Mr. Fix-it At Your Service
By Jeffrey Page
Americans don’t like to wait. We perceive a problem, discuss it for, oh say, 10 minutes, come up with what seems like a satisfactory solution – as facile as it might be – take action, and sit back with a knowing, self-satisfied smile. Occasionally this works.
But we tend to get a little testy when something resists a quick fix. Take these wars of ours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re the result of 9/11, and a decade later we’re still at it. Was it Rumsfeld the Genius who said we would be wrong to call them a quagmire? They’re a quagmire, and we’ve lost more than 5,000 of our young people in it.
Nowadays we are very concerned by the presence of millions of illegal aliens – or undocumented immigrants in the kingdom of political correctness – and there have been many proposals put forth on how to deal with this. These include a fence to rival the Great Wall of China, armed troops, armed civilian militias, and that demagogue’s delight of a state law in Arizona.
The newest idea is to repeal Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This is the part that grants automatic U.S. citizenship to anyone born in the United States, including, therefore, the children of those who are here illegally. The 14th Amendment is a testament to the fairness and humanity of the United States because it was a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott in 1857, in which the justices ruled that black men and women could never become U.S. citizens, even those born here.
Now, 142 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is out front in the discussion about repealing the compassion, goodwill and humanity of the 14th’s citizenship clause as a way of dealing with Mexicans illegally crossing the border. It’s not drastic. It’s Graham, imitating Homer Simpson: “Doh! Nothing else worked.”
Well, if we’re going to spay the 14th Amendment because we’re unable to come up with a reasoned way of dealing with undocumented immigrants, we ought to consider changing other parts of the Constitution that we find bothersome. Thanks to Lindsey Graham, this seems to be the easy way to deal with annoying situations. Find it, fix it, forget it.
Let us modify the First Amendment to satisfy the opponents of the proposed mosque two blocks from Ground Zero by making it read: “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion except Islam.” There, wasn’t that easy?
For the benefit of Americans who get nervous by the sight of political demonstrators, we could change the assembly clause in the First Amendment to read: “Congress shall make no law regarding the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances as long as those assembling and/or petitioning are quiet, respectful, middle class, middle aged, do not shake their fists and generally are non-threatening.”
For those who oppose the possession of firearms, let us repeal the Second Amendment altogether. It’s only 27 words; who would miss it?
Then there’s that pesky Fifth Amendment. Let it now read: “No person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself unless everybody knows he’s guilty as sin, in which case, he’d better talk.” The altered Fifth could be paired with an altered Eighth Amendment, which could read: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted unless we know the S.O.B. is guilty, in which case no trial is necessary. Just take him out and hang him.”
For the anti-tax folks, we’ll repeal the 16th Amendment, the one that empowers Congress to lay and collect taxes on income, and order a National Day of Prayer – pray or die – every year to ask God to rain down all the money we need to maintain civil society in the 21st Century, but without taxes.
There are people – come on, you know who you are – who’d like to do something about the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote. Hey, if the framers wanted women to vote, they would have said so, right? So, maybe late one night when the nation is fast asleep, Congress could start the machinery to, uh, do something about the 19th.
Wasn’t that easy?
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com
Tags: Jeffrey Page
August 18th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Jeff, you shoulda been a monologuist. (monologist?). Guy who does monologues. Orange’s own Woebegon…. hey, our kids are above average, too.
August 19th, 2010 at 11:03 pm
Recently the Times Herald Record ran a political cartoon about the faction wanting to repeal the 14th Amendment. Mention was made of withdrawing (or not granting) citizenship to “all people who were born here for the wrong reason.” Wow, think of all the people we could deport because they were “born for the wrong reason!” Babies born out of wedlock, children of rape victims, babies born to teenagers, those “surprise” change-of-life babies….The list goes on. Graham, of course, undoubtedly knows what the “right reasons” are.
August 24th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
It is sad testimony that even though we have reached the point in which we can elect a man President on merit and not color, just to fall back in the face of unyielding prejudice.