The history of a nation, in four pagesBy James Sullivan
America's Constitution: A BiographyBy Akhil Reed AmarRandom House, 657 pp., $29.95
The drafting of the new Iraqi Constitution, ratified in October, went about as well as the rest of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It wasn't pretty. Writing the supreme law of a land, as it turns out, is hard, vexing work. So many semantic perils to navigate.
The Bush administration has defended the Iraq process by comparing it with our own predecessors' considerable struggles at the Constitutional Convention more than two centuries ago in Philadelphia. However apt the analogy, this might be a particularly good time to marvel once again at the collective wisdom of the American framers, who built a towering monument to idealism out of a tenaciously interlocking set of words and phrases.
Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar clearly has a deep admiration for the minds that mounted this herculean task. The ambition of that body politic is the subject of his ''America's Constitution," a rigorous yet approachable work that regards four pages of inscribed parchment, plus a compact scroll of amendments, as nothing less than the history of the country personified.
Not without careful consideration did Amar subtitle his opus ''A Biography." By laying the groundwork for the three branches of government, then reserving an unprecedented bill of individual rights for its citizens, the author points out, America's remarkable Constitution has given the country a personality all its own. It may be flawed, occasionally unsteady, or even contradictory, but in the end it is about as upstanding as one could ask of a human endeavor.
The document itself, of course, was ingeniously presented as the voice of ''We the People" -- however accurate that assertion may have been in 1787, more than a half-century before emancipation and double that before the confirmation of a woman's right to vote. Amar has written his analysis with the general reader in mind, taking pains to examine each issue from all sides and tracing the ways each resolution has played out in real life.
With its confounding thicket of ''shalls" and ''shall nots," its prescriptions, provisions, and apportionments, the Constitution can seem like daunting legalese to a population more attuned to ''The Daily Show" than C-SPAN. Most Americans can surely recite from ''some favorite poem, song, speech, or scripture," the author laments, but not the Constitution. The running joke among law professors, Amar readily admits, ''is that reading the thing would only confuse students."
But a US citizen can hardly take a side in the debate over gun control, for example, without having read -- and reread -- the single sentence of the Second Amendment, which has been subject to interpretation seemingly since the day it was ratified. (''A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.")
Amar, author of a previous book on the Bill of Rights, grounds the issue, as he does throughout, in vivid historical context. He notes the rapid diminishment of the need for a civilian militia, a precaution initially intended as the states' security against a military dictatorship -- the sheer inconceivability of which now ''ranks among our greatest blessings of liberty." And he suggests that the right to bear arms, strictly speaking, is not language generally applied to deer hunters and target shooters.
As for slavery, another of the Constitution's enduring conundrums, he firmly believes that the framers were inexcusably soft on the issue. Slavery was the ''original sin in the New World garden," he writes in one of his most overtly opinionated passages, ''and the Constitution did more to feed the serpent than to crush it."
Yet he also commends the delegates for their commitment to a relatively pure form of democracy, as much as that ideal could be imagined in the late 18th century, when democratic self-government was virtually unknown. The modern suspicion that the planners were intent on creating a kind of republican aristocracy at the expense of the less privileged ''needs revising," he argues, ''as does the complacent view that the Constitution was essentially neutral on slavery or even anti-slavery in spirit."
In an age when the concept of a ''living" Constitution has become a political pejorative, implying an excessive tendency by ''activist" judges to interpret constitutional law to suit contemporary society, Amar sees the unfinished business of the text as perhaps its greatest attribute.
''The document's real end is the vast creative white space looming just beyond the latest amendment," he writes. Americans have amended the Constitution 27 times, and the people will doubtless amend it again, so long as ''the Republic endures."
Amar lets the cosmic nature of the whole grand achievement get the best of him in considering Article V, in which the Constitution prepared itself for future amendments. If the document is forever subject to review, he wonders, would that not leave the amendment article itself vulnerable to the possibility of an amendment restricting further amendments?
Here the Constitution ''might seem to burst into open paradox," he writes, evidently relishing the prospect: ''The very idea of popular sovereignty, like the mathematical idea of infinity and the theological idea of omnipotence, gave (and continues to give) rise to mind-bending questions."
If infinity is raised to an infinite power, he asks, is the result infinity, or something more? Can an omnipotent God create a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it?
Likewise, ''can the People truly bind themselves?"
The people, as this country has demonstrated time and again, can do whatever they collectively please. Within limits, of course. It says so in the Constitution.
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/01/01/the_history_of_a_nation_in_four_pages/*FW Note:The significant difference betwen the U.S. Constitution and the Iraqi constitution is that the U.S. Constitution was written by educated men who had spent years struggling and fighting to achieve their their freedom from a tyrannical foreign power, it enumerates the highest known ideals of human freedom and self-governance. The Iraqi constitution was written by foreign bureaucrats posted by an aggressive conquerer to create a puppet "democracy" for the express purpose of exploitng the regions resources and people to achieve monetary gain for a few political cronies.
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