Some progressives here in Florida learned a tough lesson recently.
Actually, I don’ know that they learned it, but they sure had the opportunity.
One of the very first Constitution 101 articles I ever wrote was titled “Living and Breathing Is Dead.” In a nutshell, the article explains the absurdity of interpreting the Constitution as you go along. You can’t have “rule of law” if the law is subject to change at the whims of politicians and government officials. And that’s exactly what adherents of the “living breathing” Constitution believe. The Constitution, they say, must change with the times.
But as James Madison said, if that’s the case, “there can be no security for a consistent and stable” exercise of government power.
This living breathing Constitution notion has predominantly been pushed by left-progressives in order to expand government power and advance their agenda. (Although in the era of Trump, a lot of people on the right have embraced the absurdity as well.) But you know what? When the tables are turned and the expanded government power is used against them, lefties don’t like it either.
A judge here in Fernandina Beach, Florida, gave some bitter medicine to some local activists who were fighting a land-use change. The city arbitrarily rezoned some environmentally protected land to allow development. To make a long story short, the judge basically said that when a local government reinterprets a zoning law, the courts must defer to the city’s decision. Basically, the land-use ordinances are living-breathing laws.
I go into more detail about this on this week’s Thoughts from Maharrey Head podcast. You can listen HERE.
But the lesson is simple. If a law has no absolute meaning based on the intent when it was passed, you really have no law at all. That goes for the highest law in the land – the Constitution – as well.
Lesson 2: when you take down fences around government power, you can never put them up again.
Progressives have spent decades empowering government to expand its own powers to suit their needs. This time, it bit ’em in the butt. All of the Republicans out there giving Trump a pass on his unconstitutional actions should take heed.