How George W. Bush (Will Have) (Accidentally) Saved the Constitution

Bear with me here. I know the title to this post probably made you roll your eyes to the point where you worried, like that one time in 1st grade, that they might get stuck that way, and you would be staring at the inside of your skull from here on out. But I swear that, at least in my mind, this will make sense…

Okay, as everyone paying any attention for the last few years has noticed, Bush has been treating the U.S. Constitution like Godzilla treated Tokyo. Gitmo, torture, wiretapping, signing statements, secrecy, “extraordinary renditions,” “free speech zones,” etc. It’s been a bad few years for the Big C. That 3.0 earthquake on the East Coast nobody noticed was actually the ground vibration caused by the founding fathers spinning in their graves at speeds normally requiring the use of superconductors.

So, how is that good for the Constitution? Well, it’s like this.

You and I, and many of our elected leaders–maybe even G.W.–have been aware for quite some time that we have a Constitution in this country. You and I, and many of our elected leaders–maybe G.W.–have been rather proud of the protections it affords us. You and I, a few of our elected leaders–I doubt G.W.–have read the thing, and thought about it, and felt secure, knowing that those protections have been in place for centuries now, and not even the worst people to come along have managed to do much to erode them. And, after all, we’ve been through a Civil War, two world wars, and a Cold War. Yet the protections are still there. It’s enough to make you take it for granted.

And that’s where my point here begins. You went through grade school, junior high, high school, learning little by little what the Constitution and this country’s history were all about, and it always seemed like an accomplished fact, a done deal. Some people shot muskets at some other people, got together in wigs and breeches, hammered out a document, and things were set from then on. It was as it had to be, and it is as it must be still.

But the Constitution is only as strong as our support of it. By living our lives taking it for granted, we supported it, sure–by assuming its truth and power. But along comes a challenge to that seeming permanence of the Constitution, and now instead of supporting it silently by the way we live, we have to voice our support. We have to act on it outwardly. We have to declare to those who are testing its limits that there are consequences for what they’re trying to pull. And in doing those things, we reaffirm our belief in the truth and power of the Constitution. It’s not, after all, something to be taken for granted. It’s something to be fought for.

So, faced with the most serious threat to the Constitution in our culture’s memory, we are forced to face up to why we need it, why we insist on it, why it is worth defending even with the greatest of sacrifices. The answers to those questions were only vague and abstract, something to be recited from a textbook, until G.W. came along. Now the answers come from the gut. We have to start from the very basics, and even defend why free speech, transparent government are good, why torture, for chrissakes, is something that we shouldn’t put up with under the Constitution. It makes us understand what we believe in and why.

And in the end, that makes us believe in it more strongly than we ever could have if the threat, in the person of George W. Bush, had never come along. The next “unitary executive” won’t even get out of the starting gate. Thanks, G.W.