Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has been a notorious liberal on the U.S. Supreme Court, but her ideology could not have been more perfectly stated in a nutshell than when she advised Egypt to not base their new constitution on that of the United States. Isn’t the job of Supreme Court Justices to defend and uphold the Constitution? However, her disdain for the document is nothing new. A recent New York Times article even went so far as to suggest that the Constitution is losing favor around the world because it does not guarantee, among other things, food, healthcare, and education. Do these people realize that all of these must be paid for, and then deprive us of our right to property. Ginsberg and those like her believe the Constitution is too focused on preventing the government from doing things, such as arresting citizens without due process, and not focused enough on requiring to do things like provide the country with an entire assortment of social services.
Ginsberg’s statement comes in the wake of almost an entire term of our President’s lax view of the Constitution, violating it in cases dealing with healthcare and offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Liberals claim the problem with the Constitution is that it is not “adaptable” enough to modern times, and so they choose to view it as a “living” document that can be interpreted in a number of different ways. The error in this way of thinking is that the Founders wrote the Constitution in a way that makes it timeless. The values and principles set forth in it will always be relevant. We should always be able to have freedom of religion, right to bare arms, protection against cruel and unusual punishment, and a trial by jury. The liberals make a “living” Constitution sound so appealing and innovative, when really it is only a way to limit our rights and expand the government’s.
Conservatives live in a world where 21st century problems all have 18th Century solutions. The Constitution is not divine and it's not "timeless." You talk about it like it's the Bible.
Romanticizing the Constitution gets in the way of us adapting it to govern ourselves.
Ginsberg isn't the only one. How many democracies have looked at ours and decided that they would rather have a parliament? The Constitution didn't have everything figured out, and Western states tend to have more populist structures (like recalls) which are improvements on self-governance.
The Constitution does exactly that; it establishes what the federal government cna do and leaves the rest to states and individuals aka govern ourselves. And as far as I’m concerned the values set forth in it like freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, and petion are just as valuable today as they were in the 18th Century.
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