The Conservative Manifesto

I have, somewhere on my bookshelves, a copy of The Communist Manifesto, penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and published in 1848. Who can forget the opening lines?

"A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.

"Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries."

They don't make manifestoes like that any more, and I don't think the Mount Vernon manifesto is likely to make the kind of impression on our national politics that its sponsors would like. It's pretty tame stuff, in this day and age, to accuse your opposition of ignoring the Constitution, particularly when the right, in the persons of George W. Bush and Antonin Scalia, have found it convenient to re-write that venerable document at need.

By all means, let us have constitutional government. As a first step, rather than trotting out the tired old myth that Congressional powers are limited to the list in Article I, Section 8, how about noting that nothing in Article II gives the President the power to act in the stead of Congress?

A manifesto? I don't think the conservative bloc in this country has the energy to create anything like a manifesto. After all, they keep falling back on the 162-year-old trick of calling upon the specter of communism as a focus for their fears.