Constitutional worlds collided Friday in Buckhead.
Speaking back-to-back, civil rights hero C.T. Vivian and conservative Supreme Court icon Antonin Scalia addressed a State Bar of Georgia constitutional symposium as from different planets.
Vivian, who in 1965 was attacked by the sheriff of Selma, Ala., in front of TV cameras during a voter registration drive, spoke of the Constitution as a distant promise, realized from generation to generation through bloody sacrifice.
“The Constitution didn’t come complete,” said the preacher of non-violent resistance honored last year with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “We had to make America America.”
Scalia, a whipping boy of liberal commentators for his often pugnacious conservatism, spoke of the Constitution as an intellectual artifact with a plain, fixed meaning that has not changed one whit from the day it was ratified.
“It is a legal document, and it says what it says,” Scalia said. “Rigidity is the purpose of a constitution.”
The dialogue that might have taken place — about the Voting Rights Act that Vivian fought for and Scalia voted last year to partially invalidate — did not happen. Each man addressed the assembled lawyers separately, with Scalia not even mentioning the subject of voting rights.
Both men were warmly received, and both spoke with unforced passion and casual charm, wooing their audience with little lawyer jokes.
Vivian, who lives in Atlanta, quipped that addressing a ballroom full of attorneys at the Westin Buckhead was harder than facing billy clubs in Selma, because “at least you know who your enemies are in the field.”
Scalia drew laughs with a semi-apologetic confession: “I don’t think many of you are going to make much money on what I’m going to talk about” — adding hopefully, “but you never know.”
But, charisma aside, all that united Planet Vivian and Planet Scalia was allegiance to a Constitution they approached from radically different vantage points.
For Vivian, the meaning of the nation’s highest law was found in the streets, among people who “came out of their churches and walked down the street” in Selma, “knowing that the Klan, when it wanted to, would drown you.”
“When we moved down the street, we were bringing (the Constitution) alive.”
Later, in response to a question about what it felt like to face a phalanx of Alabama troopers on the day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, Vivian said:
“It’s not easy, but you know you’re going to meet them. That’s the cost of being an American. I really mean that.”
Scalia, by contrast, made a fierce case for the Constitution as a remarkable piece of legal architecture, whose meaning derives solely from the words put on paper by the men who wrote it.
He dismissed as “idiocy” the arguments of those who view the Constitution as a “living” document that must be reinterpreted over time to meet evolving values and circumstances.
“My Constitution means what it meant when the people ratified it,” he declared.
Acknowledging that judges sometimes bent the Constitution to suit their personal views, even before what he derided as the modern era of judicial relativism, he lamented: “In the old days, they did it the good, old fashioned, honest way — they lied about it. You don’t have to lie anymore.”
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