文档介绍：COVER
One Document, Under Siege
By RICHARD STENGEL , ThursdayJune 23, 2011

Photograph by Dwight Eschliman for TIME
Here are a few things the framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom.
Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal
combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.
People on the right and left constantly ask what the framers would say about some event that is happening
today. What would the framers say about whether the drones over Libya constitute a violation of Article I,
Section 8, which gives Congress the power to declare war? Well, since e Washington didn't even
dream that man could fly, much less use a global-positioning satellite to aim a missile, it's hard to say what
he would think. What would the framers say about whether a tax on people who did not buy health
insurance is an abuse of Congress's authority under merce clause? Well, since James Madison did
not know what health insurance was and doctors back then still used leeches, it's difficult to know what he
would say. And what would Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned slaves and is believed to have fathered
children with at least one of them, think about a half-white, half-black American President born in Hawaii (a
state that did not exist)? Again, hard to say.
The framers were not gods and were not infallible. Yes, they gave us, and the world, a blueprint for the
protection of democratic freedoms — freedom of speech, assembly, religion — but they also gave us the
idea that a black person was three-fifths of a human being, that women were not allowed to vote and that
South Dakota should have the same number of Senators as California, which is kind of crazy. And I'm not
even going to mention the Electoral College. They did not give us e taxes. Or Prohibition. Those came
later.
Americans have debated the Constitution since the day it was signed, bu