On January 3, 2013, the National Public Radio (NPR) ran a recent New York Times  Op-Ed piece segment on Talk of the Nation, entitled: We The People Should Throw Out The Constitution. It can be heard on line at: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/03/168549290/the-constitution-just-a-poetic-piece-of-parchment.

An NPR interview staff member, Neal Conan, interviewed law professor Mike Seidman, who argues that it’s time to “reexamine the role of the Constitution.” In a New York Times recent Op/Ed piece, Prof. Seidman, who has been teaching Constitutional law at Georgetown University close to 40 years, believes it’s time to get rid of the Constitution. He believes it has essentially outlived its usefulness in today’s political world.

Frankly, that’s quite a startling statement Prof. Seidman has urged us to do with the Constitution, when you consider what was mentioned on the program, which was that our Constitution essentially represents one of the mainstays of our government since it is “one of the cornerstones of American democracy” and “is the pledge that every federal officer takes to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”

Prof. Seidman argues, “It just doesn’t make any sense, I don’t think, to have a document that is as important as the Constitution — as entrenched as it is — given the fact that the world changes….”

The reason Prof. Seidman feels the “Constitution is no longer relevant,” is because:

“The people who wrote the Constitution lived in a small rural country, huddled along the Eastern Seaboard — a large part of which was financed by slave labor. … Many of them believed that it was OK to own other human beings. Almost all of them believed that women should have no role in public affairs. Almost all of them believed people … without property have no role in public affairs. Why on earth would anybody think that their decisions ought to bind us now?”

I couldn’t disagree with Prof. Seidman more. Frankly, I feel his arguments are vacuous and without merit. An example of why I feel that way is based on what was said in the above paragraph. I can’t believe he’s taught Constitutional law for almost 40 years and can’t see its applicability to our current political state of affairs.

Prof. Seidman said we need to reexamine the role of the Constitution in resolving political debate. He not only believes that it is outdated, but it also creates political rancor by adding ‘fuel to the fire’ to political discourse today, believing “…that our reliance on the document has created a divisive and dysfunctional political system.”

The reason there’s so much rancor, political divisiveness, and dysfunction is not because of the Constitution per se, but rather, because the politicians are serving the political parties that they’re a member of, rather than the people they’ve sworn on the Constitution to preserve, protect and defend.

I recently published a book entitled What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?: How Today’s Leaders Have Lost Their Way. In it I talk at length about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, explaining why these documents withstood the test of time over these 200 plus years.

The reason this country is at an impasse, where no legislation gets passed, is not because of the Constitution, but because neither political party wishes to compromise to make legislation suitable for ALL the people, not just the wealthy, special interest groups, like the lobbyists, or the politicians themselves.

In the book I discuss that in President Washington’s Farewell Address, he talked about the “banal” or deadly effect of political parties, believing if they were established, that they would do great harm to our political system and that eventually they could destroy our freedoms, and that’s exactly what’s happening today.

I recognize since security and freedom are mutually exclusive concepts, and that the more you have of one the less you have of the other, and because of the terrorists provocations, our freedoms are becoming more and more limited, the erosion being proportional to the terrorists’ activities. Nevertheless, even without the advent of terrorism, Washington believed that political parties could eventually destroy our freedoms because our politicians are unwilling to work toward something greater than themselves and their party, which is their country, and in that way compromise and pass legislation and make laws appropriate for All Americans to enjoy, rather than just the rich and the powerful.