Triumphant Republicans thought they were reaffirming their “fealty to the framers” by reading the Constitution aloud to open the 112th Congress, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post.

They contended that this symbolic display—to be supported by a new rule requiring that all proposed legislation cite its basis in the Constitution—would herald a new era of limited

government and a return to the nation’s first principles. But instead of the real thing, GOP legislators read a “sanitized Constitution” with certain passages omitted—a founding document

from “a fanciful land” that never condoned slavery, never considered a black person as three fifths of a person, and never denied women the right to vote. It’s kind of strange to show

shall be necessary and proper.”

The Founders did not, however, give either Congress or the president unlimited powers, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. The reading of the Constitution reflected the national

feeling, powerfully expressed in the midterm elections, that since Barack Obama took office, we’ve moved too far from government “constitutionally limited by its enumerated powers” to one

“constrained only by social need.” If the federal government can fine anyone who doesn’t buy health insurance, is there anything government can’t do? Apparently not, in the progressive

worldview, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review Online. The Supreme Court, in the liberal Earl Warren era, managed to discern a “penumbra” in the Constitution that somehow guaranteed

women a right to abortion. Have liberals failed to notice that this document says nothing about giving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations, or government taking

ownership of car companies, not to mention a Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds? For the Left, the Constitution “can be twisted to mean whatever

progressives want it to mean.”

It’s conservatives who are willfully misreading the Constitution, said Michael Lind in Salon.com. Their view of it as “the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments” arises from a Protestant

tradition that is deeply suspicious of any authority that dares to interpret scripture, be it the pope in Rome or the Supreme Court. This political theology has become linked to the Tea

Party’s “neo-Confederate ideology,” with the “political heirs” of the segregationist South denouncing federal authority as illegitimate—especially since it’s now in the hands of “a black

Yankee from Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois.” What the Right is really pining for, said Rex Nutting in Marketwatch.com, is the “weak government” Americans had before 1787 under the Articles of

Confederation. The nation’s Founders, however, recognized that a loosely organized confederacy of states was a political and economic “disaster,” leaving the new nation factionalized,

powerless, and in danger of “being gobbled up by European powers.” The Constitution was deliberately framed to create a “strong central government.”

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