There was a quibble about which version to read, the original version or the current version that reflects revisions, amendments or deletions…. actually, they couldn’t even agree on what to call those. Rep. Goodlatte (R-Virginia) had decided it would be the 2010 version. That contest was easily resolved without any inconvenient turn to principles. It was a matter of privilege. It was Goodlatte’s idea to start the session this way so it was his privilege to select the text.

With that settled, reading the Constitution isn’t tricky. Where our politicians prove their mettle is when they decide what to make of it once it’s read. Will congressional freshman and their colleagues see their own eye staring at them from the text or will they see something more than they already knew was there?

The 10th Amendment was so anticipated during the performance that Rep. Goodlatte made sure he recited it himself and more than a dozen representatives were present to applaud as he did so. Did that group listen as intently to all the powers that were delegated to the United States by the Constitution? Did they notice there was no requirement that those powers be “expressly” or “specifically” granted? This is where the Constitution gets tricky. You have to read carefully for what isn’t there as much as what is and can’t make too much of one favorite clip without considering its relationship to the rest of the document.

If you only read your assigned portion or your favorite part before dashing out of the chamber, have you really read the Constitution? More importantly, have you considered what it requires of you in your role as an elected representative?

Reading the Constitution isn’t a bad idea but don’t stop there. What does it mean? The real debate lies in how we interpret the document and that debate is as old as we the people are. In Original Meanings, Jack Rakove characterizes the 1787 debate between Federalists and Antifederalists as a difference in political, perhaps even scientific, perspective:

If the framers were Newtonian of one kind in seeking to set different political forces in equillibrial opposition to one another, the Anti-Federalists were Newtonians of another stamp in thinking that the science of politics was grounded in universal laws. Their science comprised a fixed body of doctrine and cautionary lessons that were best applied to avert the risks of innovation… By contrast, for Federalists the science of politics was becoming experimental and dynamic in a modern sense (p. 152)

This same contest presents itself today when elected representatives think reading the Constitution on the House floor reveals everything we need to know. Considering these two different ideas about what to do next, it is easy to imagine the 112th’s performance will do little to change “business as usual” in Washington without continuing the discussion. In Rakove’s characterization, National Academy alumni will recognize the difference between nature represented as a a solid green line (Antifederalist) or a dotted one (Federalists). Students of Thomas Kuhn will recognize two competing paradigms or a contest to successfully articulate the one that will guide future efforts to govern. Whatever you see in Rakove’s analysis of the opposing viewpoints, the substance of the Constitution is revealed through its interpretation.

Whether green boxes, competing paradigms or different flavors of Newtonians, the real contest lies in determining what the Constitution means for the real work of governing. It doesn’t stop once the last words of the Constitution have been read. That’s only the beginning.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And everyone wants to know what you wrote! To kick off what we hope will be a season of sharing here’s my first attempt at writing Thomas Kuhn as a Dr. Seuss styled story for kids. Let me know if you need help getting your work posted….

The Original: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Normal Science

“it [a paradigm] is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions.

To see how this can be so, we must recognize how very limited in both scope and precision a paradigm can be at the time of its first appearance. Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute. To be more successful is not, however, to be either completely successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number. The success of a paradigm—whether Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of planetary position, Lavoisier’s application of the balance or Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field—is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself…

The existence of the paradigm sets the problem to be solved; often the paradigm theory is implicated directly in the design of apparatus able to solve the problem. Without Pincipia, for example, measurements made with the Atwood machine would have meant nothing at all.

A third class of experiments and observations exhausts, I think, the fact-gathering activities of normal science. It consists of empirical work undertaken to articulate the paradigm theory, resolving some of its residual ambiguities and permitting the solution of problems to whit it had previously only drawn attention. This class proves to be the most important of all, and its description demands its subdivision. In the more mathematical sciences, some of the experiments aimed at articulation are directed to the determination of physical constraints. Newton’s work, for example, indicated that the force between two unit masses at unit distance would be the same for all types of matter at all positions in the universe. But his own problems could be solved without even estimating the size of this attraction, the universal gravitational constant; and no one else devised apparatus able to determine it for a century after the Principia appeared. Nor was Cavendish’s famous determination in the 1790’s the last. Because of its central position in physical theory, improved values of the gravitational constant have been the object of repeated efforts ever since by a number of outstanding experimentalists. Other examples of the same sort of continuing work would include determinations of the astronomical unit, Avogadro’s number, Joule’s coefficient, the electronic charge, and so on. Few of these elaborate efforts would have been conceived and none would have been carried out without a paradigm theory to define the problem and to guarantee the existence of a stable solution.”

Kuhn, Thomas S. “The Nature of Normal Science.” The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

I first attempted to infuse the text with the political through elaboration. I had no intention of using the mode of a genre shift but it all made sense after working on the elaboration. Then I had to find a third mode that could be completed in a relatively short amount of time because I nearly ran away with the People of Penelope!

Re-Write #2: Genre Shift

Once upon a time in a small faraway place there lived the People of Penelope. The men, women, and children of Penelope did all the normal things that men, women and children do like laugh and sing and work and play, but all of this was done in a very special way. These laughing and playing people of Penelope believed that walking on their hands was the only way, so they wore boots on their fingers and caps on their toes! This all came to be when Penelope first began and its people had tiny little feet. As silly as it may be, living with tiny little feet proved to be no small feat for it took 837 steps to get from the bedroom to the bathroom and walking to school could take all week.  Now the persistent people of Penelope continued to plod along but they couldn’t help but notice that they got very little else done.

Horses, cars and even St. Bernard’s couldn’t provide relief. The tiny feet didn’t fit the stirrups or reach the pedals, and the poor dog barely escaped. A few children at play one day discovered what perhaps could be a brilliant new way. They think they may have seen it on T.V. or maybe it came to them in a dream, but walking on their hands got them to school with time to play. People watched with interest and fantasized about possibly cutting the trip to the refrigerator from 795 steps on tiny little feet to 5 simple strides on great big hands. The excitement grew and people wondered what other great things they might now accomplish and if this could really work.

With this promise in mind, an engineer designed a car that one could steer with tiny little feet while working the pedals with great big hands and looking out to the road from under the dash. Traffic coordinators decided they could move traffic lights to the fire hydrants so they could be seen this way, and Penelope grew more and more productive! There were great new plans to make walking on your hands the very best way from here to there and everywhere. A few older folks, however, were most unimpressed. You see they had never walked on their hands or even stood on their heads. They didn’t think they would be able to keep up and they were certain they wouldn’t like living in the world upside-down. The local gym saw a need and started classes to instruct the people on the proper form and strategies for speed and stability while all the local posters and signs were re-designed. They even decided to hang trees where the traffic signals used to be! Slowly the world upside-down began to look like the world upside-right as though this is the way it was always meant to be.

So now in the land of Penelope people laugh while they “talk with their feet” and sing when they feel “light on their hands.” Every now and then someone will insist that a world upside-down is simply bizarre, but the people of Penelope are quick to extol how grand life became when they started doing things this way and slow to see any reason to be back on their feet.

Generally speaking, a theory has the following components:

1. It organizes communication.
2. It organizes ideas.
3. It generates new ideas.
4. It displays the complexities of a problem.
5. It guides investigation.
6. It generates explanations and predictions.

This stuff is nothing new to students of Kuhn or to those who teach and study theory. My brief, amateur exegesis focuses on the first point about organizing communication. The specific type of communication presented below is what I would call “stylized public dialogue,” which I consider any writing, music, or art deliberately offered for public interest or consumption.

In an earlier politicolor post, Stepwinder considered a story by Kurt Vonnegut that had a constitutional theme/idea. Hobbes21 posted the results of his considerable research into popular songs with Federalist and anti-federalist themes.

I modestly build on the efforts of Step and Hobbes21 by offering two poems with constitutional themes. Rather than attempting to analyze the poems myself, I simply offer them to you for possible reflection. Maybe you will want to post a poem with an organizing idea or theme of American constitutional theory. -Mutter-

(1) OPTIMISM as reflected in Whitman’s

“Song of the Open Road”

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose…

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me

I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held such goodness….

(2) The FEDERALIST MIND in Ammons’

“Poetics”

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper-though
that, too-but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.