This morning we find that Elias Isquith, a political writer at Salon, interviewed Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School who has written a new book about the Constitution. Isquith prefaced this interview with a weak potshot at the TEA Party:
The Tea Party will never understand the Constitution: What the right misses about its favorite document
With the 2016 election cycle having kicked into first-gear already, any American who hasn’t inured themselves to the monotonous (and often ultimately meaningless) repetition of the word “Constitution” is advised to get to self-desensitizing — and quick.
Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have already made a fetishized version of the U.S.’s supreme governing document central to their campaign rhetoric; and even politicians less beloved by the supposedly Constitution-crazy Tea Party, like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, are likely to soon follow suit.
Ugh. They’re talking about the Constitution again, he complained.
Yet the rest of the column and the interview itself didn’t make a specific case against the TEA Party’s supposed lack of constitutional knowledge. The remainder of Isquith’s preface explained that Americans in general may not know the Constitution as well as they should, and the interview itself focused on other things. Amar said in the interview that geography played a major role in America’s founding and the Civil War “experience” (you don’t say). He stated the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments would not exist without Lincoln (is that so?). And he said that Lincoln may have been the bestest, “most important constitutional decision-maker and interpreter ever” (Salon’s emphasis, not mine).
Amar added:
Lincoln thinks that the nation created the states, which, of course, Robert E. Lee … could never buy into. Robert E. Lee would say that the states created the Union…
Of course. Only racists like General Lee would believe the eggs came before the chickens. Was this Salon’s point of reference for their headline?
The rest of the interview brought up matters such as Dred Scott, manifest destiny, Marbury v. Madison, the Democrat and Republican parties flipping North and South, and so on. No obvious references to what the Right may be “missing” in regard to its “favorite document.”
The interview concluded with this by Amar:
One of the other big things I want you to see is how regions and states are hugely important in, for example, presidential politics. I talk about the significance in this book, in particular, of Ohio and Florida in the Electoral College and also of Texas. Is it a coincidence that Marco Rubio comes from Florida? That Jeb Bush is the governor of Florida who was born in Texas and whose father and brother had their political bases in Texas? That Rand Paul was born in Texas and his father ran for president from Texas? That Ted Cruz is from Texas? That Rick Perry is a former governor of Texas?
And the point is…what, that the South is that Very Bad Place where they breed those menacing Republicans?
Coincidentally, Governor Walker was born in Colorado, moved to Iowa, and ended up in Wisconsin. Ohio Governor John Kasich came from Pennsylvania. Mitt Romney was born and raised in Michigan. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was born in Illinois then moved to Arkansas. Elizabeth Warren was born in Oklahoma and lived for a number of years in…Houston! What a coincidence.
By the end of the article, I found no definitive basis for Isquith’s introductory “the Right doesn’t get the Constitution” theme, which becomes yet another example of the Left making a general assumption about people they do not understand nor wish to understand. Inserting unsubstantiated editorial remarks makes otherwise dull topics sensational for the sake of website hits. Truth be damned.
