Senator in government classes.)

The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in less than 90 days, quite a miracle, according to Catherine Bowen. At the time, these very learned men, 'demigods' as she called them, wrote a form of government that is now copied world wide. They added the Bill of Rights a few years a later. They could not have anticipated every question that would ever come before them, so they did what they could. In the Bill of Rights, they wrote to protect the citizens from government, rights that been ignored by their ruling British government.

The most recent case of an area banning guns for personal use and for defensive purposes was in Washington DC, not to far from the Supreme Court building. The majority ruled that the Founding Fathers had indeed meant that gun posession was legal and that everyone was entitled to carry one, at least for their own protections. (I am waiting for the gangies to jump on that one in court.) The founding fathers could not have anticipated the automatic weapons some 200 years later, they were still using one shot muskets.

The Constitution is ultimatley always right.

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