"The good old days" OR "The Golden Age"

A lengthy, desultory digression: Yes, I realize my view of the Constitution is incredibly naive and ahistorical!

... in order to form a more perfect Union

Many of my posts may suggest that our current relationship to our Constitution constitutes an aberration. I am sufficiently well-versed in U.S. history to realize that this is not quite the case.

We - the people of the United States - have never quite lived up to our ideals. Even the exalted Framers compromised some fairly basic ideals, allowing slavery to remain in order to produce The Document.

That slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of allocating Representatives is a documentary testament to our imperfect heritage, from the beginning.

The Alien & Sedition Acts were passed by Congress during Adams's Administration. These were worse than today's egregious so-called "Patriot Act."

Andrew Jackson openly defied the Supreme Court, refusing to enforce Worcester v. Georgia.

The Mexican-American War was an unprovoked, unprincipled land grab.

Lincoln - one of our few Presidential Paragons - suspended habeas corpus by Executive fiat.

The Spanish-American War, an unprovoked imperialist venture.

The first Red Scare culminated in the 1917 Espionage Act and the ensuing Palmer Raids, which conveniently circumvented all sorts of Bill of Rights protections.

Another Presidential Paragon, FDR, attempted to stack the Supreme Court. He DID authorize the violent segregation of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during WWII.

The second Red Scare, often associated with McCarthyism, is not a proud chapter in American liberty.

Hoover's FBI routinely violated the rights of U.S. citizens in the name of security and paranoia. [The complete history of this period will be told only long after my death... we've only just recently learned of Hoover's plan to "to apprehend and detain persons who are potentially dangerous to the internal security of the country"]

I suspect it would be difficult to identify a single decade in the 220 years of our history during which we - the people of the United States - in fact lived up to our Constitutional ideals.

All this does not absolve us. The Framers did not pretend to create a perfect Union - only to provide the basis for creating a more perfect Union.

The Constitution is, and always will be, a work in progress. We the people are ever challenged to realize the ideal it promises. We've never been shy to stray from the ideal in the name of national security. We have, to date, survived. It may not always be so.