Fade Resistance Performance
Can all this be blind evolution? If liberals were more religious, they might evangelize that the hand of Providence is behind it! This marvelous "living document" never seems to impede the liberal agenda in any way. On the contrary: it always seems to demand, by a wonderful coincidence, just what liberals are prescribing in other social arenas.
Do liberals want big federal entitlement programs? Check it; the Interstate Commerce Clause turns out to mean that the big federal programs are constitutional! Do liberals oppose capital punishment? Check it; the ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" turns out to mean that capital punishment is unconstitutional! Do liberals want abortion on demand? Check it; the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, plus their emanations and penumbras, turn out to mean that abortion is absolutely nothing less than a woman's constitutional right!
Death by Abortion...
Setting aside your own views, opinions and feelings about the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice controversy, let's take a closer look at what has really happened. Is it possible that, as the Supreme Court in effect said, all the abortion laws of all 50 States - no matter how restrictive, no matter how permissive - had always been unconstitutional? And if so, on what legal Constitutional basis could such a conclusion be drawn?
Consider that no previous Court, no justice on any Court in all our history - not John Marshall, not Joseph Story, not Roger Taney, not Oliver Holmes, not Charles Hughes, not Felix Frankfurter, not even Earl Warren - had ever been recorded as doubting the constitutionality of those laws. Were all these previous Justices complete fools, or simply court jesters? Everyone had always taken it for granted that the States, as the Constitution defines, had every right to enact them.
Are we supposed to believe, in all seriousness, that the US Supreme Court's 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade was a response to the text of the US Constitution, the discernment of a meaning that had eluded all its predecessors, rather than an enactment of the current liberal agenda? Come now.
Notice also, that there are expansive parts of this "living document" which somehow don't develop equally or consistently. For example, the Court has expanded the meaning of some of liberalism's pet rights, such as freedom of speech, to absurd lengths; but it has neglected or even contracted and diminished other Freedoms, such as property rights, which liberalism is hostile to.
In order to really get a "handle" on how messed up things have gotten and fully appreciate what has happened, you have to grasp the panorama of the "Big Picture", you have to stand back from all the details and look at the outline of events:
US Constitution 101...
In the beginning the States were independent and sovereign. That is why they were called "states": a State was not yet thought of as a mere subdivision of a larger unit, as is the case now. A state in such context represent the People of each State collectively, just as the People of each State represent their State respectively.
The universal understanding and premise was that in ratifying the Constitution, the 13 States yielded a very small amount of their sovereignty, but kept most of it. Ratification meant that not only did the People represent their respective State but they concurrently represent all the People of all the States. While each State would continue to respectively represent all of it's people, the Constitution would represent all the People of all the States.
Those who were reluctant to ratify generally didn't object to the specific powers the Constitution delegated to the federal government. But they were suspicious: they Rightfully wanted assurances that if those few powers were granted, other powers, never granted, wouldn't be seized or illegally appropriated by the "Fed" as well.
In The Federalist, Hamilton and Madison argued at some length that under the proposed distribution of power the federal government would never be able to "usurp", as they put it, those other powers. Madison wrote soothingly in Federalist No. 45 that the powers of the federal government would be "few and defined", relating mostly to war and foreign policy, while those remaining with the States would be "numerous and indefinite", and would have to do with the everyday domestic life of the country.
Satisfy to Ratify...