Opening a Can of Worms

I am tired of it.  Sick and tired, in fact, of politicians, some of whom are actually lawyers, answering questions about their policies (or lack thereof) or attacking their opponents using The Constitution of the United States of America, as a show stopper or a nuclear weapon.  The other night Ted Cruz stood on a public stage and said that, as president he would govern by the Constitution, and he clarified with the The Bill of Rights, he just said it over and over again, not elaborating, illumining what exactly he means by that.  It's driving me freaking nuts.
It really shouldn't surprise me, he seems to use the Bible the same way, which irks me even more, but then again, I'm kind of a Bible person, so it's sort of not fair for me to pick on people who haven't been trained properly in exegesis.  What I'm going to do then, is enter the arena of the Constitution of the United States of America, as a layperson, trying to simply deal with the words on the page.  I can't claim to be a lawyer, and I'm not going to try and suss out the "original intentions" of the framers or anything Scalia-esque, I'm just going to walk through the first ten amendments to the document called the Bill of Rights.  Not all in one blog post, I'm jumping into a series here, mostly to keep myself sane, because as I re-read the Constitution it strikes me as an extremely sane and well reasoned document.
Before we get to the Bill of Rights, though, let us give some thought to the preamble and the Seven Articles of the Constitution itself.  The preamble, which was probably one of those things you had to memorize in seventh grade social studies class, is actually a useful statement of purpose for what follows:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

That's aiming high.  That is kind of beautiful and it makes the current miry bog of our political life all the more shameful.  The purpose of this document, outlined in the preamble is not to become a sort of hallowed and sacred scripture to be used as a bludgeon, but rather to provide a framework and a set of tools in which "a more perfect Union" might be created, and worked out.  "More perfect" is a rather key phrase, in a process where everything is being hammered out and argued by some very headstrong and educated men.  "More" in that context would seem to imply that it is always the goal to be a work in progress, which it has been, and will remain, if we're true to the very nature of the work.
I see a rather disturbing correlation between those who want to treat the constitution as etched in stone, and those who would, via the most literal hermeneutic, to wring all the life out of the Word of God.  They are too often the same people.
No one of these lofty goals can be established "once and for all." Each one is an ongoing struggle in which we all must engage.  Let's take them a point at a time.
Establish Justice: Justice to Thomas Jefferson included owning slaves.  Justice to Abraham Lincoln had no consideration of allowing women to vote.  Justice to Teddy Roosevelt saw segregation as an absolutely normal and healthy way of forming this more perfect union.  We grow more just, by recognizing injustice and challenging it, and because of human nature, there is always more injustice to be found.  We have to grow, we have to always engage that process, even and especially when it is scary.
Insure Domestic Tranquility: For a long time, this meant keeping the white landowning men happy.  And until that really ran smack into the preceding tenant, it was, more or less a matter of putting on some powdered wigs and arguing it out in clever and verbose speeches.  Until the Civil War happened, and the house was anything but tranquil.  Then it was the challenge of reconstruction, immigration, westward expansion, industrialization, WWI, prohibition, the Great Depression, WWII, Korea, Civil Rights (MLK and JFK both assassinated), Vietnam, The Cold War, the Middle East, Terrorism, 9-11 and so on and so forth. And now this election, tranquility appears to be something we have utterly failed for a rather long time, but it's still worth a try.
Provide for the Common Defense: Now this is where I'm going to disagree with some of my more hawkish friends, but I honestly don't believe that the common defense of the United States should involve fighting wars on the other side of the world.  That would appear to me to be a more colonial sort of activity.  But I will admit that here the framers of the constitution could honestly never have envisioned the world as it is now.  While this was being written, the sun had not yet set on the British Empire, and the colonists were frankly thanking their lucky stars that King George III had lost his stomach and his money bags for fighting a war on the other side of the ocean.  What this meant then, and what this meant now, are admittedly radically different.  We're going to run into this again when we get to the second amendment, so I'll leave it for now.
Promote the General Welfare: Again, what that means and who it applies to, have changed radically over the past two hundred years.  In the beginning the "general welfare," did not include blacks, natives, hispanics, or really even women other than as a romantic accessory to white males which ought to be safeguarded and protected as particularly valuable property.  The landowners had a certain noblesse oblige to take care of all of those lesser creatures, but that was more a matter of private character than legal requirement.  Now the table of general welfare has had to grow dynamically and must always keep growing, any stagnation or regression leads to suffering and unrest.
Secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity: "Blessings of Liberty," is pretty much what we're going to be looking at in the Bill of Rights.  But it's going to become pretty obvious that the need for continual evolution and growth is necessary here and everywhere.  The word "posterity" means that the intent was always to look down the road past the immediate and on to the life of their descendants.  The ideas put down in this document are not simply a flash in the pan they are a singular investment in the world of the future, and that precludes anything like a static interpretation of what follows.
Next up: The Articles.