Restoring

This past Saturday, at our senatorial district convention, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick dropped in to say a few words. He used to be our state senator, so he’s at home here. He’s been on the road, helping with the Ted Cruz campaign, seeing people around the country. He told us, “There are lots of people who love the country like we do, and they want it to be restored.”

My blurry phone photo of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick
from the Senatorial District 7 Convention, March 19, 2016

I’ve been thinking about that lately. Last week I watched an Uncommon Knowledge interview with Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, a Constitution lover frequently coming to my attention lately. This was the longest interview I’ve heard with him. He had more time to give context and background. I recommend watching the whole thing, but I thought I’d quote a few things here today. 

The overarching question here is, how bad are things, and how can we get back to the constitution? Peter Robinson is the interviewer:

PR: How recently did Congress work?

Sasse: Well, let’s define what work meant. In the mid-1960s there was a radical revision of what the federal government’s role was in the 1964, 1963…

PR: Great Society.

Sasse: Right. So we should celebrate the Civil Rights Movement at the same time. But in the Great Society program, there was a radical expansion of the federal government’s role in life. And it begged all sorts of questions about why we have limited government. We have limited government for a whole bunch of reasons that I hope we talk about some today. But after the 1960s, promises that were obviously bogus when they were made were never really revisited. The Medicare expenditure, the Congressional Budget Office equivalent from the mid-1960s, that projected what will Medicare cost from 1965 to 1975, was off by 1100%. What Medicare as of 1975 was costing—the original projections had been that it would be 9% of what it was actually costing. Where are the adults that have tackled that problem? It was a mess, obviously. But the mid-1970s—all sorts of things have been on autopilot since those mid-60s, and big problems are not being addressed.

So the deviation from the Constitution has been going on for a while, and seriously awry for half a century. Some of it has to do with a loss of understanding about what philosophy is behind out Constitution:

Sasse: If you sort of tried to think about, let’s teach the American Revolution to the present day, and create the sort of arc of what it means to have this really breathtaking experiment in self-governance, this idea—this big, anthropological claim that humans are created with dignity, and government doesn’t give us rights, but government is a shared project to secure those rights—that idea has really been under assault in certain ways since the middle of industrialization. It’s true that there was lots of complexity as the economy shifted from mostly agrarian to mostly urban and industrial.

I didn’t know, until this interview, much of Senator Sasse’s background. He graduated from Harvard, got a doctorate from Yale, worked at the Boston Consulting Group. He held a job at the Department of Justice, a job that was once held by Antonin Scalia. Then he taught at the University of Texas, and if I understood right, he was President of UT. 

Then he moved back home to Nebraska, a small-town suburb of Omaha, to raise his children. And run for the Senate. He’s still young. Very energetic. Very down-to-earth for someone that academically qualified. He has the valuable skill of being able to talk about important, deep, philosophical ideas in simple words that any thinking person ought to be able to understand.

I am beginning to think that simplifying skill, because it is too rare, is extremely valuable. Especially in our day, when clarity, and getting the message through in a few short words, is needed to match how information gets exchanged. 

He even uses Twitter to good effect. He was asked about a recent Twitter exchange with Donald Trump. Among other things, he connected Trump’s infidelity—and in fact his bragging about having sex with married women (who brags about that?)—with a failure to understand and keep his oaths.

There was also a challenge to Trump’s penchant for executive unilateralism. Here’s the Tweet, followed by Sasse’s explanation:

  

@realDonaldTrump  The President’s job is NOT 2 “run America.” This is precisely Obama’s error….   

Sasse: Yeah. We believe that all three branches are separate but equal, but the Article 2 branch, the executive—I mean, in some of the founders’ deliberations, president wasn’t even the term they used some of the time; they talked about the administrator. And president really just means presiding officer of the executive branch, and it’s supposed to be somebody who takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws that were passed by the Legislature.

PR: Donald Trump displays no evidence that he has any constitutional understanding?

Sasse: It is really hard to find him ever saying anything about limits and restraint, and executive restraint, which…  I’m not going to have accused him of any of these particular, you know, ugly analogues, but, man, of the things that he says about winning and power.…

The Senator tries to understand those who approve of Trump. Some of that comes because of the feckless president we’ve had on foreign policy—unfortunately combined with unilateral executive overreach. Sasse is kinder than I would be about Trump, but he says,

He’d be great to have a beer with, and he’s funny, and he’s got charisma. I get all that. Where does he ever articulate a constitutional sense of the limits of the executive branch?

Looking at solutions, he offers this:

Sasse: So, first of all, let’s just recognize that America is much much much bigger than the federal government. And so let’s not start by identifying the two. Washington that thinks it can solve every problem caused far more unintended consequences errors, mistakes, new troubles, than anything they’ll possibly solve. So first of all, we should have an American vision that can transcend what we think the federal government can get done.

Then, inside the federal government, we should want all three of these branches to all be vigorous defenders of a constitutional system of limited government.

But then, underneath that, policy initiative should ideally be coming—in the domestic policy space—should ideally be coming from the Article 1 legislative branch….

We should yearn for more deliberation that can bring us together as a people. And the supermajoritarian requirements of the Senate, to go back to your opening questions about the differences between House and Senate, we should desire solutions that can bring along a lot of the America people. That happens in dialogue. That happens among people over dinner tables. And a hundred people who should get to know each other in the Senate trying to not always put the worst construction on your policy opponent’s position. You should actually try to understand it before you reject it.

This is from his consultant background. He spent his first year going around to meet and talk with each of the other senators, to get a full view of the system, including its culture and problems.

He’s asked to explain this quote from his maiden speech in the Senate, this past November:

“While I am in favor of more civility, my actual call here is for more substance. This is not a call for less fighting [in the Senate]—but for more meaningful fighting.”

It’s the meaning—the understanding of the Constitution, and the very idea of limited government—that needs to be explained, taught, and defended. As Reagan said, in his farewell speech, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Restoration and preservation are about culture. At the 33-minute mark, Sasse makes this brilliantly simple point:

Sasse: It’ll sound too romantic, but I believe we’re incredibly blessed. We live in the most exceptional nation in the history of the world, and it’s based on an anthropological claim about the dignity of people. I really believe that people are created with dignity—the world is fallen; we need government to restrain certain kinds of evil, and to create and maintain a framework for ordered liberty.

But life is lived in neighborhoods, in our cities, and in small towns across cattle country. The center of the world is the Rotary Club in my town; the center of the world is your listeners, churches, and synagogues, in the small businesses that they’re founding, and the little league, and the PTA, and the fire department.

That is where life is lived, that textured, meaningful life.… and I want your and my grandkids to grow up in a nation that believes in limited government, because we believe in the nearly limitless potential of humans who have dignity.

He answers questions about Justice Scalia—because the interview was recorded the week after his death—and that he wasn’t “conservative”; he was about the written law.

Sasse: I read my Constitution; I see no party affiliation in the Supreme Court justices. And even progressive and conservative is wrong, because there are progressives and there are people who believe in doing their job, which is to hide anything about their own policy preferences.

The job of a Supreme Court justice is not to be a super-legislator. That would be an anti-democratic attack on a constitutional system where we the people are supposed to be in charge and be able to fire the legislators. And so if the court is going to be super legislators, they surely shouldn’t have lifetime appointments.

And so to call Scalia conservative, as the papers have done all this week, misses the fundamental point. His job was to protect the rights of the people against bad laws that overreached. He was an originalist. He was a constitutionalist.

One last section I want to share. Peter Robinson asks the senator about a quote from conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt:

“We may be seeing the eclipse of the Republic. I’m not an alarmist. It’s not the end of the world. But even as the ancient republic of Rome became a more imperial structure, our government has grown so large, its responsibilities so immense, under the burdens of the modern world, that it will be impossible to take it back.”

And then Sasse is asked, is it too late?

Sasse: We need a constitutional recovery. And we need to bring along the republic, which is three hundred and twenty million souls.

This is where he offers the Reagan quote, and reminds us that Reagan also used to say this while running for governor of California, teaching these truths to labor movement people along the railroad tracks. Then Sasse says:

It only goes on if you teach it. And I do think there is an obsession of the 535 [US legislators] to think their job is small-ball legislating. A huge part of our job is to be advocates and defenders and teachers and lovers of the constitutional system.

And we have to teach that system to the next generation. So I’m with Hugh, in that you can’t talk about the decline of self-governance as the only thing that possibly matters in a world where the reason we believe in the American system of government is because of all these other aspects of what make full lives well lived, what define human flourishing outside of government.

But I think we would be really naïve to not be having the kind of conversation that he wants to have about the risk of slipping from Republic to Empire.

PR: It’s not too late?

Sasse: It’s not too late. But, we need to recognize this president has repeatedly talked like an emperor. We have a president who says it isn’t that big of a deal “if the Congress doesn’t pass the laws I want them to pass—I have a pen, and I have a phone, and I can just make it up as I go along.”

That sounds like something that you might have heard at a certain moment in Rome’s decline. And we now have a front-runner in the Republican Party who says maybe president Obama has paved a new way, as far as its executive unilateralism goes.

If you talked constantly about power and strength—and, let’s be clear, our foreign policy needs to be defined more by power and strength, and when you make political promises you should keep your word with power and strength—and yet George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison didn’t believe when they became president that their aspirations should look like King George III.

They believed they had a servant leadership responsibility underneath the Constitution…. If you go back and read Washington’s farewell address at the end of his eight years as president, he worried that the constitutional system was in peril.

So we’re in uniquely troubled times, but not totally unique, because, in our system, you always need to teach it to the next generation. And we’ve not been doing that.

On Sunday I listened to a rebroadcast address on BYUTV, Lawrence C. Walters spoke on “Citizenship,” April 1, 2014, telling us how to incorporate being good citizens into the various aspects of our lives. Also worth hearing in full. But we're over our limit for today, so, he says there are five things we can make part of our lives as citizens, rather than as consumers or subjects.

Five Essential Attributes of Active Citizens:

1. Accept responsibility.

2. Do their homework.

3. Engage with others.

4. Take action.

5. Learn from their experiences.

I experienced these things in action the past week, culminating (so far) in Saturday’s district convention—even more than in past years, because I was on the resolutions (platform) committee. So, after all the work last week, we took additional resolutions and testimony, finalized our recommendations, and presented them before the body (about 375 attendees). I got to see first-hand how someone’s idea at a grassroots precinct meeting makes its way into the platform, which will be considered by legislators this coming session.

What we do really matters. I have hope that there are enough of us who love our Constitution to do this.

The Declaration

In honor of tomorrow’s celebration, I am re-reading The Declaration of Independence, which is the point of this holiday.

Image from Wikipedia

I received an invitation from Hillsdale College, open to anyone, to join them in their pledge to read the Declaration of Independence on July 4^th. You can of course donate to their cause, of educating people on the founding principles, but no donation is necessary. Just read. Usually The Declaration is printed in the Houston Chronicle, on the editorial page, so that’s a source if you don’t have another.

I’m providing the transcript below (including the list of the signers, who risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor), from the National Archives.

I happened to come across an article this week, quoting the president in a speech to a group of summer interns [see comment below], suggesting they not celebrate the Independence Day. His speech included this:

Peer back into history and ask yourselves—Was a revolution truly necessary? Great Britain may not have had it completely right, but they had many things right.

Presumably he has read The Declaration, with its list of abuses, and finds it too trivial to have led to a separation from the oppressor. Not sure what the limit of his tolerance for oppression (or oppressing) would be. But when I read The Declaration, I believe the founders were justified in declaring a separation. The Revolutionary War was only necessary because the oppressive regime refused to acquiesce without a fight, and freedom from oppression is a just cause to fight for.

It was necessary for our founders to set up a new nation, with new laws, to guarantee our freedoms. We already have such a nation, with such laws. But the list of usurpation of powers is arguably more egregious now that the list in The Declaration. I wrote recently that what we need is not transformation, nor reformation, but restoration.

This is a good time of year to remember what is worth restoring and preserving. Read The Declaration. And then read The Constitution. And marvel with me at the inspiration given to our founders. 

The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription

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IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

·         He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

·         He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

·         He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

·         He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

·         He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

·         He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

·         He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

·         He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

·         He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

·         He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

·         He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

·         He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

·         He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

o   For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

o   For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

o   For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

o   For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

o   For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

o   For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

o   For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

o   For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

o   For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

·         He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

·         He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

·         He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

·         He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

·         He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

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The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

Column 1

Georgia:

    Button Gwinnett

    Lyman Hall

    George Walton 

Column 2

North Carolina:

    William Hooper

    Joseph Hewes

    John Penn

South Carolina:

    Edward Rutledge

    Thomas Heyward, Jr.

    Thomas Lynch, Jr.

    Arthur Middleton 

Column 3

Massachusetts:

 John Hancock

Maryland:

 Samuel Chase

 William Paca

 Thomas Stone

 Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia:

 George Wythe

 Richard Henry Lee

 Thomas Jefferson

 Benjamin Harrison

 Thomas Nelson, Jr.

 Francis Lightfoot Lee

 Carter Braxton 

Column 4

Pennsylvania:

   Robert Morris

    Benjamin Rush

    Benjamin Franklin

    John Morton

    George Clymer

    James Smith

    George Taylor

    James Wilson

    George Ross

Delaware:

    Caesar Rodney

    George Read

    Thomas McKean 

Column 5

New York:

    William Floyd

    Philip Livingston

    Francis Lewis

    Lewis Morris

New Jersey:

    Richard Stockton

    John Witherspoon

    Francis Hopkinson

    John Hart

    Abraham Clark 

Column 6

New Hampshire:

    Josiah Bartlett

    William Whipple

Massachusetts:

    Samuel Adams

    John Adams

    Robert Treat Paine

    Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island:

    Stephen Hopkins

    William Ellery

Connecticut:

    Roger Sherman

    Samuel Huntington

    William Williams

    Oliver Wolcott

New Hampshire:

    Matthew Thornton

Three Kinds of Change

I thought we’d look at three words in relation to changing or reshaping our world, in hopes of better understanding and better choices. The words are transformation, reformation, and restoration. We might also use other metaphorical images, but I think we might get a good sense of the definitions by looking at butter.

Transformation

Trans-  refers to movement, across an expanse, or to a new destination. Form refers to the shape, physical look, or makeup of something. To transform something is to change the form into something altogether different from what it was.

Take butter. Add some things to the butter, like sugar, eggs, and flour, cocoa, plus heat, and you might transform an ordinary stick of butter (and other added stuff) into chocolate cake. Not a bad transformation.

Let’s suppose that when someone like our current president promises to transform America, he and those who support him in that effort picture chocolate cake as the outcome. Sweet, spongy, edible with a fork, great with ice cream. Utopia. But what you have afterward isn’t butter (America); it’s something else. If you need/want butter, chocolate cake isn’t interchangeable and may not be an improvement.

And depending on what you add to the butter, it may or may not turn out to be chocolate cake. What if, instead of cocoa, you substitute dirt? And instead of sugar, you use sand? Squish in some worms instead of eggs. You can do things to get a similar consistency and color to cake batter, but once you add the stressful heat, you might discover that this isn’t chocolate cake; it’s a mud pie. If you’re five years old, a mud pie might be just the thing you wanted to make—but probably only as a pretend copy of something your mom had really cooked for you. And I’m guessing even at five you know better than to eat it.

You started with the same pure dairy butter; how did it turn out so terrible? Bad recipe. Really bad recipe. Substituting molasses for sugar might work, and you can use applesauce in place of eggs, and with the right amounts, you can still get something close enough to chocolate cake to be worth eating. But everybody ought to know that you don’t use dirt, sand, and worms. The additions are better called adulterations.

chocolate cake utopia vs. mud pie reality
cake photo from here; mud pie photo from here

Everybody ought to know that you don’t take away people’s God-given rights, substitute the state for family, and tax away the incentive to work if you want to have a free and prosperous civilized society. You can't transform America into something better by adulterating the Constitution. 

Reformation

Re- is a prefix meaning over again. Sometimes the word means to take the original substance and recreate the original form, but it can also mean to take the original substance and form it again, differently this time.

honey nut, citrus, and raspberry butters, from here

For example, butter could start out as the typical cube and be softened and reformed into smaller patties, maybe even fancy molds. It could have a little oil added and be whipped, to make it more spreadable. Or it could have ingredients added but still maintain its basic butter-ness; it could become honey butter, or maybe cinnamon butter. It’s still spreadable on bread, but it’s different. Maybe an improvement, maybe not, depending on your taste and point of view.

The most famous reformation is The Reformation of the Catholic Church, which resulted not in a return to origins, but into a wider variety of versions of Christianity. This is not a statement of good or bad, just a description of a reformation.

Reforming the Constitution is done by amendment. That has happened twenty-seven times (including the 18^th, which was Prohibition of alcohol, and the 21^st, which repealed Prohibition, so they cross each other out). Many of the amendments are clearly improvements—the first ten are the Bill of Rights, which we consider an essential part of the original Constitution. Others are probably additions we would have been better without, like the imposition of the income tax, the 16^th, and the deterioration of state sovereignty by direct election of senators, the 17^th (both in 1913—one hundred years ago was a troubling time).

More often, when we talk about reform in the political world, it’s in relation to a specific issue or system: tax reform, immigration reform, health care reform. The idea isn’t to change the entire “butter-ness” of the Constitution, but to change an underlying aspect (like spreadability). Sometimes it’s because this underlying issue hasn’t been well formed to begin with, so reform is really creating a new form—within the overall form. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes not so much. A guide might be whether the reform moves toward or away from the original thing itself—the Constitution as guarantor and protector of our rights, and a limit to the powers of central government.  

Restoration

To restore can have a couple of meanings as well. It can be to take the original physical essence of something, and get it back to its original condition. This is the kind of thing done with old masterpieces; the dirt and discoloration are removed carefully to reveal the original painting. Old buildings or cars can be restored as well, but sometimes only some of the original physical essence is available. Sometimes replacements are built using new materials, or parts from similar structures, to fill in for the missing original parts.

Restore can also mean to make whole as it was originally. If an embezzler has stolen $100,000 from a company and is caught, he may be forced to restore the stolen money. It won’t be the same $100,000 that he stole, the very same bills; it will be the same amount, the same value of money.

If you were to mess up a pound of butter, leaving it out to melt, then spilling coffee grounds in it, or maybe accidentally spilling cleaning products on it—you probably can’t “restore” the very same butter to its original form, but you can restore—rebuild a store of—pure, sweet creamery butter. Unlike a painting, the original molecules aren’t what matter; it is the butter itself, to be valued and used as butter, to be spread over the metaphorical bread of American life.

So when we talk about restoring the Constitution, it is not about the document itself, which has historical value and is thing of beauty worth preserving. We have what it says written many places, including in our hearts and minds as free Americans. What we need restored is the purity of the original meaning, so it can be used as intended—to protect our rights and limit the powers of central government. We don’t need to “restore” it to its pre-amendment form; those amendments are part of the thing itself now. We just need the pure freedom ideas to perform as designed.

We don’t want those ideas to be transformed into something altogether different, unusable for our purposes. We don’t even want those ideas to be reformed into something close but not as purely ideologically functional. Wherever there has been deterioration or unconstitutional adulteration, we want restoration of the Constitution we love.