Words.
"It’s entirely appropriate that the week of our July Fourth celebrations should coincide with a moment when the Supreme Court’s health-care decision has prompted intense debate over the purpose of our government and what the Constitution allows it to do.
...This has advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantages are our openness and the fact that we tend to argue on the basis of high principles. The biggest disadvantage is that differences over policy are often disguised as differences over whether a preferred choice is constitutional or not. When we should be addressing pragmatic questions — Will this approach work? Will it solve the problem it’s designed to solve? Is this a problem government should do something about? — we instead fall back on rather abstract discussions of whether a given idea violates the Constitution.
...We do a disservice to ourselves and the Founders alike if we take them out of history and demand that they settle arguments that we ought to settle on our own.
The Founders, after all, were not timid men bound by the past. They did something bold and adventurous. In creating a novel form of government, they were thinking and acting anew..."
THE WASHINGTON POST: The Founders’ true spirit
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