Constitutional ignorance

In his Nov. 18 column, “‘Constitutionalists’ are in name only,” Shawn Vestal rightly pointed out the ignorance and/or hypocrisy of some folks’ misconceptions and misapplications of the Constitution. Necessity to publish what should be obvious implies woeful public ignorance of the Constitution, and the history and philosophy surrounding it.

Essential to understanding the Constitution is understanding the peculiar principles that the American Revolution and United States’ government were founded upon. Those principles are embodied in the philosophy of natural law, which inform the doctrine of limited government power. Our federal government was limited by separation of powers in the Constitution’s initial construct, then by rights of natural law expressed in several of the Constitution’s first ten amendments.

Knowledge and understanding of these principles has dwindled with each generation since the nation’s founding until progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt (Republican), and Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) ignored, obscured and denounced several of them in order to erode limits placed on federal government that impeded legislative and executive implementation of progressivism.

College-educated, big-government advocates, as Roosevelt and Wilson were, are just as ignorant and/or manipulative of the Constitution as “Western antigovernment” folks are. Such is the fodder for a constitutional crisis.

Duncan Bean

Spokane Valley