The announcement of the retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens brings with it another bitter partisan fight, similar to the nomination process of Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  Some may argue that the next nominee is too liberal or too conservative or that he had ties with this group or that group. What Americans need to know, however, is that none of this should matter. The real issue at hand is the United States Constitution, and how this sacred document, which has shaped our country for more than two centuries, is being rewritten and spit on by the idea of a living Constitution.
This new understanding of the backbone of our country is troubling because it pays no heed to the actual words of the Constitution written by the founding fathers. In the words of the majority of Trop v. Dulles (1958), the “words of the [Eighth] Amendment are not precise, and their scope is not static. The Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” This case set a precedent for all the courts that followed, that they no longer should take the law from the text of the Constitution, but from whatever they deem to be the most recent and up-to-date standards of society.
Who will decide what is decent? In the 1950s, homosexuality, interracial marriage and single parents were not decent, but today one could make the argument that they are now decent, and indeed, the court has agreed. Such an arbitrary approach is irrational, because allowing the court to decide what is decent is tantamount to allowing it to create law. No matter what you have been told, this is not the responsibility of the Supreme Court. The court must decide what is constitutional, using only the material they have been provided, which is the Constitution. Allowing the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution by the living Constitution standard negates the one tool that the Constitution provides to allow change, and that is the ability of Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment.
Associate Justice Antonin Scalia is one of the few men who recognize the living Constitution approach for what it is: a farce. Regarding the idea of a living Constitution, Scalia wrote, “The American people have been converted to belief in the Living Constitution, a ‘morphing’ document that means, from age to age, what it ought to mean. And with that conversion has inevitably come the new phenomenon of selecting and confirming federal judges, at all levels, on the basis of their views regarding a whole series of proposals for constitutional evolution. If the courts are free to write the Constitution anew, they will, by God, write it the way the majority wants.” Every American citizen should be outraged at the very mention of a living Constitution because this approach, by its very nature, takes away the rights of the minority. 
Think of how power is distributed in the United States: the majority elects the president, Senate and House, who in turn vote on which Supreme Court justices will be seated. Now that a living Constitution approach is widely accepted, the majority will surely nominate justices who look out for their interests because this new approach allows justices to interpret the Constitution in a way that they believe to be in accordance with “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
One could argue that, since the majority will be better represented in Congress than the minority, that the majority will get their way regardless of a living Constitution.  This is simply not the case. The founding fathers believed so strongly in maintaining the original meaning of the Constitution that they required a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate for an amendment, and even then the amendment must be sent to the states for approval.  This makes a Constitutional amendment very difficult indeed.  As a result, there have only been 17 amendments to the United States Constitution in over 200 years.  The last amendment was passed in 1992, 202 years after its initial submission. 
As Scalia wrote, “Seventy-five years ago, we believed firmly enough in a rock-solid, unchanging Constitution that we felt it necessary to adopt the Nineteenth Amendment to give women the vote.” Today though, thanks to the living Constitution, the Supreme Court could simply argue that although the Constitution gave every free man the right to vote, current standards of decency mean that we could interpret a man as a member of mankind, including women, therefore an amendment to the Constitution would not be necessary for women to vote. This was the kind of reasoning used to decide Roe v. Wade, which allows the murder of defenseless children. If an issue presents such an abhorrent injustice, then it should be addressed with a Constitutional amendment, not a court majority.
Clearly I am not arguing that women should not be allowed to vote. My only argument is that the original Constitution did not give women suffrage, so an amendment was needed to correct this inequality in a legal and Constitutional matter. We have now been afforded a loophole, allowing us to amend the Constitution without the approval of Congress. To end the partisan debate over Supreme Court nominations, and indeed to end the perversion of the Constitution itself, we must once again see the Constitution something that cannot be interpreted arbitrarily out of self-interest. The Constitution was written the way it was for a reason, and if the founding fathers intended for it to be a living Constitution as many now adamantly claim, why did they not write, “We the people of the Unites States, in Order to form a more perfect Union … do ordain and establish this [living] Constitution for the United States of America?”