Stripping the Constitution

[Draggingtree]

Public Discourse:

Stripping the Constitution

 

by Justin Dyer

Adam Freedman’s stark proposal in The Naked Constitution that we strip our founding document of its modern and academic glosses shows us that we need to take structural reforms to our Constitution seriously.

New Deal-era Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins once recounted a conversation she had with Franklin Roosevelt about how feasible it was to create a government-administered system of social insurance for the elderly. “Well, do you think it can be done?” the president asked his longtime advisor and friend. “There are constitutional problems, aren’t there?” To this Perkins conceded, “Yes, very severe constitutional problems.” Under the traditional understanding of the enumerated powers of the federal government, there simply was no congressional power to create a national system of social insurance. “But what have we been elected for except to solve the constitutional problems?” Perkins asked. “Lots of other problems have been solved by the people of the United States, and there is no reason why this one shouldn’t be solved.”

Perkins included this story in a speech at the Social Security Administration headquarters in 1962, and she was remarkably candid about her view that the Constitution was an obstacle to be overcome rather than a legal framework to work within. “The constitutional problem was the greatest one,” she said. “How could you get around this business of the State-Federal relationships? It seemed that it couldn’t be done.”

But it could be done—at least politically—and it was. As Perkins was laying out what she deemed to be the “constitutional problem”