pumpkinstrokemarrow

There is quite a decent pub of this name in Churton Street in Pimlico, a pub which used to be managed by a sometime manager of TB. But this is not the subject of today's homily, rather the Constitution of the United Stated of America.

I have been moved in this matter by a summer edition of the NYRB (August16), an edition with a good proportion of good stuff amongst its 88 pages. As is usual with magazines of this sort, the term book review is a bit of a flag of convenience under which your reviewer can bang on about whatever takes his fancy, but the NYRB is none the worse for that. And a fair proportion of the matter does not even bother with the pretense, like the article by His Eminence Dworkin on constitutional aspects of providing what the rest of the civilized world would regard as a very basic sort of national health service.

Dworkin, after pointing out the quaintness of the leading power of the late 20th century being governed by a document written in the late 18th century, explains that the constitution lists those powers which are given to Congress, powers which were listed at a time when the armed forces and the taxes to pay then with were the main businesses of states. Anything not so listed is a matter for individual states to deal - or not to deal - with as they see fit. Obama's problem being that national health services were not around at the end of the 18th century and that the founding fathers would probably not, in any case, have regarded health as a proper matter for Congress. So there has been a big debate in the Supreme Court, a court in which, despite all the legal flummery, most of the votes are cast on party lines, about whether it is constitutional to hang health care under the clause of the constitution which empowers Congress to regulate commerce between states, just sixteen words in the original, including the words which include regulation of foreigners and natives, thus: 'To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes'. Strange that such a matter should be debated with such heat & earnestness on such grounds. But perhaps not quite as strange as it sounds: opinion is very divided on the merits of a national health service - even one dressed up in insurance clothes - and it is perhaps just as well to let everyone let off their considerable heads of steam.

I then remembered that my picture book about George Washington picked up from a recent car booter (the one which included a picture of his masonic apron, embroidered by some nuns from the Nantes of the absolutist and most Catholic France if you please) also included a picture of the constitution, as agreed in 1787 and running to all of six and one half pages. A surprisingly short document - although I dare say it gets a lot longer when you start to count in the various amendments.

I asked Mr. Google who turned up lots of stuff including http://www.archives.gov which tells you all you are ever likely to want to know about the subject. A very nicely got up piece of internet educational material. Perhaps befitting the solemnity with which citizens talk about their constitution.

And then the following week, I read that the USA is not the only country tied up in a constitution. We gave the Germans one at the end of the second world war, a constitution designed to deny power to the center, to stop Germany becoming a world power again. A constitution which may make it difficult for the Germans to bail out the poor old Greeks as they have their constitutional court too.