ATLANTA — What this country needs — says he, in a voice quivering with indignation and age, and pounding the table with a feeble fist — is a good five-cent remedial course in civics.
The outburst is occasioned by still another letter to the editor of his local paper, following others in the same furrow and mimicking as well the cry of innumerable talk-radio callers, all of them chesty with the dare that someone, anyone, show them just where in the Constitution its says the federal government can set up any sort of health care.
Indeed, the Constitution doesn't say the government has any business in health care. When you think about it, it is amazing just how much the Constitution doesn't say.
It doesn't, for instance, say that the federal government can run an air-control system. The Founding Fathers, see, didn't know about airplanes. What is more, we can't know, if they had somehow anticipated airplanes, whether the Founders and Framers would have thought the government should try to keep the planes from flying into one another.
The Constitution doesn't say the government can create a national park system, either, or an agency to police the purity and safety of foods and medicines or tell parents they can't send the kids off to work when they turn 8.
Happily for us and for their own good name in posterity, the Framers didn't write a document of detailed specs. They set a framework for governance, enumerated the basic steps for achieving and maintaining that and laid all that out under a canopy of principles that were to guide the resulting government in its evolution over the generations.
The odd notion that the Constitution bars the government from meeting any national need that the Framers didn't foresee is one of several basic misunderstandings that put more knuckle into today's political fist-fights than necessary.
Stick for a moment more with the health care imbroglio. It is held against representatives and senators supporting reform that few can say they have read the proposed legislation word for word. So? The same is true of reform opponents. Staffs read, analyze and report. Members sensibly limit their reading to summaries and their close reading to passages of particular interest to them.
Similarly, the fact that the House's reform bill is 1,016 pages long is cited as somehow invaliding per se. But there is no more a right length for a bill than there is a right length for a novel. Both should be as long as they need to be to tell the story.
And lately President Obama has been lit into for popping over to Copenhagen to boost the U.S. bid for 2016 Olympics — thus neglecting, the complaint goes, Iran's nuclear chicanery and all manner of menace. Well, good news, folks: When the president leaves Washington these days, it is not in a lurching carriage on muddy roads. Air Force One carries all the power and means of the presidency.
Though, come to think of it, maybe going to Copenhagen does insult the Constitution. Its Framers never gave the Olympics a thought.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn(at)earthlink.net.
