Source:The Conversation– the U.S. Constitution.

“On January 22, the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, I attended a summit called We the Corporations v. We the People, sponsored by the Coffee Party, a network of liberals, leftists and progressives. The summit was designed to rally support for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United by declaring that corporations are not entitled to the constitutional protections of natural persons. But the attendance was sparse, the energy subdued, and the keynote speaker, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, urged the activists in attendance to scale back their ambitions and forego the push for a constitutional amendment, which he warned would not solve the problem of corporate corruption.”

From The New Republic

One of the reasons why I’m a Liberal is because I love the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with all the freedom and rights it guarantees. America might be the only republic in the world thats in a form of a liberal democracy, as much as Conservatives might hate that, it’s true, America is a liberal democracy. They argue that America is not a liberal democracy but a republic instead, because we are not purely governed by majoritarian rule. But the fact is we are a liberal, democratic republic. Not in a political party sense, but a governmental sense, because of all of individual rights that we have like property rights, but free speech, freedom of religion, right to privacy, self-defense, the limitations that we put on government as checks on it, but also to protect our individual rights.

Since I love the Constitution, even though its not perfect and think it’s a great document the way it is, I’m not for changing it. There’s not one single proposed constitutional Amendment that I’m in favor of, or one that I would come up with on my own. I’m a constitutionalist because I support the constitution and believe its a great document as it stands.

One of the reasons why the Founding Fathers (our Founding Liberals) made it so difficult to amend the Constitution and why there have only been twenty some odd amendments to it (sorry, I’m not a lawyer or try to play one on TV or on the computer) is because even though they didn’t write a perfect document from the start. With women not being able to vote, slavery not being abolished. Africans not being treated as a whole person in America, and they thought they had a hell of a document and they didn’t want it messed with.

So when I hear people who call themselves Constitutionalists or Constitutional Conservatives and yet they keep proposing new amendments to the Constitution or try to overturn current parts of the Constitution, which is what we’re seeing from the Tea Party in the House of Representatives today, I want to ask them what parts of the Constitution do you want to conserve.

And if you really are a Constitutionalist, how come there’s so much of the Constitution that you don’t like and want to throw out.

Being a Conservative is about conserving, not blowing up the establishment and replacing it with some new system and government. Which is what a lot of these so-called Tea Party Conservatives seem to want to do.