Four Sheets of Parchment vs. 2032 Pages of Government Control

The Constitution of the United States was written on four sheets of parchment. If you count the Preamble and all 27 Amendments (remember there were originally only ten), it comes out to 20 typed pages. If you don’t count the signatures and amendments, you’ll have a document of 11 typed pages. No single Amendment is a full page. Many are only a single sentence in length. The First Amendment covers a multitude of freedoms: religion, press, assembly, speech, and the right to petition the government. It does it with only 45 words. Those original four sheets, about 4500 words, were good enough to serve as a document to govern a nation.

Can you imagine a 2032-page healthcare care bill with similar interpretive powers for Congress and the Courts? Consider how much damage these two governmental branches have been able to do with just four sheets of parchment. What will they be capable of doing with 2032 pages of a healthcare bill that will enable them to govern every facet of our lives?

Do you remember how the Supreme Court came to legalize abortion in 1973? Seven of the nine justices claimed to have found in the “penumbra”—the “shadows” of the Constitution—the right to abortion. Here’s how Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, argued for the shadowy “right”:

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