Responding to E.J. Dionne

Left-wing columnist E.J. Dionne’s columns run regularly in the Albuquerque Journal. He is a dyed in the wool statist and I rarely bother to respond to his nonsense, but he wrote a few things about the incoming Republican Congress, the Tea Party, and the Constitution that I take issue with.

First, he claims that the Tea Party has “treated the Constitution not as a collection of shrewd political compromises, but as sacred scripture.” This is simply not true and it misunderstands the meaning of the Constitution which is meant to serve as the law of the land. The Constitution DID indeed contain numerous compromises, most notably over slavery. The document has been altered (amended) numerous times over the years to fully acknowledge the equality of blacks and other minorities. The Bible on the other hand is unaltered and unalterable.

This is Dionne’s fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution. He believes that it should be “living.” That is, it should be interpreted broadly in such a way as to accommodate his big-government agenda. The Tea Party and other conservatives may disagree with the 16th Amendment which legalized the income tax, but we at least recognize that it was the right way to change the original intent of the Constitution.

As for his statement that “tax cuts add to the deficit,” Dionne is simply assuming, as do many on the far left, that all wealth belongs to the government and that it allows us, the peons, to keep the scraps. This is not the way our government was intended to operate and it is simply immoral. Sorry E.J., only spending increases the deficit!