Saturday begins Constitution Week. The holiday commemorates the signing of our Constitution 235 years ago in Philadelphia.
Constitution Week reminds us of America’s great heritage and the foundations to our way of life. It emphasizes the responsibility of citizens to protect and defend our Constitution.
Like Thomas Jefferson said, “It is every Americans’ right and obligation to read and interpret the Constitution for himself.”
We live in a day when our Constitution is not understood – or is misunderstood – by most citizens; as a result, egregious violations of our constitutional rights are common place. Examples of infringements of just the first and second amendments are so frequent that it could fill this whole page. The ignorance is so thorough that people who should be defenders of the Constitution don’t even recognize infringements anymore.
For example, President Biden recently announced his school loan “forgiveness” plan. Setting aside the injustice of such a plan – it’s not “forgiveness,” it’s a transfer of wealth – note that he will be exercising both legislative and executive powers in his massive plan. This is completely contrary to the way the government is set up in the Constitution – even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has said that the President “does not have the power” to cancel student debt.
Additionally, there are almost innumerable occurrences in our day of unelected bureaucrats making, enforcing and adjudicating laws. Case in point: the CDC’s enacting an eviction moratorium, preventing landlords from evicting tenants during the COVID-19 outbreak in September 2020. Thankfully, the Supreme Court struck down a later eviction moratorium of the CDC as unconstitutional on Aug. 26, 2021.
In that 6-3 decision, the dissenting opinion was unsurprisingly given by the three progressive justices. This should encourage conservatives that we can still preserve our “more perfect Union.”
Our nation is at a crossroads; two very different approaches to our Constitution will lead to two very different future America’s. How did these two approaches come to be? I’ll give my perspective in two weeks, but it is well worth taking the time and effort to think through these differences. You owe it to yourself … and your country.
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, thestableguy@frontier.com.