Me the People: One Man's Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America - Hardcover

Bleyer, Kevin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400069351 ISBN 13: 9781400069354

Publisher: Random House, 2012

Synopsis

The United States Constitution promised a More Perfect Union. It’s a shame no one bothered to write a more perfect Constitution—one that didn’t trigger more than two centuries of arguments about what the darn thing actually says.
 
Until now.  
 
Perfection is at hand. A new, improved Constitution is here. And you are holding it.
 
But first, some historical context: In the eighteenth century, a lawyer named James Madison gathered his friends in Philadelphia and, over four long months, wrote four short pages: the Constitution of the United States of America. Not bad.
 
In the nineteenth century, a president named Abraham Lincoln freed an entire people from the flaws in that Constitution by signing the Emancipation Proclamation.  Pretty impressive.
 
And in the twentieth century, a doctor at the Bethesda Naval Hospital delivered a baby—but not just any baby. Because in the twenty-first century, that baby would become a man, that man would become a patriot, and that patriot would rescue a country . . . by single-handedly rewriting that Constitution.
 
Why? We think of our Constitution as the painstakingly designed blueprint drawn up by, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, an “assembly of demigods” who laid the foundation for the sturdiest republic ever created. The truth is, it was no blueprint at all but an Etch A Sketch, a haphazard series of blunders, shaken clean and redrawn countless times during a summer of petty debates, drunken ramblings, and desperate compromise—as much the product of an “assembly of demigods” as a confederacy of dunces.
 
No wonder George Washington wished it “had been made more perfect.” No wonder Benjamin Franklin stomached it only “with all its faults.” The Constitution they wrote is a hot mess. For starters, it doesn’t mention slavery, or democracy, or even Facebook; it plays favorites among the states; it has typos, smudges, and misspellings; and its Preamble, its most famous passage, was written by a man with a peg leg. Which, if you think about it, gives our Constitution hardly a leg to stand on.
 
[Pause for laughter.]
 
Now stop laughing. Because you hold in your hands no mere book, but the most important document of our time. Its creator, Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer, paid every price, bore every burden, and saved every receipt in his quest to assure the salvation of our nation’s founding charter. He flew to Greece, the birthplace of democracy. He bused to Philly, the home of independence. He went toe-to-toe (face-to-face) with Scalia. He added nightly confabs with James Madison to his daily consultations with Jon Stewart. He tracked down not one but two John Hancocks—to make his version twice as official. He even read the Constitution of the United States.
 
So prepare yourselves, fellow patriots, for the most significant literary event of the twenty-first, twentieth, nineteenth, and latter part of the eighteenth centuries. Me the People won’t just form a More Perfect Union. It will save America.

Praise for Me the People
 
“I would rather read a constitution written by Kevin Bleyer than by the sharpest minds in the country.”—Jon Stewart

“Bleyer takes a red pencil to democracy’s most hallowed laundry list. . . . Uproarious and fascinating.”—Reader’s Digest

“I knew James Madison. James Madison was a friend of mine. Mr. Bleyer, you are no James Madison. But you sure are a heck of a lot more fun.”—Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Team of Rivals

About this title

About the Author:

Emmy Award winner Kevin Bleyer is an Emmy Award–winning writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, for which he has won multiple Emmy Awards. Before rewriting the Constitution, Bleyer co-authored the #1 New York Times bestseller Earth: The Book, and negotiated bipartisan consensus as a writer and producer for Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and Dennis Miller. And he is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, so he secretly runs the government already. He lives in New York, where he regularly poses for portraits.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Me the People

An Order to Form a More Perfect Union

We have made a terrible mistake.

And by we, I mean you. You have made a terrible mistake. As a citizen of the United States of America, you have put your faith in a four-page document written by farmers, scrawled on animal skin, disseminated more than two centuries ago, conceived in desperation in the aftermath of war, composed in the language of the country it was intended to spurn, and, not for nothing, scribbled by hand with the quill of a goose.

And because you have made a terrible mistake, and because—lamentably—you and I together count as we, “we” have made a terrible mistake.

We the People.

But really, I blame you.

When Alexander Hamilton said, “The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right,” he wasn’t talking about himself. He wasn’t talking about we. And certainly not me.

He was talking about you.

You the persons.

You have been told, promised, and guaranteed—and since you seldom judge or determine right, you have foolishly chosen to believe—that the Constitution is your great protector, as flawless in its foresight as it is eloquent in its expression, equal parts holy water, force field, security blanket, instruction manual, and swiss army knife—delivering a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defence, promoting the general welfare, and securing the Blessings of Liberty.

The Killer App of governance.

But ask yourself, if the Constitution is such an astonishing document, such a landmark piece of literature, why no Pulitzer? Why no Nobel Prize? If this supposed “American masterpiece” is so darn revolutionary, why was it never declared one of the “Ten Best Reads” of 1787? And did you even notice that “defence” is misspelled? How embarrassing. For all the Constitution’s vaunted glories, it hasn’t even been spell-checked. This is our Founding Document? (Quick, someone put that in a display case. It belongs in a muzeum.)

It is emblazoned on signs at political rallies, where it is as often quoted as it is misquoted. It is cited on the floor of Congress, by lawmakers who only defend the parts they like. It has been fetishized and refashioned as the pristine blueprint of a bygone era, a better era, an era we should long to return to, or at least mimic as closely as possible. In October 2010, The Wall Street Journal reported not just a growing obsession with the Constitution, but a spike in the sales of powdered wigs. On a particularly historic election night in 2009, no less than Speaker of the House John Boehner insisted that all the American people want is “a government that honors the Constitution” and, when he held up his pocket-sized version at a Tea Party rally in his home state, said: “I’m going to stand here with the Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” It was a pitch-perfect recitation, and the assembled crowd ate it up. Never mind that it was not the preamble to the Constitution or anything else. It was the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

John Boehner needn’t be ashamed. In his ignorance, he is truly a representative of the people. According to a 1987 study, eight out of ten Americans believed, as he did that day, that the phrase “all men are created equal” is in the Constitution. Almost nine in ten swore that “of the people, by the people, for the people” is in the Constitution, too, even though it is of the Gettysburg Address, by President Abraham Lincoln, and for-crying-out-loud-didn’t-anyone-ever-teach-them-that? Most egregious: Nearly half thought that “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was written by James Madison, not Karl Marx. (Although they couldn’t have fingered constitutional author Madison in a lineup of the Framers and would no doubt have guessed Karl Marx was Groucho’s brother.)

Same as it ever was. Way back in 1847, only sixty years after the Constitution was adopted, the governor of New York, Silas Wright, was already grumbling, appropriately, that “no one familiar with the affairs of our government, can have failed to notice how large a proportion of our statesmen appear never to have read the Constitution of the United States with a careful reference to its precise language and exact provisions, but rather, as occasion presents, seem to exercise their ingenuity . . . to stretch both to the line of what they, at the moment, consider expedient.” Which is a fancy way of saying what Senator Robert Byrd echoed in 2005: “People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.” For two centuries, we have been expected to abide by it, live by it, swear by it—some of us, officially—yet we have no idea what it says.

So is it any wonder, I ask you, that President George W. Bush once called it, and I quote, a goddamned piece of paper?

Not to me.

Because unlike you, I googled that quote just now. Apparently it is “apocryphal”—which I also googled, and learned is another way of saying “not true.” Never happened. Bogus. Evidently, a few years ago a left-wing muckraker spread the rumor that when one of the president’s aides advised him not to renew the PATRIOT Act—on account of it being unconstitutional—the president said, “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

Oh sure, there is some truthiness to it—but it is, nonetheless, a lie. The forty-third president of the United States never said that the Constitution he swore an oath to uphold “to the best of his ability, through rain, or sleet, or gloom of night” (note to self: google “presidential oath of office”) was just “a goddamned piece of paper.” After all, it couldn’t possibly be a goddamned piece of paper—not when our third president had already, and long ago, declared it “a mere thing of wax.” Thomas Jefferson, not long after the Constitution was in force, lamented aloud that the justices of the Supreme Court had already usurped the right of “exclusively explaining the Constitution” and therefore could, as the nation’s first judicial activists, “twist and shape [it] into any form they please,” like so much revolutionary Play-Doh. By calling dibs on the first constitutional metaphor, Jefferson has beaten Bush to the punch by two hundred years. It is no goddamned piece of paper, Mr. President; it is a mere thing of wax.

Fine. But even if the Constitution isn’t a goddamned piece of paper, could the case be made that President Bush treated it like one? Sure it could. Most presidents do. That President Bush, and other presidents, have regarded the Constitution as a goddamned piece of paper is impossible to deny. The moment they take their hands off the inaugural Bible, having publicly sworn undying fealty to the Constitution, they secretly resent its existence.

For a head of state, the Constitution is a pain in the ass. It limits their powers and dampens their ambitions. There is an entire section—Article II—devoted to restricting what the president can, and dictating what the president must, do with his day. (Imagine if there were an entire section in our country’s founding document insisting that you “shall receive Ambassadors” at your home.) It’s no surprise that presidents try to cut constitutional corners, and it’s no wonder that American history is riddled with egregious examples. Minor infractions, such as:

The Alien and Sedition acts of 1798—courtesy of President Adams

The suspension of habeas corpus—compliments of President Lincoln

The Palmer Raids and the suppression of free speech after World War I—thoughtful gifts from President Wilson

The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II—a considerate contribution care of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Trumped-up trials for treason during McCarthyism—bons mots from Presidents Truman and Eisenhower

The wiretapping of dissenters during Vietnam—delicious truffles served up by Presidents Johnson and Nixon

So when President Bush ultimately decided to renew the possibly unconstitutional PATRIOT Act, it may have been, historically speaking, the most presidential thing he ever did. He turned a goddamned piece of paper into a mere thing of wax.

As he often said, September 11th changed everything.

★ ★ ★

To suggest that violating the Constitution is somehow uncommon, or unpresidential, or, worse, un-American overlooks an inconvenient truth: namely, that if not for a flagrant violation of the Constitution—known more charitably as the Louisiana Purchase—by none other than Thomas Jefferson, we’d hardly recognize the country we see on so many elementary school maps. America wouldn’t be America. If the third president of the United States hadn’t shrugged off the document he had sworn to protect “by hook or by crook” (note to self: seriously man, google the presidential oath of office already) and doubled the size of the nation with the stroke of a pen—even though the Constitution gave him no such authority—the western coast of America would be the eastern bank of the Mississippi. We would be crowning thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining St. Louis.

Jefferson knew it, too. In embarking on the most aggressive executive action in history, he was quite aware he was sticking his neck out too far. The Constitution might not approve. “The Executiv...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1400069351
• ISBN 13: 9781400069354
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352