Are you ready? Well, are you? Are you ready to get boring? If you stick with me, I promise a paradox at the end. (Check out David Cohen’s post at SCOTUSblog to drink the genius water straight from the fire hose.) To get truly boring, we need to go back in time to the 18th century. To get a sense of how long ago that was, consider top hats. Back then, wearing a top hat didn’t just say, as it does now, that, “I am partial to smoking opiates.” Rather, public hygiene being what it was at the time, wearing a top hat conveyed the impression that, “I never know when I will be walking on a sidewalk when someone might decide to empty a bucket of feces from a second floor window.” So, if you think South Carolina is bad now, you should have seen it back then. The genius of the Constitution was that it promised a bunch of unruly, rag-tag colonies a way to band together for limited purposes like establishing an army, regulating trade between the states and, of course, requiring frivolous abortions at taxpayer expense. The Constitution is the rulebook for the federal government, not
