How
To Avoid Lying
Al
Gore’s relentless fibs have accumulated to the point where they
have seriously damaged his candidacy. He seems unable to stop himself
from silly little prevarications that are easily exploded and immediately
become fodder for comedians. Not good; not at this stage of the
campaign.
Gore’s
petty mendacity is puzzling. Liberals shouldn’t have to lie. They
have developed a technique of deception that makes outright falsehood
superfluous.
Centuries
ago the Catholic order of Jesuits gained a reputation among Protestants
for deceiving without falsehood, by using common words in equivocal
senses. Hence the disparaging term jesuitical, a synonym for equivocal
quibbling. Shakespeare alludes to "equivocation" several
times; it was a hot topic in Elizabethan England, where Jesuits,
operating underground, were regarded as politically subversive.
Macbeth denounces the witches who have misled him as "juggling
fiends ... / Who keep the word of promise to our ear / And break
it to our hope." Their words have proved literally true, but
turn out to mean the opposite of what he assumed they meant.
In
our own time liberals — politicians and jurists alike — have learned
to do likewise. The most brazen examples in recent memory are Bill
Clinton’s quibbles about the meanings of such seemingly clear words
as alone, sex, and even is. He didn’t lie under oath; he merely
used these words with equivocal senses nobody suspected.
These
were miniature instances of the technique liberals have applied
to law, particularly constitutional law. Since the New Deal, liberals
have invested the old words of the U.S. Constitution with new and
previously unsuspected meanings, all of which, by a strange coincidence,
tend to enlarge the power of the federal government and its courts.
The
liberal equivocators have taught us that the Constitution forbids
racial segregation, public school prayer, most obscenity laws, laws
restricting abortion, and so forth. At the same time, they have
taught us that the Constitution authorizes the federal government
to create a national welfare state, to control virtually all forms
of commerce, and to legislate in nearly every area it chooses.
In
each case it was clear that the federal courts, especially the Supreme
Court, were enacting their own policy preferences, not bowing to
the imperatives of the law or the Constitution. The consistent result
has been to centralize power. Seldom have the courts ruled that
the federal government had overstepped its authority; and those
clauses limiting federal power, such as the Tenth Amendment, have
become dead letters.
They
have done this by giving new, equivocal meanings to such phrases
as establishment of religion, the freedom of speech or of the press,
unreasonable search and seizure, equal protection of the laws, and
general welfare. They have also created new "rights,"
nowhere mentioned in the text of the Constitution, by positing "penumbras,
formed by emanations" from other rights, whatever that may
mean — and of course it may mean anything the courts want it to
mean. Meanwhile, the courts have ignored inconvenient passages.
Now
whatever you think of the liberal agenda on its merits, until very
recently nobody thought the Constitution meant what liberals now
say it means. And in their way, the liberals admit this. But they
say the Constitution is a "living document," whose meanings
may change over time. This is what Gore meant when he said recently
that the Constitution "grows" with history.
So
nobody actually lies about what the Constitution means — at least
it’s awkward to prove, at any given moment, that the liberal interpretation
is false. It has superficial plausibility to anyone who doesn’t
have a thorough knowledge of the Constitution. And liberals, like
Clinton, don’t think of themselves as liars when they use words
in equivocal senses.
But
what it comes to is that the American public — alias "We the
people" —has allowed the federal government to decide what
its own powers are. We allow the federal government to change the
meaning of the document in which we supposedly set limits on that
government. By claiming the authority to interpret the Constitution
unilaterally, it has abolished those limits.
This
defeats — in fact, inverts — the whole purpose of having a written
constitution, which, as Alexander Hamilton said, was meant to be
"unalterable by the government." The cunning of it is
that nobody has to lie.
October
27, 2000
Joe
Sobran, who Pat Buchanan says is "perhaps the finest columnist
of our generation" and Lew Rockwell calls "a national
treasure," has his columns nationally syndicated by
the Griffin Internet Syndicate. He also writes "Washington
Watch" for The Wanderer, a weekly Catholic newspaper.
Mr. Sobran is the author of the book Single Issues: Essays
on the Crucial Social Questions. His book on the Shakespeare
authorship question is Alias
Shakespeare. He is currently writing a book on the abandonment
of the Constitution.
Mr. Sobran, a lecturer and speaker who appears frequently on
major talk shows and at conferences throughout the world, also
edits SOBRAN'S, a monthly newsletter of his essays and columns.
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