Reading of the Constitution, or at least some of it

One of the biggest complaints from self-labeled conservatives and tea baggers is that we need to get back to the Founder's intent of the Constitution.  Their battle cry for some time has been we've strayed too far away from what the Founders intended for this country, and unless we return to those founding principles we risk destroying the nation.

I'm cool with that. I really think we should return to the strictest intent of the Constitution possible. Women had no rights. Blacks were slaves and counted as 3/5 a person.  Only land owning white men could vote.  The right to bear arms unequivocally meant a single shot muzzle.  And the only function of the federal government was to run the post office.  Those were no doubt the intentions of the framers.

So how does the party who has whined and cried for years that we as a nation have strayed from the original intent deal with such unpleasantness when it decides to read, for the first time ever, the Constitution on the House floor?  Simple really. They just skip over those parts.

In other words, the reading of the Constitution yesterday was not the full document. It was the amended, Republican approved-version, not the document containing the original intent of our Founding Fathers.  By not reading the original intent of the Constitution, Republicans proved the Constitution is not a dead document but a living, thriving instrument that has to be applicable to the 21st or wither and die, which is the exact opposite of their argument.  They proved the Constitution has flaws and ultimately so did the Founders.

It's not as if they only read the Constitution with its updated amendments because they didn't.  For instance they read the 18th Amendment that prohibits alcohol and then also read the amendment repealing it.  They read the 14th Amendment's clause for only males over 21 to vote.  And then turned around and read the 26th Amendment which overturned all voting rights ever contained in the whole document.  They took out the ugly parts, read the parts they were comfortable with and then patted themselves on the back for being Great Patriots.

The Constitution is not just the Amendments.  It's the entire document.  Slavery, inequality, imperfections all the same.  Leaving out those parts goes against the very fabric of the Founder's intent-- literally.