When Republicans opened the 112th Congress with a reading of the Constitution, they faced a challenge that threatened to undermine the whole purpose of the reading, to demonstrate adherence to the original document. The trouble, you see, is that the times they’ve gone a-changing… For one thing, blacks actually count today not as three-fifths of a person but as a whole person; and (gasp!) women have the right to vote. So they read a watered down version that simply left out the ugly stuff. But like the Bible, the US Constitution has a resilience that allows principles to remain while the context may change. Like the Bible, though, it requires intelligent, thoughtful interpretation of both those broad principles and the details that lie therein. Besides, if such documents were completely static, with no possibility to bend in meaning with new times and circumstances, they’d have passed into the ether of irrelevance long long ago.
