GOP to Read Constitution on House Floor

From CNN:

Republicans will have the Constitution read on the House floor Thursday morning in a nod to the conservative Tea Party freshmen that helped put them back in the majority. The reading will start at 10:30 a.m., with members taking turns until they complete the document -- a process that could take up to a couple of hours.

Story time here.

Senator Kerry's Quest to Amend the Constitution

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission should be stale news to you by now. The new debate is how the disappointed executive and legislative branches will react to the judiciary's (alleged) overreaching.

Senator Kerry suggests starting at the source: amend the constitution. From the Huffington Post:

At a hearing on Tuesday, Kerry said that in the short term he wanted Congress to quickly pass countermeasures that would require corporations to get shareholder approval for political spending and prohibit spending by domestic subsidiaries of foreign corporations and government contractors.

'But we may also need to think bigger,' Kerry said. 'I think we need a constitutional amendment to make it clear once and for all that corporations do not have the same free speech rights as individuals.'

While, undoubtedly, Justice Scalia would be proud of Senator Kerry for actually changing the constitution's text to effect a change in its meaning, I can't imagine a bigger third-rail for the Senior Senator than running on a platform of "let's fix the first amendment."

More likely than not, Citizens United will be somewhat curtailed by a more mundane act of Congress. Proposals have ranged from requiring shareholder approval of any corporate campaign spending to preventing corporations from listing on exchanges if they fund campaign speech. Whether such an act will withstand the scrutiny of SCOTUS' all seeing eyes is another question (but commentators seem to say no).

So we may be in for a show. Hopefully the 28th Amendment will be a little more spicy than the underwhelming 27th Amendment.

Historic Redline - Early Draft of U.S. Constitution Found in Philadelphia

Historians in Philadelphia were perusing some of the more than 21 million documents in the Historical Society of Philadelphia's collection when they stumbled upon what appeared to be an original draft of the U.S. Constitution. From the Inquirer Journal:

Researcher Lorianne Updike Toler was intrigued by the centuries-old document at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. On the back of a treasured draft of the U.S. Constitution was a truncated version of the same document, starting with the familiar words: "We The People. . . ."