"In the past, our constitutions were drafted during times of hardship.
"In the past, the Constitution was little more than a banner with no legal effect," said Mr. He, the law review editor.
The disadvantages of such a thing are numerous enough, and in the past the "constitution of the people" and the traditions of British political life were on balance preferable.
Dropping symbols is not a concession, it is a ploy to make it easier to sneak big slabs of the constitution past voters.
The deadlock over the selection of assembly members threatens to drag the completion of the interim constitution past the Feb. 28 deadline.
Although their movement is still somewhat amorphous, its wide-ranging agenda includes returning to the stricter, more conservative values of the past, rewriting the Constitution to allow Japan to make war, and re-arming so that Japan would be prepared to go it alone in a world they depict as full of threats to its survival.
"Of course, we have a Judeo-Christian past, but the constitution is inspired by a heritage that is cultural, religious and humanist all at once," Michel Barnier, France's new foreign minister, said after a news conference at the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday.
"We applaud senators McCain and Feinstein for their tireless, bipartisan efforts to make sure that government-sanctioned torture and cruel treatment are relics of the past," the nonpartisan Constitution Project said in a statement.
This past fall, The Constitution Project's Liberty and Security Committee released a Report on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, urging a variety of reforms to the law in order to ensure that the FAA surveillance program incorporates strong privacy safeguards to avoid intrusions on Fourth Amendment rights.
Over the past few months, the constitution of the United States has been quietly amended.
It would refuse to be constrained by the prejudices of the past in reading the Constitution's promises.
