gracchusdixit

The noisy, nearly hysterical rhetoric surrounding IRS scrutiny of conservative 501(c)(4) organizations has all but drowned out the essential question at issue: whether the scrutiny was justified in the first place.

From the first instant this brouhaha got underway, it has been almost universally assumed, without proof or evidence, that the decision to scrutinize organizations with the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their names was made for explicitly political reasons, either by overzealous bureaucrats in the IRS wishing to please the administration in power or, more sinisterly, by the administration itself.

This facile assumption has been a convenient godsend for Republicans in Congress, who would dearly love to compromise and embarrass a President whose reelection they still cannot abide.  The only thing they would love better is to impeach the man before his second term has a chance to run its course, just as they tried to do to Bill Clinton.

Easy assumptions, however, are not the same thing as reality.  That the organizations flagged for scrutiny happen to be “conservative” does not mean that the scrutiny was politically motivated.  There is another possibility, one that easily could, and should, be verified.

That possibility is that tax exempt organizations with the words “tea party” and “patriot” in their names may have a particular history of attempting to flout the law—and may have done so more frequently than other organizations of this kind.  If such a reality, not ideology, was the basis of the  “criteria” the IRS employed, the agency was doing exactly what it is supposed to do—enforce the tax code.

501(c)(4) organizations are required by law to pursue “social welfare,” not politics.  This entitles them to a tax exemption.  It also allows their donors to remain anonymous.  Anonymity is the key point.  When a supposedly “grass roots” organization purporting to advance “social welfare” is, in reality, a sham, bankrolled by wealthy donors with a blatantly political agenda, its behavior is not only embarrassing but illegal.

That such chicanery goes on is not in doubt.  Numerous 501(c)(4) organizations have been exposed as fronts for the funneling of anonymous and tax-exempt money toward explicitly political purposes.  The infamous Koch brothers have been guilty of this dodge more than once.  So has the equally infamous Karl Rove.  There are some on the right (and for all I know, on the left as well) who have even been foolish enough to boast of it.

The question is not whether such chicanery happens, and it certainly isn’t whether this behavior deserves to be scrutinized and stopped.  The question is whether the record of “tea party” organizations is statistically more suspect than others.  If that is not the case, the IRS deserves every bit of the opprobrium that is now coming its way.  If it is the case, however, the agency deserves not only praise but encouragement.

The trouble is that the IRS may be the least-loved department of government, and the mere thought of IRS scrutiny is every American’s worst nightmare.  Nonetheless, that is no reason to let politically convenient assumptions cloud the facts.  Let’s find out what the facts really are before we decide who deserves the blame.  We might be surprised by the result.

Abraham Lincoln defined democracy more eloquently than anyone before or since when he concluded the Gettysburg Address with the fervent prayer that  “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Today, 150 years after Lincoln uttered his famous words, the democracy he prayed for has all but perished, not only here, in the United States, but throughout the world.

True democracy demands all three of the conditions Lincoln stated.  Those who govern must be “of the people,” because it is impossible to govern democratically from a social or psychological distance.  Government must be directly controlled “by the people,” because to surrender the task of governing to anyone else destroys democracy itself.   Government must act solely “for the people,” otherwise, it cannot call itself democracy at all.

The world we now live in is governed, not of, by and for the people, but of, by, and for self-perpetuating elites—economic, social, and intellectual oligarchies, whose main purpose is to sustain and expand their status and their privileges.  In countries like ours, where the formalities of popular government linger, the elites pay lip service to democracy but ignore its substance.  In other countries, where such traditions never set down roots, they don’t even bother with lip service.  The end, in both cases, is the same: government of the people has been replaced by government of the few.

That is why so many Americans—at both ends of the political spectrum—are frustrated and angry.  Those on the right think that government has been usurped by effete  “socialists.”  Those on the left believe it has been hijacked by right-wing zealots.  The reality is less complicated and far worse.  Government has been bought, lock, stock, and barrel, by the wealthy and the privileged, and they run it in their own self-interest.  More than half of our congressman and all but a handful of our senators are millionaires, most of them many times over.  Whether they are Democrats or Republicans matters little.  They are all members of the same governing elite.

It is easy to forget that, throughout much of history, this has always been the case.  There were, of course, some exceptional moments when the undemocratic few governed for the explicit benefit of the many.  The 2nd century of the Roman Empire was one.   But such exceptions were rarities.  Until the tumultuous French Revolution undertook to change the old order of things, the unapologetic purpose of governments everywhere was not to encourage democracy but to stifle it.

One must ask:  how did  it happen that the slow, sometimes agonizing progress of democracy ground to a halt?

One reason is the growing economic inequality that we have heard so much about.  But the problem isn’t inequality per se. There will always be some measure of inequality in any society, and there is even a respectable argument to be made that there should be.  Talent and hard work deserve to be rewarded.

The real problem is that today’s grotesque levels of economic inequality have for all intents and purposes become permanent and hereditary.   The social mobility that once democratized wealth in our country and elsewhere has largely disappeared.  Wealth no longer acts as an incentive, it throws up impenetrable barriers.  Those who govern us tomorrow will be the children of those who govern us today.  They will have the best health care, they will go to the best schools, they will enter the most prestigious and lucrative professions, because they, and only they, can afford to.  They will succeed and prosper, not because they are more talented but because they are so prosperous.

Money is power, pure and simple.  When power is concentrated in the hands of a few, freedom cannot live, democracy dies.  The wealthy few now have so much power that they no longer need to bribe the government to get their way.  They are the government.

The global economy is in a strange state, more like a stuporous dream than a reality.  The powers-that-be—the politicians, the bureaucrats, the technocrats, the so-called economic experts—stumble on, like sleepwalkers, as if the worst were behind us.  The reality is that we are tottering at edge of an economic cliff far steeper and much deeper than the so-called “fiscal cliff” we’ve heard so much about.

Here, in the United States, we have been lulled into thinking that our economy, if not entirely well, is at least getting better.  The housing market seems at long last to have turned a corner, unemployment (though still terrible by historical measures) is less terrible than it was, and the profits of American corporations are booming, pushing the financial markets to new highs.

These calming signals are deceptive:  the wages of ordinary Americans are stagnant, millions are still underwater on their mortgages, and millions more have given up looking for work—which, perversely, is one of the reasons the unemployment statistics look better.

Even the rosy profits of American corporations are deceptive. For all too many corporations, profits are up while sales and revenues are down.  Which means that costs (a.k.a., wages) are being squeezed mercilessly.

The much greater problem, however, lies in Europe.

In recent years, we have been inundated with talk of the booming economies of Asia, in particular of China and India.  For all this talk, the reality is that the 27-member European Union comprises the largest economy in the world, larger than ours and much larger than that of any Asian nation or region.  And the more sobering reality is that the European Union has never recovered from the financial collapse of 2007-2008.  Indeed, many of its members are in the most severe economic distress since the Great Depression.

Spain, Greece, Ireland, and Cyrus are experiencing, not cyclical recessions, but what appear to be deep and and irremediable depressions.  In Spain alone, more than 25 percent of the population are unemployed, and the figure is much greater among the country’s youngest citizens.  Other EU members are approaching the same abyss. Those on the brink include the United Kingdom and Italy, which have, respectively, the third and fourth largest economies in Europe and the seventh and eighth largest economies in the world.  If these countries lapse from temporary recession into permanent depression, the consequences for the rest of us will be grave.

There is little doubt that, if Europe does not recover soon, it will drag the rest of the global economy down with it.  The EU is so large, and its problems have such sweeping consequences for the rest of the world, that all our fates depend upon it.

There is, unfortunately, little sign that the steps taken thus far by the world’s economic institutions—the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank—are having any positive effect in reversing the situation.

Nor is there any prospect that Asia’s two economic powerhouses, China and India, are capable of making up for Europe’s faltering economic outlook.  China  remains a totalitarian state where the government is free to cook the books and economic transparency is non-existent.  India, for all its undoubted innovativeness and growth, is riddled with corruption and waste.  Neither of these countries is ready to lead a global economic recovery if Europe fails.

For the world to prosper again, Europe must therefore take the lead.  And to do that, its leaders must abandon the failed economic theology that has created political gridlock not only there but here in the United States:  a theology that says slashing budgets, lowering taxes, and paying off bank debt at the taxpayer’s expense will somehow make things better.

In Europe, the main evangelists for this theology are the conservative governments of Germany and the United Kingdom, which continue, in a latter-day brand of Protestant fervor, to insist that “austerity” will bring us to the promised land.  This fervor has little to do with reality and much to do with prejudice.  The Germans and the British love to bask in their contempt for the “irresponsible” behavior of southern Europe, the “lazy” Spaniards, Italians and Greeks and, yes, even the “lazy” French.

What they are not willing to acknowledge is how much their own good fortune derives from their membership in the European Economic Union or, in the case of Germany, its membership in the smaller club of nations that adopted the euro as their currency.  Germany has become rich because of the euro, and without the euro, Germany’s economic preeminence would evaporate.  Now, when the euro is under pressure, it may be time for Germany to return the favor, if only to secure its own self-interest.  If Angela Merkel ever decided to be honest with her electorate, that is what she would have to tell them.  But that, of course, will never happen.

Not will it happen that the Tory Prime Minister of the United Kingdom ever stands before Parliament to admit the utter failure of his economic regime of slash-and-burn austerity, which has done nothing to reverse the downward spiral of the British economy.  The more such policies fail, the more adamantly such people insist on their rightness.  Such people are, in the end, ideologues, like their Republican counterparts here in the United States.  To such people, reality, fact and evidence mean nothing; ideology, and theology, mean all.

This intellectual blindness would be sad in and of itself, if it were not for the much sadder fact is that these ideologues are willing to sacrifice the well being of their fellow citizens on the altar of their theology.  If, because of their blindness, millions of people around the world are made to suffer when the global economy finally does comes apart, may God forgive them.

The shameful defeat of even the most modest proposals for gun control in the Senate of the United States says less about the scandalous power of the NRA or the callous indifference of those who voted “nay” than it does about the fundamental flaws in our system of government.

Our system is revered by some for its “checks and balances” and lauded as if it had been divinely inspired.  Its inspiration was anything but divine.  It was the creation of entirely mortal men who were born nearly three hundred years ago, many of them men of wealth and privilege, and profoundly suspicious of democracy.   For all their talk about “the people” and their “rights,” much in the Constitution they bequeathed to us was designed, not to further democratic government, but to contain it.

The system these men devised no longer serves the needs of the large, sprawling, diverse democracy we have become.  Instead of protecting vulnerable minorities by checking the power of potentially oppressive majorities, our system does the reverse.  It is the minorities—the zealots, the bigots, the self-interested and the well-funded—that wield oppressive power now.  Not only is this morally wrong, it is no longer workable for the age in which we live.

And if the truth be told, our system of government has never worked particularly well.  In fact, by any rational calculus, the Constitution the Founders created is a bust.

Those who choose to see things through the foggy lens of sentimentality blame “partisan politics” for our current problems and tell us that things once were different, that our system of government was, once-upon-a-time, guided by gentlemanly compromise and common sense.  This is a fairy tale.

The first 75 years of the Republic were bitterly partisan, and they culminated in a murderous Civil War.  If you think Donald Trump’s attacks on Barack Obama are crazy or extreme, then I would encourage you to read what was said about Abraham Lincoln.

The next 75 years were mired in sweeping corruption and dysfunction, leading, in 1929, to the near collapse of global capitalism.  The only form of “consensus” that governed our public life in those days was the almost universal agreement that public officials should wink and take the money that was being handed out by the robber barons of Wall Street.

The truth of the matter is that our system has functioned effectively only when we have been prepared, or forced, to put it aside.

That is what happened during the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt became, in effect, our first democratically elected monarch.  He didn’t get everything he wanted, but he got most of it—in part because he was so overwhelmingly popular, in larger part because the economic crisis was so dire that nobody else was able to offer any plausible alternatives.

That is what happened again during the Second World War, with first Roosevelt and then Truman in the White House.  “Checks and balances” went out the window, and the economy was all but nationalized, with a regime of central planning and steeply progressive taxation that would today be called “socialism.”

And that is what happened yet again during the Cold War, which set in even before the Second World War ended.  This is one of those eras of “compromise and consensus” that are now remembered so fondly.  It was in fact a time of fear and intimidation.  We rallied around the national mission to “fight Communism,” because we weren’t given a choice.   “Compromise and consensus” came from conformity, not good will.

For better or worse, these three eras of crisis made us the country we are today:  a modern industrial nation,  with needs and problems that cannot be dealt with by the quaint pre-industrial system of federalism invented by our Founders.  In such a nation, real democracy is the only possible form of decent and effective government.

The main obstacle now standing in the way of real democracy is the Constitution’s anachronistic regard for “states’ rights.”  This may have made sense when the nation first came together as a loose confederation of formerly independent colonies.  But that time passed long ago.   To be sure, cultural differences still separate one state or region from another—you won’t find many people north of the Maxon-Dixon line eating grits or very many people south of it eating hoagies.  But such differences do not constitute “rights” or “sovereignty.”   They certainly do not justify the denial of democracy to the nation as a whole.  To treat California with its thirty million people and Iowa with its three million as separate and sovereign entities, having an equal say in how the nation is governed, is simply absurd.

If ever we needed proof of this absurdity, we just got it when a group of Senators representing a small fraction of the nation defied the will and wishes of the overwhelming majority of the American people by voting down gun control.

It is tempting to focus the blame on those who voted “nay,” and they do indeed have much to answer for.  Whether their motives were cowardly or craven, self-interested or sincere, their behavior was shameful.  But blaming them, even punishing them at the ballot box, will not be enough.  We need to change the system that allows, indeed encourages, them to do what they did.

It is time to realize that our Constitution was written in an altogether different era, for an altogether different kind of country.  It is time to “check” the undemocratic power it created.  It is time to bring real “balance” to the Constitution of the United States.

Margaret Baroness Thatcher is dead, but her legacy lives on.  Indeed, that legacy now dominates the life of much of the world.

Thatcher and her political soul-mate, Ronald Reagan, spent their public lives pursuing their political and philosophical agenda with exceptional clarity and focus.  Both told us that government was “the problem.”  Both deified the so-called “free market.”  Both were determined to dismantle what they vilified as “the welfare state.”  Both saw the world as a Darwinian conflict between “takers and makers” or, as the British more colorfully put it, “skivers and strivers.”  And both were largely successful in imposing their views on the rest of us.

It is ironic, to an almost Shakespearean degree, that such seemingly clear-minded people should, in their final days, have descended into the dark murk of dementia.

But it is also fitting—for the vision these two people forced upon the world is itself dark, murky, and demented.

Baroness Thatcher will no doubt be sent on her way to the next world with the pomp and circumstance that only Great Britain any longer seems capable of producing.  How the British people will feel about it all is another matter.  For many of them, Margaret Thatcher was in no sense a visionary.  She was, instead, a ruthless instrument of the powerful, the privileged, and the rich, whose departure from the scene will not be lamented.

This is seldom recognized here, in the United States, where we still remember her political partner, Ronald Reagan, more for his genial charm than for his actual policies.   Americans tend to conflate the two:  both the people and the policies.  Since “Ronnie” was such a charmer, “Maggie” must have been too.  They view things a bit differently in the United Kingdom, and we would be better off if we did the same in the United States.

The world these two people built—the world of unfettered global capitalism—is a world in which a few are indeed much better off.  The bonuses paid on Wall Street, the salaries paid out in board rooms, the profits piled up by corporations and their share holders have made one percent of the country richer than they have been in one hundred years.  But the riches here are paltry compared with the money being made in the booming nations of Asia.  All that cheap labor, all those exported jobs, all those workers who have no protections or legal rights have allowed an infinitesimally small number of people to become unimaginably rich—rich enough to buy presidents and prime ministers, rich enough to buy governments, rich enough to buy whole nations.

The bill for all this has been paid not only by Americans but by the rest of mankind.  The American middle class is all but gone.  Unions and the hard-won protections they once provided to their members are all but dead.  The simple idea that all Americans deserve decent medical care and a modest retirement is now demonized as “entitlement,” a word that once signified a basic human right but now stands for indulgence and laziness.  Thanks to Ronnie and Maggie, the glimpse Americans once had of a decent life has all but disappeared.  Thanks to Ronnie and Maggie, millions of people around the world will never even glimpse that much.

It is therefore fitting, however sad, that these two people should have ended their lives in darkness.  Perhaps they will, in the next life, see the light.  We can only hope.

Now that our military involvement in Iraq is all but done and our engagement in Afghanistan is finally winding down, there is much talk from the chattering classes about what can be learned from these experiences.  The pundits have precious little to say, however, about what may be the most important lesson of all—the jarring contradiction between the power we think we have and the power we actually have.

The United States of America likes to think of itself as being militarily preeminent, even unstoppable—or as some have put it, “the only remaining superpower on the planet.”  Because of this self-perception, we are routinely tempted to use military force to solve problems that might (and usually could) be dealt with in more effective and less costly ways.

There is, of course, a certain quantitative reality to this self-perception.  We spend as much on guns, ships, planes, and bombs as the rest of the world put together, and our expensively acquired military technology is generally one step ahead of that of other nations.  But what has this vast expenditure purchased?

Despite our enormous and undeniable material advantages, the military record of the United States is abysmal.  It would seem that we can push around small and militarily laughable nations like Guatemala or Panama but cannot prevail against more formidable adversaries.  Indeed, one has to wonder whether the military establishment of the United States, no matter how much money we spend on it, is able to win a major war.

Consider the facts:

World War II is the principal source of our self-image as a great military power, but the part we played in that conflict was less decisive than we like to think.  The British, let us remember, fought alone for two years, helped by our materiel but not by our direct involvement.  When we did finally enter the war, it was the Russians who did the bloodiest work and suffered infinitely greater casualties.  Without them, we might well have overcome the Japanese, but we never would have defeated the German army, which was better trained and better led.

The “police action” we now call the Korean War was a costly draw that produced no clear victory for either side.  The divided Korea it left behind is still divided, more than half a century later.  There were those at the time who said that the United States could have prevailed had “the politicians in Washington” let Douglas MacArthur have his way, by using nuclear weapons against the Chinese.  We will never know—thank God.  What we do know is that American forces did not win the war.  Nobody did.

Then, there was the unmitigated disaster of Vietnam, perhaps the most terrible of the many wars we did not need to fight.  Again, there were those who said (there are those who still say) that we could have prevailed had the generals been unleashed.  The truth is that those generals were given plenty of leash: napalm, Agent Orange, carpet bombing, and half a million men, 50,000 of whom never came home.  We still lost.

Which brings us to Iraq and Afghanistan.  No matter what Dick Cheney and co-conspirators may wish posterity to believe, in neither case can it be said that anything  lasting or substantial has been accomplished.  We invaded Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.  We toppled Sadam Hussein in less than ten days but spent more than ten years trying, without result, to end the chaos we had unleashed.  We invaded Afghanistan to apprehend the perpetrators of the attack on the World Trade Center and to eradicate their supporters.  It took us a decade to find Bin Laden—ensconced comfortably in a villa in Pakistan, not in the wilds of the Hindu Kush.  Today, as we sneak away, the Taliban are stronger than ever, and the government in Kabul feels free to insult us all the while it takes our money.

In truth, after the surrender of Japan, the only major military conflict waged with unmitigated success by American forces was the Gulf War of 1991.

This is neither a glorious nor a comforting record.

Perhaps the lesson we should learn from such a record is this:  Don’t pick fights you can’t win, and if you’re not very good at winning fights, don’t pick them at all.

Paul Ryan may have lost his recent bid to become the Vice President of the United States, but he has lost little of his ideological fervor and none of his intellectual gall.  For the third time in as many years, he has put forward a budget that, like its predecessors, has one objective and one objective only: to dismantle, diminish or reverse every decent investment made by the Federal government except defense.

Among its many indecencies, the Ryan budget would turn Medicare into a system of vouchers, all but destroy Medicaid, scale back Social Security, and replace our current progressive tax code with a two-tiered “flat tax,” increasing the taxes paid by most Americans and substantially reducing those paid by the richest.

These proposals are grounded in one overarching assertion—that the root of our problems is “the unchecked growth of government.”  Shrink the government (at least the part of government Ryan dislikes) and all, he asks us to believe, will be well.

The problem is that Ryan’s central assertion is a myth, stitched together from a series of lies.

To begin with, the size of government isn’t growing.   There are half a million fewer Federal employees today than there were in 1980, when the population of the country was considerably smaller.  For the last twenty years, the number of government employees has remained roughly constant.   All told, Federal employees comprise less than four percent of the total workforce, scarcely enough to constitute a drag on an economy as large as ours.

Nor has Federal government spending increased substantially.  On the contrary, it has remained at roughly 20 percent of GDP since the 1980s and has declined in the last several years under that “big spender,” Barack Obama.  To be sure, our debts and deficits have grown substantially since George Bush was elected in 2000—but not because of the “unchecked growth of government.”  They have grown because Bush squandered a trillion dollar surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy, because economic activity and tax receipts shriveled in the wake of the financial collapse of 2007, and because we decided to fund two unnecessary and fruitless wars with borrowed money.

Despite all that, Ryan proposes to cut taxes on both corporations and the richest Americans, claiming that high tax rates strangle job creation.  The truth is that our personal tax rates are not particularly high as compared with the rest of the world and relatively few corporations actually pay the high tax rates he complains about.  If they did, we wouldn’t be in this mess.  In truth, our economy was booming when tax rates were substantially higher than they are today, and no credible evidence exists to suggest that our current tax rates are in any way suppressing economic activity.

Finally, Ryan talks incessantly about ending the heavy hand of government regulation, which, he claims, is “stifling” the natural inventiveness of the “free enterprise” system and, in particular, “small business job creators.”  In this as in so much else, Ryan offers us sentimental myths and comforting cliches instead of the facts.  It was the evisceration of financial regulation by Bill Clinton and a prior Republican Congress that led directly to the crash of the capital markets and the recession that followed.  It isn’t “small business job creators” but large corporations—fewer than one percent of all the businesses in the country, in fact—that employ a majority of the workforce and pay nearly two-thirds of the wages.  For all the “stifling” regulations and onerous taxes Ryan complains about, these corporations seem to be doing rather well, with their profits and stock prices at record highs.

In the preamble to his budget, Ryan draws a stark contrast between two “visions” of the nation’s future: his own, which he glorifies, and the President’s, which he vilifies.  Clearly not a humble man, Ryan calls his own vision a “blueprint for American renewal.”   In the unexpectedly lucid words of Newt Gingrich, Ryan’s blueprint is nothing more than an act of “right-wing social engineering.”  It is a blueprint for disaster.

Nearly all those who are now proposing—and ever so timidly hoping—for some change in our ridiculously lax guns laws swaddle their proposals in two reassuring caveats.  First, they say that they are merely advancing “common sense” measures designed to limit only the most egregious consequences of unfettered gun ownership.  Second, they say—almost pleadingly—that they continue to support the Second Amendment.  Nearly all reassure us that “common sense” and the Second Amendment can live harmoniously together.  Unfortunately, nobody on the public stage has yet had the courage to stand up and say the obvious: there is nothing even remotely sensible about the Second Amendment.

Whatever sense or relevance the Second Amendment may have possessed in Colonial America evaporated long ago, and its continued presence on the books would be merely silly if it weren’t so destructive.  It is, in fact, the major obstacle standing in the way of all constructive and sensible change in our guns laws.   Instead of paying slavish lip service to the Second Amendment, we should be talking about abolishing it and, along with the Amendment itself, the entire gun culture it has been allowed to spawn.

The truth of the matter is, the “common sense” measures of gun control now being proposed won’t even begin to solve the problem.  Most of the gun-caused deaths in our country have nothing to do with assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, convicted felons or the certifiably insane.  They are caused by run of the mill handguns possessed by run of the mill people:  for the most part, depressed or desperate people who turn those guns on themselves.  The problem is that we have nearly as many guns in the United States as we have people, and, unless something changes, we will soon have more.

No amount of talk about “sportsmen,” “self-defense” and “responsible gun ownership” can alter the fact that guns are lethal weapons, which are designed to kill.  There is no need or possible justification for their continued presence in our homes and on our streets.  If some people want to indulge in target practice, let them buy dart boards.  If they want kill animals, let them go to work in a butcher shop or a slaughterhouse.  If they want to collect firearms for their historical or antiquarian interest, let them visit a museum.  If they want to own guns to demonstrate their virility, let’s send them to a psychiatrist.  Among the so-called “civilized” countries of the world, we are the only one that clings to guns as a matter of “right” rather than privilege.  This is a sickness.  Clinging to the tragic silliness of the Second Amendment won’t cure us of the disease.

The Constitution is a wonderful document, but it isn’t holy writ.  It was written by men, admittedly brilliant but men nonetheless.  They lived at a particular time, under a particular set of circumstances.  They were wiser and more prescient than most, but they were not omniscient, nor could they see into the future.  They could not envision automatic weapons.  They could not predict the stubborn insanity of the NRA.  They could not imagine, in their worst and wildest dreams, the slaughter of mere babies in Newtown, Connecticut by a monster exercising his “right to bear arms.”    We have changed the Constitution before.  It is time to change it again.  I am reasonably certain that the Founding Fathers, were they alive today, would be leading the way.