THE GOP MISFIRES
The surest way to make an issue or an ally an embarrassment for oneself is to act embarrassed by it. This is what Georgia Republicans are doing by trying to rescind a speaking invitation to NRA official Wayne LaPierre. Unless they are also about to convert to the gun-control side en masse, the main effect of this will be to suggest that these Republicans have something to be embarrassed about. This is also likely to be the effect of the Senate Republicans' amazing turnaround on gun-show regulations. John McCain and Gordon Smith were alarmed, we're told, by the Washington Post's coverage of the Senate's defeat of these regulations. (Senator McCain has not had to develop a high tolerance for bad press coverage.) And perhaps opposing the regulations-a fairly innocuous piece of the idiot politics Dick Morris has done so much to promote-was a political mistake. In that case, surely the thing to do was to press the accelerator and leave the scene. Instead, McCain and Smith forced another vote that made the GOP look weak and unprincipled as well as unreasonable.

Still more destructive is Elizabeth Dole's left turn on the issue. (Since we've done a fair amount of Dole-bashing of late, we should pause here to note that she has just signed Grover Norquist's pledge not to raise taxes, taking the first clearly conservative position of her campaign.) If Ronald Reagan's eleventh commandment-"Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"-has any value at all for the GOP, it is in keeping losing primary candidates from developing the themes the Democrats can use against the winner. If Mrs. Dole loses, Al Gore will be able to say that her failure proves her point: that the Republicans, and George W. Bush or whoever the nominee is, are controlled by extremist special interests.

DEATH WISH
Ron Unz is ready to move forward with his campaign reform ballot initiative in California, but redistricting won't be a part of it. "Republicans don't support it," he explains. Unz originally filed four different measures with the state--three of them with a redistricting component, and one without. All along, his plan has been to save the GOP from death-by-redistricting after the 2000 Census by including a proposal to take redistricting out of Sacramento (i.e., the Democrats' hands) within a package of popular reforms, such as contribution limits. But he hasn't been able to generate any interest among Republicans--not at the RNC, the NRCC, or even within California's House delegation, which stands to be a lot smaller after the 2002 elections. Unz expects to receive title and summary next week, and he'll begin gathering signatures to push through the campaign-finance reforms, which he supports whether or not they are linked to redistricting. "If Republicans had their own redistricting plan, I'd gladly support it," says Unz. "But they have nothing. It's like they want the Democrats to redistrict them out of their seats."

THE CONSTITUTION'S FALSE FRIENDS
Have you noticed the blizzard of amendments that keep changing the U.S. Constitution? We've had one in the last 27 years, and it was originally submitted in 1789. It's a veritable stampede! Thank goodness that in addition to puny little hurdles set forth in Article V-the requirement that amendments win the support of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states-we now have "Guidelines for Constitutional Change" to protect us from the menace of amendments proliferating like Tribbles. The guidelines are courtesy of Citizens for the Constitution, a project of the Century Foundation (formerly the Twentieth Century Fund). And C-for-the-C is an admirably "Bipartisan Panel," as the Washington Post headline put it today: It includes Peter Edelman, Arthur Schlesinger, Kathleen Sullivan, and a score of other liberals, but it also includes such rock-ribbed conservative Republicans as Sheila Burke and Elliot Richardson. (If only our bombers had this kind of precision targeting.)

Of course the Constitution should not be amended frivolously. But the panel's entire document, "Great and Extraordinary Occasions," is suffused with bad faith. It registers no objection at all to the major amendments to the Constitution that have actually taken place in the last few decades, because these were done by the Supreme Court in decisions such as Everson and Miranda and Roe and Romer. For the vulgar mob to act on the passions of the moment is at all costs to be avoided, but the whimsies of the legal academy are no problem.

In fact, C-for-the-C is exercised precisely by attempts to overturn the Court's amendments. In an appendix to the guidelines, Professor Sullivan revealingly calls these attempts "mutiny against the authority of the Supreme Court." She continues: "We have lasted two centuries with only twenty-seven amendments because the Supreme Court has been given enough interpretive latitude to adapt the basic charter to changing times. Our high court enjoys a respect and legitimacy uncommon elsewhere in the world. That legitimacy is salutary, for it enables the Court to settle or at least defuse society's most ideologically charged disputes." Rest assured, gentle citizens: Your rulers are hard at work, defending their Constitution.