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THE CONSTITUTION "ALIVE AND WELL" But Most People Don't have Much of an Idea What's Actually in There Editorials, Las Vegas Review Journal, 09-23-02, P. 8B As the 215th anniversary of the framing of the U.S. Constitution passed largely unnoticed last Tuesday, a poll commissioned by the National Constitution Center found 87 percent of Americans still agree with the document's underlying principles... but 84 percent admit they don't really know what's in there. Among 1,500 adults polled by phone by the New York-based research group "Public Agenda," freedom of the press turned out to be the least popular right guaranteed by the Constitution, with 43 percent saying the Founding Fathers "went too far" there. And the right of the people to keep and bear arms - guaranteed by the Second and 14th Amendments - proved the most divisive, with 32 percent saying the Founding Fathers went too far in barring Congress from passing any law "infringing the right to keep and bear arms," while 26 percent told poll-takers the right is already too restricted. The underlying problem here is that a majority of Americans now apparently believe such rights were handed out by government, which can thus "take back" those conditional grants of privilege to whatever degree proves politically acceptable. They forget that John Adams, second president of the United States, ringingly insisted, "You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe." Most of the Constitution Center's poll questions are of the touchy-feely "Does the Constitution make you proud?" variety. The outfit summarizes the Constitution's bedrock principle in its official Sept. 17 press release on the poll results as: "Decisions made in the United States should follow the will of the majority, but also protect the rights of the minority." Needless to say, if most Americans today confronted a somewhat more rigorous test, asked whether the Founders guaranteed us a central government with powers sharply limited, and whether there is any area of the national life in which the central government is NOT empowered to meddle (Hint: The Department of Agriculture? The Department of Education?) these numbers would look far worse. The future of a free people depends on each succeeding generation being taught to cherish their liberties - which means they have to know what those liberties are, the mechanisms by which they're supposed to be safeguarded... and whether pure "democracy" is a boon to those rights, or a skulking assassin in the night. "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government," warned Alexander Fraser Tytler (1745-1813), professor of history at Edinburgh University, whose "Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic" was well known to the Founders. "It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury." Asked Frank J. Hogan, president of the American Bar Association, in 1939: "If the Constitution is to be construed to mean what the majority at any given period in history wish the Constitution to mean, why a written Constitution?" Eight-six percent of Americans think America is and ought to be a democracy - a conclusion the National Constitution Center does not seem overly concerned to correct - and hardly a one can think of an area in which the government is not empowered to meddle, so long as someone thinks it might enhance "the general welfare." There's your problem. WORKING TOGETHER TO ATTAIN FAIRNESS | ||
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