Huck Finning the Constitution

By Ezra Klein

So rather than read the Constitution straight through, the House GOP actually read the Constitution-as-amended straight through. The idea being, I guess, that if people heard that taxes and congressional representation were originally "determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons," people would get, well, confused. I rather doubt that you'll see a Matt Drudge headline screaming "GOP SANITIZES CONSTITUTION!" however.

As Adam Serwer writes, there's some worrying sentiments lurking behind the impulse to Huck Finn the Constitution. The document, in addition to governing our present, serves as the link to our past -- including our mistakes. The amendments are our effort, over more than 200 years, to build a better and more just nation. Wiping that work out of the text, pretending it was perfected from the beginning rather than improved over the years, denies an important thread in our history. In this country, we amend the Constitution. We don't edit it.

The desire to edit the Constitution seems, to me, to be connected to the desire to own it, and use it, for specific political purposes. Rep. Steve King, for instance, joked that he was going to add a helpful aside when he read the Constitution's section on the Commerce Clause: "Democrats: Do not interpret this to think you can do anything you want to do, it’s a very limited authority.” Another way of making the same point is, "Republicans: Interpret this to mean that social policies you dislike are not just bad policies, but unconstitutional." There is not a lot of scholarly support behind the tendency to look at the Constitution and see this instead.

But there are good political reasons motivating it: If the Constitution is both unerring and obviously on the side of you and your policies, well, that's a powerful ally indeed. And that's a view that minority parties tend to find convenient, as even a presidential election can't override the Constitution. But when you admit that it's a more checkered document that has required both changes and reinterpretations as American history has moved forward, that leaves you in more difficult territory. As Dahlia Lithwick writes, "No matter how many times you read the document on the House floor, cite it in your bill, or how many copies you can stuff into your breast pocket without looking fat, the Constitution is always going to raise more questions than it answers and confound more readers than it comforts. And that isn't because any one American is too stupid to understand the Constitution. It's because the Constitution wasn't written to reflect the views of any one American."

That view is comfortable enough in most circumstances: The genius of the Constitution lies both in its specificity and in its vagueness. It's an effort to both set some boundaries around the American project and create a process capable of allowing the arguments that would define the country's future to go forward in a peaceful and constructive fashion. But it's not so comfortable if what you want out of the document is for it to end the argument on your terms.

Related: The Washington Post's interactive Constitution, with notes.