Fareed Zakaria on the CNN show bearing his name Sunday actually recommended we use social media to create "a set of amendments to modernize the Constitution for the 21st Century."
On his radio program Monday, conservative talk show host Mark Levin gave Zakaria a much-needed lesson about this document the liberal commentator so badly wants to change (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):
MARK LEVIN: Fareed Zakaria yesterday on the Constitution. Hat-tip Media Research Center. You’re going to want to listen to this. Cut ten, go.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN: And let me be very clear here, the U.S. constitution is an extraordinary work, one of the greatest expressions of liberty and law in human history. One amazing testament to it is the mere fact that it has survived as the law of the land for 222 years.
But our constitution has been revised 27 times, some of these revisions being enormous and important, such as the abolition of slavery. Then there are areas that have evolved. For example, the power of the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, is barely mentioned in the document. This grew as a fact over history.
But there are surely some issues that still need to be debated and fixed. The electoral college, for example, is highly undemocratic, allowing for the possibility that someone could get elected as president even if he or she had a smaller share of the total national vote than his opponent.
The structure of the Senate is even more undemocratic, with Wisconsin's six million inhabitants getting the same representation in the Senate as California's 36 million people. That's not exactly one man, one vote.
And we are surely the only modern nation that could be paralyzed as we were in 2000 over an election dispute because we lack a simple national electoral system.
So we could use the ideas of social media that were actually invented in this country to suggest a set of amendments to modernize the Constitution for the 21st Century. Such a plan is not unheard of in American history. After all, the delegates in Philadelphia in 1787 initially meant not to create the constitution as we now know it, but instead to revise the existing document, the Articles of Confederation. But the delegates saw a disconnect between the document that currently governed them and the needs of the nation, so their solution was to start anew. I'm just suggesting we talk about a few revisions.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
LEVIN: No you’re not. The Constitution has already been shredded almost beyond recognition, and you want to finish the job.
For the rest of Levin's marvelous lesson, you're going to have to play the video above. It will be well worth your time.
Bravo, Mark! Bravo!
(Grateful hat-tip to our friends at The Right Scoop.)
