News flash for Conservatives who think it takes gnostic powers to read the Constitution: the Constitution contains no Da Vinci Code. Let's see what Justice Joseph Story, who served simultaneously as Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and is the greatest commentator on the Constitution has to say on the matter at hand:
In the first place, then, every word employed in the constitution is to be expounded in its plain, obvious, and common sense, unless the context furnishes some ground to control, qualify, or enlarge it. Constitutions are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the exercises of philosophical acuteness, or judicial research. They are instruments of a practical nature, founded on the common business of human life, adapted to common wants, designed for common use, and fitted for common understandings. The people make them; the people adopt them; the people must be supposed to read them, with the help of common sense; and cannot be presumed to admit in them any recondite meaning, or any extraordinary gloss. --Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, I. V. 451. XV
As Bill Buckley almost said, I'd sooner have my Constitution interpreted by the first 100 names in the phone book than a bunch of pundits who think constitutional interpretation requires anything more than citizenship and common sense.
(Ahem. This is not about Miers, it's about the Constitution.)
[Tags: Harriet MiersGeorge Will
