Boston Tea Party
Not unlike high schools at the start of a new year, hundreds of freshman Congressman showed up at the Capitol this week to do important things like find their lockers, scope out the best tables in the cafeteria, and set in motion plans to radically shift the government back from what they perceived as two years of socialism.
We saw that many voters passed over GOP candidates last year to choose ultra-conservative Tea Party candidates, with the intentions of bringing the country back to a simpler time – specifically, the 19th or 18th centuries. They just don’t want to believe we are living in the year 2011.
The new Congress’ highly publicized first order of business was to read the U.S. Constitution out loud on the floor of Congress (and according to the hilarious and brilliant mathematical work of the Daily Show staff, each representative read approximately 17 words from the 4,500 word document).
It’s evident that the public reading was a political stunt demonstrating a conservative belief that President Obama has been traipsing all over the Constitution (of course, disregard Bush’s abuse of executive power to stage two wars simultaneously and circumvent the Bill of Rights to allow for torture…those don’t count…)
And now the political right’s first target is the contentious “Obamacare,” the landmark piece of legislation providing healthcare to millions and taking control of medicine away from insurance companies.
Tea Party Rally
There are approximately 40 million people without insurance in this country, and nearly a quarter of them are young children. Health care reform ensures that children with chronic diseases aren’t denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions or because they reached some arbitrary cap in their coverage.
But, of course, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t contain an article outlining “the right not to die from lack of insurance,” right? So why not repeal Obamacare?
In fact, some conservatives’ understanding of the Constitution is so extreme, they won’t concede that women have protections under the law. Current Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently said that protections in the 14th Amendment don’t extend to women. He told the legal magazine, California Lawyer, that:
“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.”
By reading the Constitution aloud, the Tea Party Congress is sending a message that words in the Constitution are fixed, and the document itself isn’t evolving. Therefore, amendments to end slavery, ban the drinking alcohol or allow women to vote should never have been considered.
Everybody knows the new Congress was elected to “lower federal spending and deficits,” yet it’s unclear whether that will happen when their gaze is so focused on the past. The U.S. Constitution is one of the greatest political documents ever created, and it should be revered, but it shouldn’t be a political tool used to say people don’t deserve health care or equal rights.
It’s 2011. Let’s keep the past in the past.
*Editors Note: This entry was written before the tragic shooting of Rep Giffords of Arizona. All we can say about that is taken from Feministe. “Certainly, some people with mental illnesses do commit crimes — but that shouldn’t really surprise us, since people with mental illnesses are people, and some people commit crimes. I’m worried, though, that “he’s crazy” will end up being the easy card to pull in the particular case of the Arizona shooting, without recognizing that, mentally ill or not, Jared Loughner participated in the same society as the rest of us, and was undoubtedly influenced by the culture in which he lived — mental illness does not typically put one on an island all their own, totally unswayed and oblivious to everything around. We need to take a good look at the culture and sub-cultures we’ve built in the United States; “he’s crazy” is a cop-out, and it’s irresponsible, and it doesn’t alleviate us of our responsibilities.”
