[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 58 (Tuesday, May 3, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H2937-H2938]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     CONSTITUTIONAL FUNDAMENTALISM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Quigley) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. QUIGLEY. On the first day of this Congress, Members took turns 
reading the Constitution aloud on the floor of this House. It was a 
worthwhile exercise.
  However, some parts were omitted. There was no recital of the 
Amendment that established prohibition or the clause requiring fugitive 
slaves to be returned to their owners, or the one equating slaves with 
three-fifths of a human being. I guess nobody wanted to be the one who 
was stuck reading those parts, and I can understand that.
  But it got me thinking that, lately, there has been a lot of talk 
about the Constitution, and that's a good thing. The Constitution is 
our national charter. It protects our basic freedoms, it grants power 
to the government, and puts limits on those powers.
  All of us in this body took an oath to support it. We should talk a 
lot about the Constitution, but we should talk about it the right way. 
Some of my colleagues here seem to think that all we have to do is read 
the Constitution together and we will all see the light; that the 
little words on the page will answer all of our questions. For them, 
the Framers had all the answers. I guess that's the real reason they 
didn't want to read the embarrassing parts out loud on the House floor.
  To do that would be to admit that the Framers got some things wrong, 
that their document was a first draft of liberty, a blueprint for 
justice, not the last word.
  Some call this way of thinking constitutional fundamentalism. When it 
comes to the Constitution, fundamentalism is misguided. Let me explain 
why.
  No one doubts that some parts of the Constitution are meant to be 
read literally and rigidly: every State gets two Senators. You have to 
be at least 25 years old to be elected to Congress. Cut and dried.
  But in many of the most important passages of the Constitution, the 
Framers deliberately used broad, open-ended language because they 
wanted their words to be read flexibly as times changed. Freedom of 
speech, due process of law--these terms don't define themselves.
  The Fourth Amendment protects the right of people against 
unreasonable searches and seizures. The Eighth Amendment outlaws cruel 
and unusual punishment. What makes a search unreasonable or a 
punishment cruel? The document itself doesn't tell us.
  The constitutional fundamentalists tell us we should interpret the 
words of the Constitution as they were understood at the time they were 
written, more than 200 years ago, but they can't really mean that. At 
that time, all felonies were subject to the death penalty and flogging 
was a common punishment for crime. Today, we consider such punishments 
cruel and unusual.
  The words the Framers chose are not just broad and open-ended. More 
importantly, they express basic values. To enforce basic values, you 
need to make value judgments. And value judgments change as the world 
changes, even when the underlying values stay the same. The Supreme 
Court has always understood this.
  Almost 200 years ago, the great Chief Justice John Marshall made 
clear that the Court was going to read the broad phrases of the 
Constitution differently than it might read a tax statute or bailing 
code.
  Marshall wrote: ``If we apply this principle of construction to any 
of the powers of government, we shall find it so pernicious in its 
operation that we shall be compelled to discard it.''
  Marshall and his successors on the High Court understood that when we 
freeze the meaning of the Constitution in place, we limit our capacity 
to make progress as a people.
  Progress hasn't come easy. It wasn't until the 1940s that the Court 
applied the First Amendment's establishment clause to State and local 
governments, ensuring the separation of church and State. It wasn't 
until the 1950s in Brown v. Board of Education that the Court declared 
government-sponsored racial segregation unconstitutional. Not until the 
1960s did the Court finally represent the principle of one person, one 
vote. And not until the 1970s did the Court enforce constitutional 
equality for women.

[[Page H2938]]

  If we interpreted the document in a static and literal way, we would 
find ourselves in a country we didn't recognize.
  Constitutional fundamentalism makes difficult choices look easy by 
papering over the ambiguities of the document and ignoring the 
complexities of our history.
  I would much rather acknowledge the ambiguities and debate and 
discuss and argue about the complexities. I think it's significant that 
when we amend the Constitution, we don't redact the superseded parts. 
Leaving them in serves as an anecdote to collective amnesia about our 
past mistakes; it undermines efforts to sanitize our troubled history, 
as many in power throughout the world often do with their own history.
  I close with the words of Thomas Jefferson: ``Some men look at 
constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark 
of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. Let us follow no such 
examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable of 
taking care of itself, and ordering its own affairs.''
  Thank you.

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