The Constitution: use it or lose it.(The Last Word)

Not being a devotee of late-night television, I had to be told by an acquaintance about a very insightful remark uttered by comedian Jay Leno. During the customary monologue at the start of his nightly show, Leno pointed to our nation's leaders and said: "They keep talking about drafting a constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys; it's worked for over 200 years; and [heck] we're not using it any more."

Leno's hyperbole contained an element of truth. While some deference is paid to procedural parts of the venerable document, its most substantive clauses have been consigned to a memory hole. The Constitution is honored in the sense that there are still three branches of government; the president still reports about "the state of the Union"; Congress does "lay and collect taxes"; and "compensation" is provided to those who serve in a government post.

However, the same cannot be said about the very first sentence in the main body of the Constitution. It states: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.... " If all legislative powers reside in Congress, why have Supreme Court decisions attained "law of the land" status? And why is law made through executive orders and presidential decisions? Not only is this abuse tolerated, it's celebrated. In 1998, Clinton adviser Paul Begala arrogantly described his boss's repeated use of executive orders as, "Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool." And Congress did nothing to stop this abuse.

Occasionally, a direct repudiation of a hugely important constitutional provision surfaces. Worried that a future president might take the nation into war, the Founders carefully assigned the war-declaration power solely to Congress. But Congress did not declare the wars we fought in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq (both in 1991 and 2003). The Constitution wasn't amended to account for this; it was simply ignored by the vast majority in Congress.

With war clouds gathering just two years ago, the House International Relations Committee met on October 3, 2002 and Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) offered a motion to declare war on Iraq. He announced his intention to vote against his own measure because he didn't believe our nation should go to war against Saddam Hussein's regime. But he wanted to remind his colleagues that they alone possessed war-making power. If they wanted to go to war against Iraq, he reasoned, they should vote to declare war as required by the Constitution. Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) responded to Dr. Paul's initiative with as clear a ...