Founders Provided For Peaceful Change

When American revolutionaries signed the Declaration of Independence 219 years ago, they could only dream of a government that peacefully changes direction in response to public discontent. They had to fight and die to end the governmental annoyances of their day.

For more than two centuries, our country has survived because, after the revolutionaries had laid down their guns, they picked up their pens, pooled their political ingenuity and designed a system of government with a miraculous capacity to change its own course.

The White House repeatedly has changed direction. This year, Congress has done the same.

And now, the Supreme Court, usually the dullest branch of government, has shown the capacity to kick up its heels.

Court rulings of the last few weeks have left lawyers agog. Familiar civil rights doctrines have been turned on their heads.

This comes as a shock in the legal profession, which long has pretended that constitutional law lies above the realm of politics. The theory goes that court rulings aren’t the products of individual judgment and biases, but that they’re the product of the grand analytical traditions and procedures of the law.

However, judges don’t merely interpret laws - they make law, and they do so according to their own political preferences.

Recent changes on the Supreme Court result from the concerted efforts of two presidents - Ronald Reagan and George Bush - to change that court’s rulings by changing the ideological leaning of its membership.

That’s a valid part of our system. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Supreme Court appointments shoved the court to the left a half-century earlier. Reagan, responding to public anger with the rulings of liberal justices, shoved the court back toward the right. Both were responding to broad political currents of their times.

Now, the results: In recent weeks, the court has charted a new color-blind course in questions of race and equal opportunity; affirmative action, in hiring and congressional districting, has died. The court also has tilted in a new direction in the balance between religious freedom and the separation of church from state.

Whatever the Founding Fathers might have thought about these new directions, they would have to take pride in the change in course.

A government that changes once can change again. If it responds to public frustration, it survives - and keeps the guns where they belong: on the shelf.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board