I have to run, so I can’t go in detail on today’s Kerryism in Slate (see here for my criticisms of yesterday’s), but one thing just jumped out at me: Kerry argued that we shouldn’t amend the Constitution because “It’s a document that we haven’t touched, certainly with respect to the Bill of Rights, in years, and I don’t think it should be used for the purpose of driving a political wedge through America.” Slate says he should have dropped the “certainly with respect to the Bill of Rights.”
If I had an editor like that, I would scream. The Constitution was mostly recently “touched” about 10 years ago, with the addition of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. That’s a special case, since it was ratified over 200 years, though I think most ratifications came in the last 20 years of the process. But since 1960, there have been five amendments, including the Twenty-Seventh.
The “certainly with respect to the Bill of Rights” might be a caveat, but it’s a necessary caveat — otherwise people could reasonably say that while we literally haven’t touched the document “in years,” we have changed it quite a bit within many voters’ lives. You can’t just remove it and claim that the result “is Kerry’s quote translated into plain English.” The result is Kerry’s quote made wrong, or at least misleading and subject to factual criticism.
Actually, it’s Kerry’s quote made more wrong. The Federal Marriage Amendment would not change the Bill of Rights (except to the extent that one thinks the right to marry is already guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause, which Kerry presumably doesn’t believe). But be that as it may, the Slate “translat[ion]” does nothing to fix this error, and merely adds another error.
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