The United States is on the verge of falling off the so-called fiscal cliff, and nobody is paying attention to what's causing all the chaos, Georgetown Law professor Louis Michael Seidman argues in The New York Times.
Oddly enough, Seidman, who spends his days teaching Constitutional law, blames the U.S. Constitution for the partisan gridlock that's screwing up the country.
In his provocatively titled op-ed "Let's Give Up on the Constitution," he even suggests that we start ignoring the Constitution because many of its provisions are arbitrary and even disruptive.
Just last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asserted that the House couldn't consider a Senate plan on tax cuts because the Constitution says such "revenue provisions" must start in the House and not the Senate.
This type of strict adherence to the Constitution makes Seidman wonder why dead white men who thought it was fine to own slaves should get to decide the fate of our Congressional negotiations.
"Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago," he wrote.
Seidman acknowledges his views might seem radical. But, he pointed out, John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the First Amendment. And Thomas Jefferson himself thought the Constitution should expire after one generation.
Seidman probably isn't in very good company now, though. Judges and regular citizens are too attached to many of the rights the Constitution gives us like freedom of speech and even the right to bear arms.
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw might have come the closest to echoing Seidman's sentiments about the 225-year-old document.
"I told you what to do, and you haven't done it," Shaw said in a 1931 newsreel. "I told you that what you had to do in this country was to abolish your Constitution, which was preventing you from doing anything."
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