The Constitutional Essence of a Healthy Nation

I am thrilled by the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act. Even more thrilling was Chief Justice Roberts of the conservative five breaking away from them and voting astutely with progressives. He encased himself in what I think will be one of US history's greatest decisions, perhaps, the Civil Rights Act of health care in our time. When the nation elects brilliant leaders chosen at the right time it does brilliant things. Elections matter! It was a great week for the president and was a happy day for me. 

Having said that, I think about the conservative perspective of judicial review -- the so called constitutional "originalists" often labeled "strict constructionists" who are philosophically consumed by wanting to deviate little from what they think the Founders in 1789 constitutionally meant and wrote. I am quizzical. The population of the US in 1776 was approximately 350 thousand people.  There were 13 fledgling former colonies and a psychology of individual states which the Founders were trying, with difficulty, to form into some sort of collective sovereign entity. 

It was a nation, too, trying to form a just construct while ironically retaining the unjust institution of slavery, the economic lifeblood of especially the south but the whole nation too, as powerful in its time, perhaps, as the military industrial complex is today.  It is a nation now of 50 states populated by approximately 350 million diverse people with a panoply of different interests forming a huge melting pot of ideas.  Could the Founders have envisioned this?
 
A document constructed then must change now in many ways as the social fabric of the nation changes. Does one really think, for example, that the Founders understood their Second Amendment to allow rapid-fire guns with double clip magazines, unlimited assault rifles or a powerful organization advocating for minimal gun control even when a House member or a president is nearly assassinated with ease? Could they have envisioned domestic criminal thuggish often psychotic violence which never ends placing millions of guns in the hands of the psychologically unbalanced who will be tempted to use them at any cost?  

The Founders' nation was originally composed of 13 colonies afterward states needing to maintain state militias because they had confronted the external force of British control. Who is going to overthrow a country of 350 million successfully now? HOPEFULLY, NO ONE will.  What external threat could be so powerful as to force millions of individuals in that complex sovereign nation to think they need and must have weaponry geared for internal and external war which could, in truth, be waged only by local police or the various military forces of government? 

Truly, though, what was the Founders' original intent?  I believe it was to form a document which could accommodate change and thereby withstand the test of time.  I do not think the Founders were so obtuse to believe their institutions should be quick-sanded in 18^th-century cement.

Progressives understand the nation changes. We understand its people through their institutions and its Constitution must reflect that change as well.  The brilliance of the document the Founders wrote about two and one-half centuries ago is that it is flexible enough to accommodate those social changes which, I believe, the Founders knew, eventually, would occur.  We are still a healthy nation.   I hope the essence of progressive thought and its humane Constitutional interpretation keeps us that way.