No, the Constitution Isn’t Outdated

Source: Daily Signal | September 15, 2016 | John York

This Constitution Day, we celebrate the 229th year since our Constitution’s signing. For many Americans, the durability of our founding document is a point of pride, an indication of its high quality, and a worthy reason to revere it.

Time tests quality, and the fact that our Founders’ creation has outlasted so many other regimes signifies their skill and prescience.

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Some scientific and technological changes do require that we think carefully about the Founders’ intent when they were writing the Constitution. For instance, new technologies allow police to peer into homes without physically entering them, intercept an email or a text message, or track your car from their computer back at the precinct. Whether these things constitute a search or seizure of citizens’ “houses, papers, and effects” under the Fourth Amendment is an important question the Founders do not answer for us directly.

But by no means are we merely left to guess how the Constitution speaks to these modern conditions. Through the Founders’ own writings contained in the Federalist Papers, notes on the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention and correspondence, thoughtful judges and legal scholars get a clear sense of the spirit behind the words on the page.

Given the Founders’ concern that government would use warrantless searches to harass and condemn political dissidents, it is hard to imagine James Madison or Alexander Hamilton would approve of warrantless wiretaps, drone flyovers, and email dragnets conducted by federal agencies.

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While the Founders took special care to ensure the Constitution’s foundation could survive new developments in technology and society, the durability of the document owes as much to what the Founders knew about human nature and worked into our foundational text as it does what they recognized they could not foresee and left to future generations.

Our Founders believed government must be strictly restrained because those attracted to political power rarely restrain themselves. The Founders knew even the power of the majority should not be total, since infringements of individual liberty authorized by 150 million voters are often no more just than those authorized by a single ruler.

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As yet, the heavens have not parted, and human nature is still as fallible as it was 229 years ago. Thankfully, our nation was blessed with a generation of men who had insight to perceive the essential character of man vis-à-vis government and the wisdom to craft institutions rooted in those unchanging realities.

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