Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:
- Austin Bay’s Iraqi friend comments on the Iraqi constitution. Contra his friend’s claim, the U. S. Constitutional Convention convened May 25, 1787 and adjourned September 17, 1787 so the delegates to the Convention took less than four months to write our Constitution and they did so without models other than the Articles of Confederation and the several state and colonial constitutions. They kicked a few things down the road, notably slavery, so we should expect the Iraqis to do the same.
- Brad Plumer, an opponent of the invasion of Iraq and the Bush Administration, makes the case against withdrawal from Iraq.
- I’m surprised at how few bloggers have posted about the big Vioxx suit decided yesterday. Professor Bainbridge comments with links to others. A Stitch in Haste has thoughts of his own.
- Laughing Wolf salutes blog-father Joe Katzman, founder of Winds of Change.
- Pollster Scott Rasmussen gives us the words for the birds on opinion on Cindy Sheehan. Hat tip: WILLisms who has put the results in a very snappy graphical form.
- The things you see when you haven’t got your gun: Colony of wild wiener dogs found in British Columbia.
That’s the lot.
Surely, you are not asserting that it only took 4 months to form the Constitution? You mention the Articles, which, despite your brushing off, most certainly acted as a model. The Articles themselves took about 16 months to write and another 3 years to ratify. Add that to the time it took for Congress to decide that it would not cover a federal government in the long term, and you get closer to 12 years to finalize the US Constitution. If you simply stick with the time it took to debate over and ratify the 2 documents, you get roughly the 5 years to which Bay’s friend refers, a relatively moderate figure to your quite generous one. By using your 4-month figure, do you feel the Iraqis can healthily skip the inevitably lengthy debate and ratification processes? I have good, positive hopes for the Iraqis, but I sincerely doubt things will be – or should even appear to be – that easy.
That’s apples and oranges. The Articles of Confederation were not a first draft of the Constitution. They were a different constitution. Drafting the Constitution took four months. That is a matter of fact.
By the finalization standard you’re proposing it could reasonably be asserted that, since we’ve amended the Constitution more than twenty times in two hundred some-odd years, it’s taken that long to finalize the Constitution. Will we ever finalize it?
I don’t know how long the Iraqis will take to write their new Constitution. I’m quite certain they will find it necessary—as the writers of our Constitution did—to kick some cans down the road. I see no particular need for a fixed deadline except that I do believe that the Iraqis need a sense of urgency and a deadline does provide that.