Unconstitutional Unconservative

Here is Michele Bachmann's official sales pitch to the country.  In this clip, she talks about bringing "our" voice to the White House after years of bringing "our" voice to Congress.  Well, it is still unclear how Bachmann has done that when she hasn't championed any legislation during her tenure.

Perhaps the funniest thing to notice here is that her campaign has disabled user comments on the video's youtube page.  Correct.  An individual running for the White House has disabled feedback from voters.

Enough of the anecdotal and on to the truly disturbing: the closing frame.  Bachmann here is marketing herself as a "constitutional conservative".  

This term is thrown around frequently these days, but not by journalists or pols describing others.  Rather, we see pols proclaiming themselves "constitutional conservatives".  The trouble is that these folks do not have a working knowledge of constitutional law, and they are very hard to consider conservative.

Take Bachmann as an example.  For a former lawyer, she has shockingly poor knowledge of the workings of American society and its history.  Her repeated gaffes on slavery in the US reveal a sobering ignorance not just of US history, but of constitutional law as well.  How so?  Well, a lawyer should be able to point to the Reconstruction amendments, written nearly a century after the Revolution, and explain how they worked to abolish slavery and establish personhood and citizenship for formerly enslaved persons of African descent in the United States.  These are not history factoids for Jeopardy; they are part of the US Constitution.  As in "constitutional".  As in "constitutional conservative."

Now let's look at the "conservative" title.  Small government, economic conservatism can be disregarded off the bat: Bachmann has long made her money from the federal government, working as a tax attorney and a congresswoman, and taking farm subsidies from Washington for her family's lands.  Conservative with regards to the Constitution?  Well, if conservative means adhering to traditional values, and adherence to those mores requires a knowledge of them, then one can hardly be called conservative if that person does not even know the tradition and values of the matter at hand.  How could some one call themselves traditional if they do not know the traditions?  Simply put, if one does not know constitutional law, one absolutely cannot be a constitutional conservative.

This is not a question of semantics.  It is a question of issue framing.  When fragments of the Republican Party branch off and proclaim themselves to be "constitutional conservatives", they are giving themselves a false position of authority in a larger national debate on values.  They can hide behind the weight of the Constitution to frame a hotly-debated topic in terms of us vs. them, wrong vs. right, constitutional vs. unconstitutional.  They essentially take the cultural importance and weight of the Constitution to bolster a stance that is not rooted in the Constitution itself.  Rather than using the Constitution as law, they use the idea of it as a way of making the playing field uneven so that the "conservative" side has an unearned higher ground above an "unconstitutional" and "liberal" opponent.  Above and beyond politically dirty issue framing, it is a twisted way of politicizing the legal principals upon which this country was founded.

If ever confronted by a self-proclaimed constitutional conservative, seize the high ground and do so fast.  The title is untrue, unearned, and unconstitutional.  It should always be revealed as such.