Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s sting is in the casual “Some.” It’s a deliberately low bar that makes the rest of the sentence feel like an indictment: constitutional literacy isn’t assumed in power, it’s an occasional accident. Then he pivots to the real target - not ignorance, but opportunism. The Bill of Rights becomes a prop, something to “wave…in the air,” a phrase that strips away reverence and recasts civil liberties as campaign signage.

The subtext is a symmetry argument with teeth: rights rhetoric is less a principle than a posture, adopted when you’re out of office and discarded when you’re in charge. By citing Republicans during the Clinton years and Democrats under Bush, Bovard isn’t praising bipartisanship; he’s accusing both parties of the same cynical reflex. The Constitution, in this telling, is opposition theater: you invoke it to constrain the other side, not to constrain yourself.

Context matters because the Clinton and Bush eras each had signature civil-liberties flashpoints that made “rights talk” politically useful: Clinton-era fights over guns, crime, and executive power; Bush-era expansions of surveillance and national-security authority after 9/11. Bovard, a libertarian-leaning critic of government power, is cataloging a pattern where civil liberties become a weapon of convenience, not a governing commitment.

Why it works is its prosecutorial economy. No grand theory, just a repeating cycle viewers can recognize: the party out of power discovers the Bill of Rights right on schedule.