How Tea Partiers Get the Constitution Wrong

Newsweek had a great article, How Tea Partiers Get the Constitution Wrong. It concludes:

"The Tea Partiers are right to revere the Constitution. It’s a remarkable, even miraculous document. But there are many Constitutions: the Constitution of 1789, of 1864, of 1925, of 1936, of 1970, of today. Where O’Donnell & Co. go wrong is in insisting that their idealized document is the country’s one true Constitution, and that dissenters are somehow un-American. By putting the Constitution front and center, the Tea Party has reinvigorated a long-simmering argument over who we are and who we want to be. That’s great. But to truly honor the Founders’ spirit, they have to make room for actual debate. As usual, Thomas Jefferson put it best. In a letter to a friend in 1816, he mocked ‘men [who] look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched’; ‘who ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.’ ‘Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs,’ he concluded. ‘Each generation is as independent as the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before.’ Amen."