Time Reporter Betrays Constitutional Ignorance in Bemoaning GOP 'Cult of the Constitution'

photo: Swampland

Newsbusters  "The latest lefty to demonstrate his constitutional ignorance, Time Magazine's Washington correspondent Alex Altman, decried the "Cult of the Constitution" in a headline yesterday.
Altman began by lamenting the decision to not read parts of the Constitution that, well, are no longer parts of the Constitution. "The bipartisan recitation omitted several critical passages," he noted, "including the three-fifths compromise."
"But the three-fifths provision and all the passages omitted from the reading are, unlike everything that remains, irrelevant to the 112th Congress. The existing Constitution governs the legislature, and provisions scrubbed from the document, obviously, do not.
"And that seems to be where the fundamental misunderstanding occurs. Altman does not seem to realize that the Constitution is not a list of suggestions. It's not a nice-sounding essay that lists our founding principles. It's not just "a remarkable document…worthy of veneration [and] study," as he dubs it. It is quite simply the law, and it dictates the limits of Congress's power."

MSNBC's Jansing Dismisses as Complicated New House Requirement to Justify Legislation's Constitutionality " Neither Jansing nor Beschloss noted the conservative counter-argument would be that children born stateside to illegal immigrants are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, as the 14th Amendment requires and that section five of the 14th Amendment stipulates that "Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions" of the 14th Amendment, including, logically, defining those persons who fall outside the jurisdiction of the United States ... .