Texas governor and Republican presidential primary candidate Rick Perry has big plans to overhaul the Constitution, which he described in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. His proposals, summarized in a Yahoo! blog, The Ticket, by Chris Moody, range from limiting tenure of federal judges to abolishing the income tax to defining marriage as being between a man and a woman to prohibiting abortion nationwide. They involve amending the constitution, adding new amendments, and rolling back existing amendments.
Here’s the good news: you can propose changes to the Constitution till you’re blue in the face, but the founders were smart enough to make it an arduous process, probably recognizing that the occasional peanut brain with looney ideas might get elected to high office. In our history, only one really stupid amendment was ever added to the Constitution — prohibition — and I’m sure every member of Congress, the president, and every state legislator of three-fourths of the states who voted to approve it was drunk at the time they voted.
Assuming he became the Republican nominee, and assuming he won the presidency, Perry would have to hope that enough peanut brains were elected to Congress to get his changes off the ground — possible, but a statistical unlikelihood. But his ideas should sound an alarm about this presidential wannabe.
Lifetime tenure is one of the underpinnings of the concept of checks and balances, and while we may not like the idea of an Antonin Scalia serving forever, we at least get a Ruth Bader Ginsberg for that long. The power to nominate judges rests with the president, which should give pause to voters when they cast a ballot every four years. This is how men far, far wiser than Rick Perry meant it to be so long ago.
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