What The Founders Meant
Obama's book The Audacity of Hope devotes an entire chapter to the subject. In it, he confesses to having some sympathy for conservative Justice Antonin Scalia's view that the Constitution's language is perfectly clear on some matters and can be strictly applied. But in the end, Obama writes, much of the Constitution speaks in generalities that cannot tell us what the Founding Fathers would have thought about modern dilemmas: whether, for example, the National Security Agency's data mining is constitutional, or what freedom of speech means in the context of the Internet.
"Anyone like Justice Scalia looking to resolve our modern constitutional dispute through strict construction has one big problem," Obama writes. "The founders themselves disagreed profoundly, vehemently, on the meaning of their masterpiece."
The professorial Obama is on display in this chapter, refusing to provide simple answers or formulas, and rejecting so-called bright lines. "Its not just absolute power that the founders sought to guard against," he writes. "Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth — the infallibility of any idea or ideology, or theology, or 'ism', any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course."
Obama concludes the chapter by lauding the founders' end product: "The Constitution envisions a road map by which we marry passion to reason — the ideal of individual freedom to the demands of community. And the amazing thing is that it has worked."
Obama The Constitutionalist
University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has known Obama since they both taught at the law school. Sunstein points out that we have not had a constitutional law specialist in the White House in an exceptionally long time — perhaps not since the early days of the republic.
Former Bush Associate White House Counsel Brad Berenson, who nearly 20 years ago worked with Obama as an editor at the Harvard Law Review, does not share Obama's politics. But Berenson recognizes that the Democrat [Obama] is far more knowledgeable than McCain when it comes to the courts. Berenson predicts that Obama's background in constitutional issues "may mean that a President Obama takes more personal interest and more of a personal hand in his judicial appointments than a President McCain would."
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