I wrote for Politico today about Mike Bloomberg’s a-constitutional view of government:

Surely, to the extent it’s made any impression on him whatsoever, Bloomberg considers the Constitution an anachronism that poses obstacles to the initiatives of right-thinking people. Why should an 18th-century conception of rights get in the way of 21st-century government, especially when health and safety are at stake?

Bloomberg’s reaction after the Boston Marathon bombing was characteristic. “We live in a complex world,” he said, “where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

What he so dismissively calls “the olden days” was the time of the American founding. The idea that the founders didn’t understand complexity, or have any sense of trade-offs, is ahistorical nonsense. And the notion the Constitution should be changed simply by reinterpreting it when provisions — in this case, protections of civil liberties — supposedly become inconvenient is an offense against constitutional government.