Ken Shepherd is managing editor of Newsbusters.
Columbia University professor Simon Schama made his Newsweek debut yesterday with a blog post that indirectly attacked Tea Party activists and conservatives for what Schama considers a historically illiterate ancestor worship of the Founding Fathers.
"The Constitution’s framers were flawed like today’s politicians, so it’s high time we stop embalming them in infallibility," snarked the subheading for Schama's June 26 post.
"True history is the enemy of reverence. [emphasis mine] We do the authors of American independence no favors by embalming them in infallibility, by treating the Constitution like a quasi-biblical revelation instead of the product of contention and cobbled-together compromise that it actually was," Schama argued, and, in the process gravely distorted the arguments of constitutional originalists.
Sorry, Dr. Schama, to originalists, it's not that the Framers of the Constitution were secular demigods who are entirely unassailable, it's that the Constitution provides for a legitimate process to amend the document and that the judicial branch is not it. Courts are bound to honor the Constitution and the will of the people by strictly adhering to its limits....
