On Amending the Constitution

I have pondered why some "conservatives" are so eager to amend the Constitution at the drop of a hat. After all, isn't preserving (or rather conserving) what we have the foundation of conservatism?

Actually, I think "conservative" is a misnomer. We'll figure out what terminology to use some other time, maybe.

Two Constitutional amendments have failed in the Senate in the past week, ploys to rally the base for November, since the Republicans have nothing positive to run on.

But the question I pondered at first is, why go after amending the Constitution?

As a high school friend of mine used to start out saying, "The way I've got it figured is" they aren't happy with the liberal documents the founding fathers gave us. The Bush Administration is trying to emulate King George III's actions as described in the Declaration of Independence. Read it point by point, and you will see how the current George is trying to put himself above the law, impose the military mindset on the civilian population, and leave us vulnerable to attack just the way the Declaration lists.

As for the Constitution, those infamous liberals George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, etc. gave us a document that doesn't fit with the way the Republicans want to run our government. They don't want a separation of powers; they want a sovereign President Bush, with the Congress and Extreme Court standing by as rubber stamps, the way Parliament was for King George. They aren't comfortable with having a separation of church and state as defined in Article VI and Amendment 1. They aren't comfortable allowing people to disagree with them as Amendment 1 guarantees. They aren't comfortable allowing people with whom they disagree to have the privacy guaranteed in Amendments 4 and 9.

Therefore, they want to chip away at the Constitution, piece by piece, getting ever more intrusive into the private lives of the citizens while playing lip service to "getting the government off our backs." What they want is the government off big business' back while snooping into citizens' privacy more and more.

It's time to mount a major push to restore democracy to America. As the Constitution says, Congress must guarantee "a republican form of government." Let's elect people who will take government away from the current monarchists and restore it to the people for whom it was intended.