Tea Party Fails History on Constitution

The "Tea-Party-infused lawmakers" who pushed for this week's reading of the Constitution did so to honor the framers, but the stunt actually "did the opposite," writes Dana Milbank. He joins the chorus of those criticizing the move to read a sanitized version, one "conjuring a fanciful land that never counted a black person as three-fifths of a white person, never denied women the right to vote, never allowed slavery and never banned liquor," he writes in the Washington Post.

In fact, the decision amounts to conservative heresy by sanctioning a "dare it be said?—'living Constitution' pruned of the founders' missteps," writes Milbank. "Nobody's proud of the three-fifths compromise, but how can we learn from our founding if we aren't honest about it?" The kicker here, he writes, is that many of the politicians who profess to consider the document sacred are pushing to rewrite it yet again by, for instance, repealing the 14th Amendment that grants birthright citizenship. Click for Glenn Beck's similar criticism of the "cowardly" reading.
(More Tea Party stories.)