Rethinking 1937

摘要

In nathaniel hawthorne's day, as today, and as usual in America, the voices of various "experts" and "realists" gravely warned that society's problems were more daunting than ever and demanded that old principles yield to new realities. Hawthorne, however, kept his head. It was time, he said, to consult "those respectable old blockheads who still... kept a death grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning." Two weeks ago the Supreme Court dusted off an idea that has not been in vogue since 1937, an idea that went out of fashion exactly 150 years after the Constitutional Convention of 1787 made it a bedrock principle of the Republic. Now the Court has reaffirmed it, but only by a 5-4 vote. Still, the decision in the Lopez case indicates, more strongly than all the fermenting rhetoric from the political branches of the federal government, that 1995 really might be remembered as a year of restoration.