Of course, these worthies are right––if the Constitution is nothing but an aggregation of unrelated rules to be used by those who seek power—if the only mandatory provisions are those that explicitly say, “This provision imposes a duty on people to make it work realio trulio no kidding uh-huh baby pinky swear really not kidding, you hear me, Mitch?”

Under this reading, Congress has almost no “duties”—it must meet for one day every December, it must elect officers, it must keep a journal, and it must count the electoral votes every four years. There’s no “duty” to approve a presidential cabinet, or to fill vacancies in the military officer corps, or to appropriate funds to run the government.

This interpretation is a post-constitutional pathology. The Constitution imposes lots of obligations, and affirms many values, that are apparent to any open-hearted reader. Step away from its values, and it imposes almost none.

(The conservative aversion to actually governing, interestingly enough, is not in evidence in states that they control. Legislators in red states are eager to suppress the vote, regulate women’s fertility and sexuality, roll back LGBT gains, silence criticism of agriculture, gut collective-bargaining rights, dismantle higher education, and strip away academic freedom. And state leaders truly in a hurry are eager to call a “convention of the states” and scrap the Constitution altogether.)

It’s true that the Democratic side of the ledger has also succumbed to a certain slovenliness in its approach to the Constitution; as I wrote at the time, for example, the Obama administration’s excuses for not seeking authorization for the Libya intervention were as lame as anything the Bush White House produced. Current operations against ISIL in Syria and elsewhere have no shadow of authorization from Congress.

It is not justification, but simply description, to say that this kind of executive chicanery is inevitable if Congress refuses to do its duties. The government must keep running, and in a crisis, presidents will inevitably conclude that their plan is imperative. Congress has the power to say yea or nay to military force; but if it will not speak at all, presidents will act as they think best. And remember that the most consistent attacks on Obama as “weak” cite the one occasion on which he decided that military action actually did require Congressional approval.

Constitutional rot has spread from a feckless Congress to a desperate executive, and is now enfeebling the judiciary.

Whatever is taught in school, the Constitution never was (in James Russell Lowell’s phrase), “a machine that would go of itself;” what has made it work is a daily societal decision that we wish to live in a constitutional democracy. In 1942, Judge Learned Hand warned that “a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save.”

The willingness to live by fundamental law has fled, and few seem to notice. It will not return, if at all, until as a society the United States finds a constitutional vision that is about more than power.

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