The Big Con(stitution)

We don't endorse or dis-endorse candidates of either party here at The Big Con. We do, however, humbly admit ourselves to be partisans of the United States Constitution [1]. Being as Mr. Perlstein, the blog's proprietor, is a member of a minority religious group—he is of the Jewish persuasion—we have always especially appreciated the third clause of that document's Article VI:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

"No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office." All the presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, should reread that clause. They should reread the whole Constitution, for God's sake, but this part especially. Because it's just now come out that one of those candidates appears as ready to double-cross our nation's sacred charter as surely as if he had proclaimed, "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate, a House of Representatives, and the combined membership of my Aunt Lulu's bridge club."

It's really that simple.

At a fundraiser in Las Vegas, a distinguished Muslim citizen, a businessman who served his country in 1997 by negotiating with Sudan to offer counterterrorism support to the Clinton administration, among other noble gestures, asked one of the presidential candidates—who happens to be a member of a minority religious group himself—if we would consider appointing a Muslim to his cabinet.

The candidate responded: "based on the number of American Muslims in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified."

Someone take this man to a tattoo parlor. He deserves to have Article VI, Clause iii of the document he wishes to swear to uphold as President of the United States inscribed upon his upper thigh, lest he forget the principles upon which this nation was founded.

Quiet dishonorably, by the way, this candidate has since tried to climb down [2] from the plain meaning of his statement. But as the indefatigable researchers at the Talking Points Memo empire have now established time [3] and again [4], our candidate is now voluminously on the record cherishing Article VI of the Constitution as his personal scrap of soiled toilet tissue.

But this is not about Romney. It's about the conservatism. It always is. Last week Digby wrote in this space about how conservatism has lately devolved into nothing more than a grand experiment in defining deviancy down [5]: rendering once-sacred American principles (like: "America doesn't torture") profane, again and again and again, with remarkable resourcefulness and creativity—and dragging us all down to their level. Here is just one tiny thread in that glorious tapestry.

But let us not also miss, in this talk of the sacred and the profane, a second, more banal tidbit of evil packed into Romney's full quote. After saying, "based on the number of American Muslims in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified," he added: "But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve as lower levels of my administration."

Leave aside that our Mitt has just revealed that he considers cabinet positions as mere patronage plums to be handed out to ethnic constituencies, in proportion to that constituency's percentage of the U.S. population. Consider, instead, what this means for Mr. Romney's grasp of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution [6], which says, to put it in a nutshell, that there are no first class, second class, or third class citizens in America—just citizens.

Muslims? Let them serve in the "lower levels." Maybe, say, shining shoes in the State Department.