This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Could there be a greater insult to the authors of the United States Constitution than to see them as people who were so full of themselves as to command that all future ages bow before their wisdom?
If there is anything a gang of revolutionary thinkers — who engaged in the violent overthrow of the established order and ceaselessly squabbled among themselves — would not presume to do it would be to expect that citizens more than two centuries hence should hew to the original meaning of the document they bequeathed to us. Or even that there is a single version of what that original meaning is.
Yet comes now state Rep. Ken Ivory, with a bill that would not only create and fund another committee to be on the lookout for federal overreach, but also command that said committee take its guidance from "the meaning of the text of the United States Constitution, as amended, at the time of its drafting and ratification." It also specifically commands that the panel, in interpreting said original meaning, ignore federal court rulings.
Of course the Constitution contains many nuts-and-bolts instructions that do not offer much opportunity, or need, for interpretation. The minimum age for Congress members. The presidential oath of office. How long Congress will have to wait before banning the import of more slaves.
But the founders were also wise enough — or thought we were wise enough — to leave us some of history's most important weasel words. Phrases such as "Necessary and proper," "Unreasonable search and seizure" and "Due process" command us to work out for ourselves, over and over, what it all means. That, plus the amendment process written into the original Constitution — exercised almost immediately to incorporate a Bill of Rights — suggests that the last people to believe that the wisdom of the Constitution's authors would last for all time would be the authors themselves.
So it is absurd for the Utah House to have overwhelmingly passed House Bill 76, which sets up within the already superfluous Constitutional Defense Council a new Federalism Subcommittee. It gives that body $600,000 in housekeeping money and apparently grants it the task of holding an ongoing statutory seance, to read the minds of people dead almost two centuries, people who owned slaves, wouldn't let their wives vote and thought tobacco was good for you.
Ivory's bill not only demeans the work of current state and federal officials who are seeing after our interests, it also throws the founders' trust for us right back in their faces.
The Senate should leave this bill along the side of the road, and tend to more pressing matters.