monday, april 13, 1981
daily nebraskan
page 5
A runaway Supreme Court is the real danger
Washington-There is a specter haunt-
ing official Washington. It is the specter of
a constitutional convention - a wide-open
conclave where delegates, chosen by the
people, debate and decide upon alterations
in the Constitution on issues ranging from
the right to life to the death penalty.
What has given the specter shape and
form is that 30 states have issued a call for
a constitutional convention, the purpose of
which is to draft an amendment mandating
a balanced federal budget.
L
If four more states join, Congress may
be required to issue the call. If the conclave
is held, who is to say it will restrict itself to
the discussion of mandated limits on fed
eral spending?
If wc truly believe, however, in the
capacity of a free people to govern them
selves, what do Americans have to fear
from a constitutional convention?
In their eternal wisdom, the founding
fathers made the amending process long
and laborious - as the advocates of ERA
have come to discover. Whether a proposed
amendment emerges from Congress or
from a convention, it must still win the
support of both houses of the legislatures
of 38 states. Any frivolous or foolish pro
posal to come out of a constitutional con
vention would perish long before it attain
ed that considerable height. The D.C. Vot
ing Rights Amendment, for example,
approved overwhelmingly by both Houses
of Congress two years ago, has yet to be
ratified by 10 states. It is dead in the
water.
We are told, for example, that if the un
tutored American people were allowed to
vote today on the Bill of Rights, they
would reject it in a referendum. "Does
anyone want to test that proposition?"
asks the New York Times.
Well, yes. Why not? If the American
people would reject the Bill of Rights in a
national referendum, perhaps it is not be
cause they oppose the Bill of Rights, but
because they oppose the interpretation, the
construction, placed upon the first 10
amendments and the rest of the Constitu
tion by the Supreme Court.
This free people still believes deeply in
its tradition of free speech and freedom of
the press. It does not, however, believe in
the right of organized crime, under the
shelter of that amendment, to run a multi
billion dollar business in hard-core porno
graphy. This free people still believes in the
Fifth Amendment right of an individual
not to be forced to testify against himself.
Reagan deserves no more
notice than lowliest victim
I have been contemplating these past
few days the assassination attempt on
President Reagan and the predictable re
sponses that have followed. My personal re
sponse to the whole incident has been that
we should be grateful that no one yet has
lost their life due to this shooting, but
other than that, I find myself cold, detach
ed and uncaring, certainly feeling a good
deal sorrier for James Brady than for
Reagan.
There is renewed fuss about gun
control, capital punishment, violence, and
so on. This fuss does not mean very much
to me simply because nothing more will be
done than already has been done in the
wake of the assassinations of John and
Robert Kennedy, Mcdger Evers, Malcolm
X or Martin Luther King Jr. Violent
murders have not changed our minds in the
past and I suspect the pattern will
continue.
opinion
What is really frightening to me is what
already has happened and what will
happen : specifically, the hypocrisy fhat has
already manifested itself in the form of
hyped-up "shock and horror," and the
political fallout that all this will have.
These are the sub-surface questions that
few really will come to grips with. I would
like to give it a try. If nothing else, the
questions may prove throught-provoking.
In the first place, who is it that was
shot? Was it truly Ronald Reagan? It seems
not. If Ronald Reagan were at this point a
former grade B movie actor who was wash
ed up at 70 years of age, would we be as
upset as we are now?
Even if he were still a marginal political
figure, would the concern be as great? The
fact is that the president of the United
States was shot and that is why we are all
upset. The president could have been any
body at all; it just happened to be Ronald
Reagan.
This means a person who holds con
siderable power or high political office de
serves more attention when shot than
ordinary people who have the same thing
happen to them. When "important" peo
ple are wounded, all the talk on gun con
trol becomes louder, but people are shot
every day and nothing is ever said or done
about this situation. I feel no sorrier for
Reagan than I do for any other victim of
violent crime in this country. I feel no
sorrier for the president than for the lowli
est bum who gets knifed in any slum in this
country for his few pennies. It is all vio
lent, all horrifying, even for the least and
meekest of us. as well as for the most
powerful. Special attention is uncalled for.
In the second place, this assassination
attempt shouldn't horrify us at all, We are
a nation that revels in violence. We glorify
it in our history and in our entertainment.
We are a nation that has carved its territory
out at the point of a gun, wiping out an
entire pre-existing culture in the process.
Violence happens in our urban areas every
day. We witnessed an entire war on our
television sets. We salivate over every Mafia
execution. An assassination attempt should
be right up our alley, complete with instant
conspiracy theories and the imminent
collapse of government. Why be hypocriti
cal about it? Let's pretend that we're at the
movies.
This syndrome of exalting to some high
er stature the deaths or near-deaths of
presidents and the subsequent response of
pity, sympathy and concern shown by
new-found loyalty for the president and his
cause deserves the most concern. A gun
shot wound is no trivial matter, to be sure,
but compared to the injuries sustained by
the others involved, Reagan was merely
scratched. Blown out of proportion, this
scratch makes it easy for us to forget that
Reagan is supporting and expanding our
further involvement in El Salvador, where
thousands of peasants are being brutally
suppressed and murdered; trimming the
federal budget on all the wrong places and
dangerously escalating the arms race by
way of massive expansion of the military
budget; refusing to talk to the Soviet
Union and rattling Cold-War sabres at them
while still refusing to lift the grain embargo
as he promised to do during the campaign.
(Ironically, aid for cities to combat crime is
getting the ax.) In the wake of sympathetic
outpourings, all this is easily forgotten.
One last scene of hypocrisy that sticks
out is the behavior of Secretary of State
Alexander Haig. Recently, while testifying
before a Senate committee on El Salvador,
he was asked about the four women who
were raped, tortured and killed. Haig tried
valiantly to brush the whole affair off as
one of those things that happens and even
suggested that the nuns were in some vay
responsible for their own deaths. His con
cern for American slaughter abroad should
be just as great as his concern for a wound
ed president.
I care no more for the president being
shot than I do for any other person in this
country who is the victim of senseless
violence. If we continue to condone violent
attitudes in this country, then this ,ts no
more than we should expect to happen.
We cannot let this incident serve as a
political smokescreen for the continuance
of brutal domestic and foreign policies. II
we're going to do something to halt these
events from happening, let's get on with it.
If not, then let's cut out the media circus,
all the tears and all the pious moanings and
groanings and let life, in all its brutality, go
It does not, however, believe that some
killer or rapist has the right to be turned
loose to prowl the urban jungle simply be
cause his arresting officer failed to inform
him of his right to keep his mouth shut.
This free people does not wish to return
to the days of racial segregation. It does
not, however, believe in court-ordered bus
ing to achieve racial balance in the public
schools. It has said so in a hundred surveys
and referenda. What does it take to get this
message through to Washington? What does
it take to get Congress to muster the cour
age to take back the legislative powers
usurped by the Supreme Court?
This free people does not believe in
lynch law, or in hanging horse thieves. It
does, however, with good reason, wonder
how the devil the Supreme Court could
claim the death penalty is "curei and un
usual punishment," hence unconstitution
al, when the death penalty was common
place in the states of the union which
originally ratified the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights.
Instead of wringing their hands in
horror at the remote prospect of a runaway
constitutional convention, why do not our
terrified Lords Temporal look at the cause
-the real and present danger, a runaway
Supreme Court?
(c) 1981 By PJB Enterprises, Inc.
Distributed by The Chicago Tribune
N.Y. Syndicate, Inc.
nebraskan
UPSP 144-080
Editor: Kathy Chenault; Managing Editor: Tom McNeil; News
editor: Steve Miller; Associate news editors: Diane Andersen, Bob
Lannin; Night news editor: Kathy Stokebrand; Magazine editor:
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editor: Larry Sparks; Art director: Dave Luebke; Photography
chief: Mark Billingsley ; Assistant photography chief: Mitch
Hrdlicka. Editorial page assistant: Tom Prentiss.
Copy editors: Mike Bartels, Sue Brown, Pat Clark, Nancy Ellis,
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Business manager: Ann Shank; Production manager: Kitty
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manager: Jeff Pike.
Publications Board chairman: Mark Bowen, 473-0212. Pro
fessional adviser: Don Walton, 473-7301.
The Daily Nebraskan is published by the UNL Publications
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Address: Daily Nebraskan, 34 Nebraska Union, 14th and R
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