Straight From The Hart
By Joan Rowden Hart
I have always been fascinated by the study of our U.S. Constitution.
In the fall of 1991, I sat transfixed in front of my television set
during the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas who had been
nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President George H.W. Bush to
replace Justice Thurgood Marshall. The hearings lasted for hours and
into the next day if I recall, and I was fascinated by the profundity
of the arguments and testimony. I was then, and remain today, a
steadfast supporter of Justice Thomas.
But even before then, in the spring of 1988, I served as a delegate to
the Jefferson Meeting, a bi-partisan non-advocacy debate of issues
concerning the Constitution sponsored by the Missouri Press-Bar
Commission in Jefferson City.
The Jefferson Meeting’s format is based on the original Constitutional
Convention and it is an open public debate. I was designated one of
the group speakers in the category concerning judicial terms, taking
the position that Judges to the Supreme Court and all Federal Judges
should be appointed for ten year terms rather than for a lifetime.
During my speech I quoted extensively from Chief Justice Robert E.
Donnelly’s 1982 proposal to limit the power of the Supreme Court. I
was then, and remain today, a steadfast supporter of Justice Donnelly
who had one of the most brilliant legal minds of our time.
Last week was Constitution Week and I was astounded to learn that
three-quarters of the high school seniors surveyed by the National
Assessment of Educational Progress in 2011 could not name even one
power granted to Congress by the Constitution.
School students of every age and class also showed a deficit in their
understanding of our Constitution.
When De Tocqueville visited America in 1831 he wrote that in New
England, “ every citizen receives the elementary notions of human
knowledge; he is moreover taught the doctrines and the evidences of
his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of
his Constitution.”
But Charles Quigley, head of the Center for Civic Education, said that
in 2011 the results of the NAEP test shows that only four percent of
all twelfth-graders are at a level we would hope our future leaders
would have attained by that age.
And he reminded us that many of these students will be voting this November.
On Sep 17, 2012, during a question and answer session at University of
New Hampshire School of Law, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice David
Souter described “pervasive civic ignorance” as one of the biggest
problems we face today, saying that the decline of civic education is
putting the U.S. in danger.
Quoting him from an article in The Raw Story, he said, ““I don’t worry
about our losing our republican government in the United States
because of a foreign invasion. I don’t worry about a coup by the
military, as has happened in some other places. What I worry about is
that when problems are not addressed people will not know who is
responsible, and when the problems get bad enough — as they might do
for example with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do
with another financial meltdown — some one person will come forward
and say “Give me total power and I will solve this problem.”
He went on to warn that our ignorance about our own government could
lead to a dictatorship because he believes that if the American people
do not know who is responsible, we will stay away from the polls, and
not demand it, and the day will come when somebody will come forward
who promises to do it for us, and we and the government will turn
everything over to that person. And that will be the end of our
democracy.
I don’t know the answer to the problems that I have put forth above.
I do have an opinion but if I said what I really think I would
probably have to leave town, and I like Lebanon too well to leave.
But we are facing a drastic situation in our educational process and
it won’t get any better until there is a major turn-around in the
direction we are heading.
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