Impeachment: Back to basics
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, Jan, 1999

No, impeachment is not the end of the world as some have maintained.  In fact, it may be the resurrection of a portion the Old World that would do us all some good.  For once we are really looking at the Constitution. . . And who knows, maybe we’ll be changed by it.

Too often constitutional principles (and even para-constitutional concepts) have been painfully strained to fit someone’s current cultural agenda and, once altered, are enculturated into society through repetitious reference in various media outlets.

Examples?  “Free speech” is now interpreted to give governmental endorsement and protection to naked ladies dancing on tabletops in bars.  Or the same phrase is used to authorize total access to unimaginable deviant sexual behavior pumped into your video monitor via the Internet. 

“Right to privacy” now means you can “terminate” your pregnancy even as the child is being born.  Or, it is used to justify statutes that sanction homosexual sex with anyone, any time, in any way, almost anywhere.

Thomas Jefferson, someone who seemed to have wisdom for effective governance and perhaps an even better understanding of human nature, cautioned with these words:  “On every question of construction, [we must] carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”

Have faith.  Something more profound may be happening regardless of whether the president is convicted in the Senate:  It may well be that William Jefferson Clinton, of all the presidents in the last 50, or even 100 years, may be the one that leads this nation back to discovering its constitutional footing.  Not a bad legacy.  Just a bad way to secure it.
 

Key Family Foundation Contacts: Kent Ostrander, Executive Director Martin Cothran, Senior Associate Policy Analyst