Liberals have a love/hate relationship with the Constitution. They love the Constitution when they can find some out-of-context word or phrase and add concepts that aren’t found in it in order to give constitutional credence to their unconstitutional laws.

Liberals found the right to abortion in the “penumbra” of the Constitution. That means they found the right in the Constitution’s shadows. The welfare state was said to be constitutional because of the phrase “provide for the general welfare,” never checking to see what the founders actually meant.

A careful student of history, as all lawmakers, lawyers, and judges should be, would know that “general welfare” did not mean aid to some at the expense of others, as James Madison was quick to point out in Federalist 41:

“But what color can the objection have [that the phrase ‘general welfare’ is not specified by particulars], when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon? . . . Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars . . . .”1

The new healthcare bill is being shoved down our throats by an appeal to the “Commerce Clause” in Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 with the claim that the Federal Government can force us to buy things we do not want. It’s going to be hard to fight against the argument since the passage of the Social Security Act and Medicare.

The Constitution can only work as a governing document on two conditions: (1) the people know and understand the document and (2) the people are virtuous. The government school system in America has made the first condition inoperative as well as the second condition. From the first day in a government school, students are taught that it’s moral and virtuous to receive money from other people that was confiscated by government.

In his The Americans, in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations (1837), Francis Grund (1805–1863) wrote the following:

“The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government.”2

Patrick Henry said something similar: “[B]ad men cannot make good citizens. . . . No free government, or the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.”

We have 50 percent of voting Americans who are content to live off the prosperity of others, and the Democrats exploit their lack of virtue in the name of the Constitution.

1. The Federalist No. 41: General View of the Powers Conferred by The Constitution,  No. 41 (January 19, 1788). [↩]
2. Quoted in Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, 127. [↩]