How to Avoid Lying

October 12, 2000

Al Gore’s relentless fibs have accumulated to the point where they have seriously damaged his candidacy. He seems unable to stop himself from silly little prevarications that are easily exploded and immediately become fodder for comedians. Not good; not at this stage of the campaign.

Gore’s petty mendacity is puzzling. Liberals shouldn’t have to lie. They have developed a technique of deception that makes outright falsehood superfluous.

Centuries ago the Catholic order of Jesuits gained a reputation among Protestants for deceiving without falsehood, by using common words in equivocal senses. Hence the disparaging term jesuitical, a synonym for equivocal quibbling. Shakespeare alludes to “equivocation” several times; it was a hot topic in Elizabethan England, where Jesuits, operating underground, were regarded as politically subversive. Macbeth denounces the witches who have misled him as “juggling fiends ... / Who keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope.” Their words have proved literally true, but turn out to mean the opposite of what he assumed they meant.

In our own time liberals — politicians and jurists alike — have learned to do likewise. The most brazen examples in recent memory are Bill Clinton’s quibbles about the meanings of such seemingly clear words as alone, sex, and even is. He didn’t lie under oath; he merely used these words with equivocal senses nobody suspected.

These were miniature instances of the technique liberals have applied to law, particularly constitutional law. Since the New Deal, liberals have invested the old words of the U.S. Constitution with new and previously unsuspected meanings, all of which, by a strange coincidence, tend to enlarge the power of the federal government and its courts.

The liberal equivocators have taught us that the Constitution forbids racial segregation, public school prayer, most obscenity laws, laws restricting abortion, and so forth. At the same time, they have taught us that the Constitution authorizes the federal government to create a national welfare state, to control virtually all forms of commerce, and to legislate in nearly every area it chooses.

In each case it was clear that the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, were enacting their own policy preferences, not bowing to the imperatives of the law or the Constitution. The consistent result has been to centralize power. Seldom have the courts ruled that the federal government had overstepped its authority; and those clauses limiting federal power, such as the Tenth Amendment, have become dead letters.

They have done this by giving new, equivocal meanings to such phrases as establishment of religion, the freedom of speech or of the press, unreasonable search and seizure, equal protection of the laws, and general welfare. They have also created new “rights,” nowhere mentioned in the text of the Constitution, by positing “penumbras, formed by emanations” from other rights, whatever that may mean — and of course it may mean anything the courts want it to mean. Meanwhile, the courts have ignored inconvenient passages.

Now whatever you think of the liberal agenda on its merits, until very recently nobody thought the Constitution meant what liberals now say it means. And in their way, the liberals admit this. But they say the Constitution is a “living document,” whose meanings may change over time. This is what Gore meant when he said recently that the Constitution “grows” with history.

So nobody actually lies about what the Constitution means — at least it’s awkward to prove, at any given moment, that the liberal interpretation is false. It has superficial plausibility to anyone who doesn’t have a thorough knowledge of the Constitution. And liberals, like Clinton, don’t think of themselves as liars when they use words in equivocal senses.

But what it comes to is that the American public — alias “We the people” — has allowed the federal government to decide what its own powers are. We allow the federal government to change the meaning of the document in which we supposedly set limits on that government. By claiming the authority to interpret the Constitution unilaterally, it has abolished those limits.

This defeats — in fact, inverts — the whole purpose of having a written constitution, which, as Alexander Hamilton said, was meant to be “unalterable by the government.” The cunning of it is that nobody has to lie.

Joseph Sobran

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