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Originally Posted by TimSr
Either you believe the Consitution is sacred, and must be followed or changed through the amendment procedures it outlines, or you wish to give temporarily elected politicians the power to change it by statute or by politically appointed judges in the courts. What is the "compromise" position on that?
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Ah, but the devil is in the details.
The Constitution isn't, in fact, sacred text. It was written by humans, to address human problems -- specifically, those of governing themselves -- in a way that had never been done before.
When it was written, it was anything but a conservative document; figure that the conservatism of the time involved ideas like "the divine right of kings." The ideas at its root were new ones, derived largely from Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke. Ideas like the natural rights of man, freedom from oppression, and government by the consent of the governed: straight out of the Enlightenment, which was essentially a liberal movement.
It's easy to say that "it must be followed," but it's first necessary to decide what it means, which is a matter of interpretation. This has been going on since the beginning. See
Marbury vs. Madison (1803) and
McCulloch vs. Maryland (1819) for a couple of significant early examples.
It's fashionable in some circles to talk about things like "plain-language interpretation" of the Constitution, but the language isn't actually very plain. If the meaning is as obvious as all that, why did it take until 2008 (
District of Columbia vs. Heller) to settle the question of whether the right to bear arms is an individual one?
It's possible for honest people to differ over the meaning of the Constitution. If it weren't, the Supreme Court would have been out of business a long time ago.