Kevin Ryan, BridgeTower Media Newswires
The Law Day theme this year — “Toward a More Perfect Union: The Constitution in Times of Change” — at first struck me as a dodge, an effort to avoid talking about the disease that afflicts America by shifting the conversation to something much more academic and traditional. It is a theme that could have served just as well any year since 1787, and if the goal of Law Day is to inspire classroom presentations on constitutional theory, it’s a good theme.
One can picture constitutional law professors and social studies teachers enthusiastically telling students about the Founders and the Framers, about the inconveniences the Constitution was drafted to address, about the “separation” of powers (which is not what the Constitution provides, by the way — it provides a system of shared powers), even about the late 18th century tensions over slavery and big state vs. small state. It’s a theme that could lead an essay like this toward history and political theory, toward a consideration of what the Framers had in mind and how that has been elaborated over the centuries.
But no matter how important such an analysis of the history and theory of the Constitution is — and the failure to hear or heed such an analysis surely contributed to our present predicament — retreating into such an analysis disserves the audience and misses an opportunity for honesty about where we are and how we got here.
What does it mean to speak of “a more perfect union”? What does it mean to move “toward” such a thing, whatever it is? And are these “times of change” or a “time of crisis”?
To speak of a “more perfect union” is to presuppose there is some sort of union to start with, and I fear that such a presupposition may no longer be true at more than a very superficial level. Yes, we live within recognized boundaries and (some more than others) share the privileges of the wealth and power of the “nation” lodged within those boundaries. But stop and think for a minute what else Sen. Josh Hawley and Sen. Bernie Sanders are united about? What does the rural voter with the MAGA hat have in common with the urban person of color — aside from mutual dislike and distrust?
My point is not that there are not unions, for there are, but that there is not one union that can be made more perfect. The hope for union has always been at risk because of the deep-seated racism and persistent sexism that have been with us from the start — both on blatant display in the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Now that hope may well have been extinguished. Instead, we find disconnected jigsaw pieces from different puzzles, and it is not easy at all to imagine getting them into the same frame without significant damage to both puzzle and pieces.
The goal today seems less union than power, less fellow citizenship than devotion to one’s own desires (often referred to, disappointingly, as one’s “rights”). I make that claim in a bi-partisan spirit. Neither party has distinguished itself — at the national, state, or local level — by its efforts toward union, toward a shared, collaborative search for something more perfect. Indeed, quite the opposite.
It seems no one moves “toward” a better union; rather, each interest group, often each individual, seeks to tend their own garden, grabbing for all they can get, and resenting others who grab too, especially those who tie their grab to a claim of right or justice. Each move of the opposition must be treated not as a reasoned argument for a possible better future but as a vile immorality, a mortal danger to the kids or the family, a lie cleverly hiding a thrust for total power and the destruction of all that makes up a better union.
We live not in times of change so much as a time of crisis. Change suggests a direction, a goal toward which things are moving. It may be for the worse or for the better, depending on your perspective, but usually we can see where change leads. Today, however, we face chaos, not movement toward something better or different, and you can’t tell where chaos is leading. Chaos leads nowhere. All that is solid melts into air; all that we had been taught to expect has been transmogrified into something grotesque.
We expect politics to be partisan but ultimately collaborative, issues to be controversial but discussion to be rational, nominees to be qualified but subject to scrutiny based on their merits. In general, that’s not what we get today.
Instead, we get a bastardized politics in which the goal is all-out destruction of the other side. We get issues cooked up to score partisan points and discussion filled with inflammatory misinformation (a.k.a. lies) undermining rational discussion. We get nominees chosen for intensely political reasons, their qualifications (or lack thereof) ignored in a flurry of lies, secrets, silences; at the end of the chaotic process, votes are on strict party lines, no matter how qualified (or unqualified) the nominee may be, with nary a thought of making anything “more perfect” unless it be the infection of the body politic by a faction’s power. These are the wages of a Faustian bargain negotiated by a people willing to exchange their souls and the welfare of what once was a union for a few more years of getting to do whatever they want. This is not change; it's bedlam, it’s pandemonium, it’s disaster for the republic.
We can read this year’s Law Day theme as a statement of regret, with an implied question mark: Toward a More Perfect Union? I wish I could see a way to erase the question mark. I hope my children can and that they are not destroyed by the forces we’ve created. Surprisingly, I retain my optimism through humor, friendship, and love. I retain a hope that when the skeleton of our times finally comes tumbling down — as did the shell of the Roman Empire long, long ago — the new dark ages will contain enough points of light that good people will be prompted to seek a new, more perfect union.
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Kevin Ryan is Executive Director of the Monroe County Bar Association.
