Great piece up today by Conn Carroll on the Heritage Foundation's Foundry blog that makes an obscure but extremely vital question - the president and member of Congress are just as responsible as the federal judiciary for upholding the Constitution.

How do we know that? It's right there in the oaths of office sworn by the chief executive, every senator, every representative, every member of the federal civil service and every member of the military.

Why is this important? For one thing, as Carroll explains, the oath "obliges them to observe the limits of their authority and act in accordance with the powers delegated to them by the Constitution."

And for another, the ignorance about the Constitution clearly is not limited to the mistaken notion recently voiced by Ezra Klein of The Washington Post that the nation's founding document is only about, oh, a hundred years old.

Carroll points to a cozy little discussion among a trio of Slate authors about "Decoding Christine O'Donnell" in which one of the participants asks in all seriousness, "Isn't it a court's job to determine whether or not something is, in fact, constitutional?"

Sadly, I suspect that view is anything but a minority among mainstream journalists. But then, thanks primarily to the union-controlled public schools, it likely isn't among the general populace, either, which should tell us something about why the Leviathan in Washington bears so slight a resemblance to the federal government established by the Constitution.

For Carroll's complete post, go here. Don't miss the quote from Abe Lincoln on the proper level of public knowledge of the Constitution.

Wouldn't be a bad idea to bookmark The Foundry, too, if you haven't already.