Mount Vernon Statement released today – Constitutional conservatism?

The Mount Vernon Statement is set to be signed today by 80 leading conservatives on the eve of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) event in Washington this week. Some call it a manifesto, some a resurgence of the Contract with America. May I remind readers of the true conservative manifesto?

Michelle Malkin just hit on this topic and I thought it was worthwhile to write some commentary.

Update: The statement will be posted here tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. I was expecting the text to be available at some point today, but I have no idea why it’s such a secret. My guess … it certainly won’t be all that interesting.

Update 2: Text is here.

The United States Constitution is a fantastic document written by great leaders who ensured the document would work well centuries into the future. They provided for a means to amend the document, ensuring it could “live”in that way, but they did not intend the document to be vauge. In fact, it was – and is – very clear.

I’m not sure if we need to restate the guiding principles of the U.S. Constitution in another way, but this group does, and hopes the TEA Party movement will pick up this document and use it as a framework for activities, events and organization in the future.

I’ll post the document when the full version is released, but here are some thoughts from American Spectator.

Dubbed the Mount Vernon Statement, its goal is to unite the right — economic, social, and national security conservatives — under a set of shared principles. The idea is to make different conservative groups feel part of the same team and also to bind them in a common intellectual enterprise. …

a set of philosophical principles that can serve as the foundation for policy formulation later. …

“In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics,” the document reads. “The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.” …

“I think it’s an excellent statement of conservative first principles,” former Congressman David McIntosh, a leading participant in the Conservative Action Project, told TAS. “The objective was to unify various people who were conservatives who care about different aspects of conservatism. It unites all of those principles under kind of a stron hold of constitutional government.”

Our Constitution is not obsolete, and it should never be referred to in that way. For those of you who think it is obsolete, post your (concise) comments below and I’ll give you an answer. You may not like it, but the Constitutions greatness is that it really does deal with almost anything your imagination comes up with.

How? Think about the number ten.