Wrong and Dangerous: Ten Rightwing Myths About Our Constitution
by Garrett Epps, professor of law, University of Baltimore
“The primary purpose of the United States Constitution is to limit Congress. There is no separation of church and state. The Second Amendment allows citizens to threaten the government. These are just a few of the myths about our constitution peddled by the Far Right—a toxic coalition of Fox News talking heads, radio hosts, angry ‘patriot’ groups, and power-hungry Tea Party politicians. Well-funded, loud, and unscrupulous, they are trying to do to America’s founding document what they have done to global warming and evolution—wipe out the facts and substitute partisan myth. In the process, they seek to cripple the right of We the People to govern ourselves. In Wrong and Dangerous, legal scholar Garrett Epps provides the tools needed to fight back against the flood of constitutional nonsense. In terms every citizen can understand, he tackles ten of the most prevalent myths, providing a clear grasp of the Constitution and the government it established.” — Amazon
“Disgusted by what he calls the Far Right’s ‘drive to destroy the Constitution in the name of “saving” it,’ law professor Epps offers spirited and sarcastic rebuttals to 10 hot-button claims that conservative commentators tend to advance about the Constitution. In one chapter, for example, Epps picks apart the idea that the Constitution does not provide for separation of church and state; in others, he takes on the recently popular notion that the Second Amendment was intended to make government fear its constituents, and he knocks down recently rewarmed claims about the obsolescence of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although presented in a breezy manner, Epps’ arguments are grounded in a textual interpretation and scholarly research. He also takes particular joy in exposing the contradictions, false premises, and bad faith behind the ‘conservative myths’ he targets. Ultimately, it’s a polemic of sorts, intended to provide progressives with inspiration and factual ammunition to those who seek to challenge right-wing ‘originalist’ notions of constitutional interpretation. –Brendan Driscoll
The main fault of such books as this is they aren’t read by the people who most need to read them. America has 1.3 million lawyers, and I’m quite sure this tome hasn’t sold anywhere near a million copies. Probably only a couple thousand of our lawyers, if that many, have read it. (I haven’t, because I only heard of it today.) It’s also the type of book — argumentative in nature –that, even if they read it, won’t make a dent on the people it’s aimed at … because their minds are irrevocably made up: Fox News talking heads, Tea Party leaders, Republican politicians, and the gun-waving militia morons who rally behind the likes of Cliven Bundy and Randy Weaver.
Studying the Constitution isn’t irrelevant, nor an inevitable exercise in futility, because words do have meanings. But if we are not to live in an Alice-in-Wonderland society, they can’t simply mean whatever we want them to. The Constitution functions somewhat like a driveway easement. Let’s say our houses share a common driveway, and a document filed in county property records, having the force and effect of a deed, spells out our rights and obligations with respect to use of the driveway — such as not blocking the other owner’s access and equitably sharing the parking area along the fence. This document makes it possible for us to share the common driveway peacefully, and settles arguments when they arise. It can’t possibly anticipate every dispute that might arise, so it may require some interpretation, and if we can’t settle the dispute ourselves, a judge will use its words to reason his way to a conclusion. Asking a piece of paper to answer complicated questions without application of human reason is asking too much. But without that paper, there’s no framework, no general principles, no agreement — in a word, no contract. The written agreement and human reason have to work together to prevent driveway wars.
The Constitution is a social contract. Through it, we all agree — implicitly if not overtly — to be members of the same society, called the United States of America, and it sets forth the driveway rules. Like an easement agreement, it articulates general principles but can’t provide specific rules for every issue that conceivably might arise, so it must be interpreted. The Supreme Court is designated as the institution having authority to determine what it means in specific contexts.
It’s fine for rightwingers, leftwingers, and/or no-wingers to debate what its words mean until the cows come home. That’s free speech. Just comply with the Court’s interpretations, whether you agree with them or not, that’s all. If the Court says you can’t place a Ten Commandants stone in a public building or require public school students pray to the Christian God, while excluding the symbols and prayers of other religions, then damn it you can’t. If your response to the Court’s interpretations of the Constitution — our driveway agreement — is to brandish firearms and threaten your neighbors with “civil war,” then move. Go find a plot of dirt you don’t have to share with anyone, where you can live under your own rules, if that’s what it takes to satisfy you. Like Somalia, or the tribal areas of Afghanistan. But I think you’ll find that even in those places there are social groups who have rules and make everyone follow them. So if you really, positively, absolutely, insist on being an anarchist you may have to shop for an uninhabited island or blast yourself into outer space.