GOP lawmakers fast to ‘tweak’ Constitution while revering it

Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia won his seat in Congress campaigning as a strict defender of the Constitution. He carries a copy in his pocket and is particularly fond of invoking the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

But it turns out there are parts of the document he doesn’t like - lots of them. He wants to get rid of the language in amendments about birthright citizenship, federal income taxes and the popular election of senators, among others. He would add plenty of stuff, including explicitly authorizing castration as punishment for child rapists.

This hot-and-cold take on the Constitution is surprisingly common within the GOP, particularly among conservatives such as Mr. Broun who portray themselves as strict constitutionalists and frequently accuse Democrats of twisting the document to serve political aims.

Republican lawmakers have proposed at least 42 constitutional amendments in the current Congress, including one that has gained favor recently to eliminate the automatic grant of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

Democrats - who typically take a more liberal view of the Constitution as an evolving document - have proposed 27 amendments of their own, and fully one-third of those are part of a package from a single member, Illinois Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr.Mr. Jackson’s revisions encapsulate a liberal agenda in which everyone has new rights to quality housing and education, but most of the Democratic proposals deal with less ideological issues such as congressional succession in a national disaster or voting rights in U.S. territories.

The Republican proposals, by contrast, tend to be social and political statements, such as the growing movement to repeal the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship. Republicans including Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the lead Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, argue that immigrants are abusing the right to gain citizenship for their children, something he says the amendment’s authors didn’t intend.

Mr. Sessions, who routinely accuses Democrats of trying to subvert the Constitution and calls for respecting the document’s “plain language,” is taking a different approach with the 14th Amendment.

“I’m not sure exactly what the drafters of the amendment had in mind,” he said, “but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen.”

Other widely supported Republican amendments would prohibit government ownership of private companies, bar same-sex marriage, require a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise taxes, and - a Capitol Hill perennial - prohibit desecration of the American flag.

During the health care debate, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, introduced an amendment that would allow voters to directly repeal laws passed by Congress, a move that would radically alter the Founding Fathers’ system of checks and balances.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, the outspoken Minnesota Republican who founded a “tea party caucus” in Congress, wants to restrict the president’s ability to sign international treaties because she fears the Obama administration might replace the dollar with some sort of global currency.

Mr. Broun, who is among the most conservative members of Congress, said he sees no contradiction in his devotion to the Constitution and his desire to rewrite parts of it. He said the Founding Fathers never imagined the size and scope of today’s federal government and that he’s simply reviving their vision by trying to amend it.

“It’s not picking and choosing,” he said. “We need to do a lot of tweaking to make the Constitution as it was originally intended, instead of some perverse idea of what the Constitution says and does.”

The problem with such a view, said constitutional law scholar Mark Kende, is that divining what the framers intended involves subjective judgments shaded with politics. Holding up the Second Amendment dealing with gun rights as sacrosanct, for example, while dismissing other parts of the Constitution is “cherry-picking,” said Mr. Kende, director of Drake University’s Constitutional Law Center.

Virginia Sloan, an attorney who directs the nonpartisan Constitution Project, agreed.

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