UNITED STATES
Verdict
15 SEP 2016
MARCI A. HAMILTON
Sometimes I feel like I should pen a letter of apology to the Framers of the Constitution. They fundamentally understood that people are inevitably tempted to abuse power and that concentrations of power are dangerous. It was a fortuitous and sage combination of common sense and the Presbyterianism of Princeton at the time. To put it a bit more simply: power must be checked, or it will run amok, and that goes double for combinations of power. And, oh yes, those who have power will work hard to be unaccountable. Power without accountability is the gravest danger we can face.
With that as the foundation, we really should be able to do better. Instead, lawmakers are increasingly the unaccountable power-grabbing people the Framers warned us about. And nowhere are our elected officials failing more spectacularly right now than in the case of child sex abuse.
The good news is that there is an antidote, and the people need to administer it.
Let’s start with some facts: one in four girls and one in five boys are sexually abused. Children have been abused in apparently every conceivable venue where they are available to predatory adults. Those “safe havens” like pricey boarding schools and elite sports, and churches and synagogues, have turned out to be available venues for abuse. The sad march of the truth goes on: children who are hungry have been forced into the sex trade just to eat. Child pornography continues to explode, with trusted adults from priests to coaches recently identified.
As you ponder this ongoing series of scandals, witness recent developments, where politicians are so stuck in the mud of unaccountability that facts apparently don’t matter:
In Pennsylvania, where lawmakers have been “debating” the merits of obtaining justice for child sex abuse victims for over a decade, some members have latched onto an almost hilarious (if it were not so painful to the survivors) “discussion” of the constitutionality of reviving expired statutes of limitations. They have become positively expert on the “Remedies Clause.” The cases in Pennsylvania actually add up most logically to a conclusion that revival of expired SOLs is constitutional, as I testified, but one need not even go that far. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the issue, so it is an issue for the courts. That leaves the door open for Pennsylvania lawmakers to do what is right.
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