Let’s not let the wingnuts own the constitution
by digby
If you don’t lay claim to the constitution, they will:
Last week, the Republican Party released a party platform which treats the Constitution as if it were a manifesto composed by Paul Ryan himself. The GOP platform would declare Medicaid unconstitutional. It inflates the Second Amendment into a license to obtain weapons of mass murder. It lavishes love on Citizens United, hates on Roe v. Wade, and tells gay Americans they can forget about that whole “equal protection of the laws” thing. Oh, and just in case there are any judges out there who can tell the difference between the Constitution and a Tea Party pamphlet, the GOP platform floats impeachment as the solution. Altogether, the GOP platform devotes six pages to its abomination of the Constitution.
The Democratic platform, by contrast, mentions the Constitution by name just five times — once to endorse a constitutional amendment permitting campaign finance reform, twice to tout the party’s support of faith-based initiatives, once to promise judicial appointees who show “faithfulness to our law and our Constitution,” and once to state that our homeland security policy “must always be in line with our Constitution.”
Where the GOP platform lays out a comprehensive rewrite of America’s most important document, casting aside the founders’ vision for a meaner society in which powerful interest groups can flourish, the Democratic platform barely mentions the document at all — and when it does it normally only does so in passing.
That’s not good. I don’t much care if they failed to drop God’s name all over the place since that’s really not appropriate for civic life, but like it or not, the constitution is our secular “sacred” text and if the Democrats don’t tie their values and their principles to it, the other side will. And since they’ve already got the Bible and Atlas Shrugged they’ll hit the trifecta.
It’s nice that we have “This Land is Your Land” and George Clooney. But we should at least grab the Bill of Rights. After all, liberals tend to want to protect all it, not just the 2nd Amendment.
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