One widely held premise is that Jason Rapert mostly wants attention. If so, these surely are his glory days.
If so, I will feed his hunger for one more day. After today, perhaps I can turn to a new subject. Tom Cotton, maybe.
If Rapert reads this column early enough, as I suspect he will, then he might have time to incorporate a lamentation for me and my heathen ilk into his sermon. I would be honored.
What happened was that Rapert, state senator and right-wing grandstand, got granted permission by this newspaper last Sunday to answer critics in a Perspective cover piece. His essay was about the pending legalization of same-sex marriage, a matter that has propelled him into a serious lather. He’s against it. For everybody. He’s had it up to here with these judges and these liberals and these columnists.
He says his religion teaches that marriage is “holy.” So he wants to establish his religion in government in a civic context, which is unconstitutional under the First Amendment. You make your “holy” arguments at church, not in government. People have a hard time getting that.
In my column Wednesday, which is published only online and therefore not seen by many of you, I made some measured fun of Rapert’s treatise on two main fronts. One was that he presumed to speak for God. I don’t concede to him or anyone else that official spokesmanship. The other was that he declared that all real political power in America is vested biblically and constitutionally and, by natural law, in “we the people.”
The contrary fact is that our wise founders wanted to empower the people democratically, but only to a limited point. They authorized us to create and install the institutions that would then actually govern. They left constitutional principles to guide our institutions. That is to say the people rule, but not to the extent that they may decide by a majority vote in some subsidiary jurisdiction—Arkansas, let’s say—to violate the federal constitutional principles of equal protection and due process.
So I was greeted early Wednesday morning by a text message from Brother Rapert. He told me I wasn’t as funny as I thought. He said I had mocked him and God. He said, by the way, that I had probably guaranteed his re-election, which, tragically, was never in doubt. But that wasn’t quite enough for him.
A couple of hours later, he joined the cast of public commenters on the aforementioned online column. And the best service I can provide is to quote that comment almost in full. I impose only a minimal excision of extraneous material for purposes of saving space.
Rapert wrote: “Everything in this nation from the commencement of the American Revolution until now is based upon government of the people, by the people and for the people. From the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and ratification by the people of the individual states, the people of this nation rule through our elected representatives. We are the power base from which all laws emanate. To argue that the will of the people has been forever quashed by the superiority of an elitist judiciary is preposterous. If the people of this nation amend the Constitution, the law changes—period. … Keep arguing [that] the people of this nation and the state of Arkansas do not have the authority to govern themselves … and you will soon see the power of the people of this nation is still intact and ultimately will reign supreme.”
A few subsequent public commenters surmised that Jason had threatened a theocratic revolution, a domestic crusade, a holy war. He may have. I’m not so much worried. We could put a little insurrection like that down easily enough.
What interests me more is Rapert’s argument that we are a nation of people, not of laws, and that the people can change the Constitution. That’s simply not so. It reflects a dangerous misunderstanding.
People, especially those composing a majority, can become mobs and impose tyranny, especially if permitted to do so in limited jurisdictions by some kind of home rule. A minority might someday become a majority and turn on Jason to take away his constitutional rights. And that wouldn’t be right.
Our Constitution exists as a set of prevailing nationwide principles to keep that kind of thing from happening. It works so long as we preserve and respect our independent judiciary to apply those principles, not ridicule it as made up of the “superiority” of “elitists.”
The people do not have the authority to change the U.S. Constitution, at least not directly. Our supreme legal document may be amended only by a vote to refer an amendment by a two-thirds majority vote of both the U.S. House and Senate, and then only by ratification by three-fourths of the states within a limited time frame. And that ratification must be provided not through public votes of the people in those states, but by votes of state legislative bodies or, as used only in the case of the Prohibition, specially called state ratifying conventions.
The founders surely didn’t want the U.S. Constitution made into a publicly accessible mess with 90 pieces of debris like the amendments voted by the people for our state Constitution.
We define an unborn child. We deny rights to people by sexual orientation. We declare a right to hunt and fish. We impose page after page of taxation minutiae to keep property taxes from getting equitably applied to farm and timber property. Our state Constitution isn’t a set of guiding principles. It’s an orgy of political bellicosity.
For Rapert to have his theocratic way on matters of public policy, he’d need to change the U.S. Constitution as follows, at a minimum: Repeal the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment. He’d need to do away with freedom of religion (lest some religion preach differently from his) as well as those inconvenient rights of equal protection and due process under the law.
Now that’d keep a smart-aleck local judge from letting the homosexuals get married like regular free people.
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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.