Our Constitution Is The Best Model A Country Could Have

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

America's Legacy: Our Constitution is no longer respected as it once was. Nations writing new constitutions don't see it as the prototype to be followed. All have something in common with our president.

A study to be published in June in the New York University Law Review finds that our Constitution "appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere."

"Among the world's democracies," writes David Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia, "constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall.

"Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s."

The New York Times' coverage of this study finds "lots of possible reasons" for the decline. The U.S. Constitution," it says, "is terse and old" and "guarantees relatively few rights."

"The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation," says the Times.

"And the Constitution's waning influence" the Times adds, "may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige."

The Constitution doesn't seem to be of much use to Barack Obama, either. The president who also thinks U.S. power and prestige are no longer what they were, and aren't that important anyway, recently lamented that the Founders "designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes."