Dahlia Lithwick points out the reading of the U.S. Consitution on the House floor yesterday is no so significant for what GOP leaders wanted to leave in but what they wanted to leave out.

The House's public reading of the Constitution today opened with a brief but meaningful hiccup. When it became clear that the Constitution would be read in its "most modern, amended form" (i.e., without references to portions that had been superseded by later amendments, including the explicit language in Article 1 that classified slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of congressional apportionment and taxation), several House Democrats raised objections to what was—quite literally—a constitutional whitewash.

She's right. There's no good excuse for that. And especially because it shows that the constitution can be changed (amended, which it was) and improved to help us form a more perfect union.

It took a civil war and several constitutional amendments to recognize the God-given rights of all Americans. It was not changed by the legal whims of liberal judges, but by a democratic process set up by the constitution itself.

Still, many liberals remain frustrated by the restraints the constitution puts on progressive government to the point where they simply ignore that such restraints exist. Today's great political argument is over the size and scope of government. The constitution was clearly meant to limit the power of the federal government to impose its will over The People by legislation, regulation and threat of force. That is what makes it the force for the conservative movement that it is today.

In the last two years, under a Democratic president, House and Senate, the federal government was never busier, bigger or more intrusive in the lives of the American people. November's election was a rebuke to all that heavy-handed, process and constitution-be-damned progressivism. It was about time.