Three months ago, I quoted George Jonas on the 30th anniversary of Canada's ghastly "Charter of Rights and Freedoms": "There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself," he wrote. "It's as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them." For longer than one might have expected, the U.S. Constitution was a happy exception to that general rule — until, that is, the contortions required to reconcile a republic of limited government with the ambitions of statism...