In his April 16 letter “Constitution penned by great minds” Robert Wassman stated, “Our Constitution’s authors were morally and intellectually giants who wrote it as a barrier against tyranny. Such statesmen are rare today and those misguided nerds who (Jordan) Sillars would select would be dangerous moral and intellectual pygmies tampering with the best document ever written by the hand of man.”
Rather than making a fetish of the Constitution and those who wrote the original bits, including the slavery bits, I’d suggest Wassman study a little more history. The Constitution was written so that those with great power and wealth could keep their power. The current struggles in America today are eerily reminiscent of the struggles in the latter days of the Roman Republic. Just as we have rich people favoring Republicans and Democrats today, then there were the optimates against the populares — rich people who pandered either to the wealthy or the masses, and elections then as now were decided by money. We know how that turned out.
If our current government cannot amend the Constitution to reduce the effect that vast wealth has on deciding elections, and if we do not have heroic people willing to produce a new Constitution that restores our liberty and rights, we will surely go the way of Rome.
John M. Kowalski
Camas
