Friday, January 7, 2011

WikiTution



House Republicans made a show of reading the Constitution on the floor of that chamber yesterday. Well, the parts they wanted to read, anyway. From Slate.com:

There is only one official, canonical version of the Constitution—and most of the folks who read (Wednesday), Republicans and Democrats alike, have a copy in their offices, if not their breast pockets. The suggestion that there is some other, agreed-upon, document, whose "portions [were] superseded by amendment" is simply untrue. As CBS News Capitol Hill Correspondent Bob Fuss pointed out, the "redacted" version as read this morning had no coherent logic. They skipped over the three-fifths compromise but included the constitutional clause referring to the preservation of voting rights only for males over the age of 21—a provision superseded by the 26th Amendment. They skipped the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) then read the 21st (repealing Prohibition). Andrea Stone at AOL News picked up on the fact that they "read 14 words from Article I, Section 9 about taxation. Under a strict reading of the ground rules, though, it likely should have been excised because of the later passage of the 16th Amendment that legalized the federal income tax."

In other words, in addition to taking it upon themselves to whitewash past constitutional errors, House Republicans (Wednesday) compounded the sin by inventing a choose-your-own-ending document they tried to pass off as official.

Get me rewrite!

allvoices

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