Congress, President Barack Obama and millions of Americans want a mandate that requires individuals to buy health insurance. They call it health care reform. What they want is irrelevant, if we are to obey the law.

Obeying the law may be a radical notion, at least to one powerful legal scholar in the Obama administration. A 2005 CNN interview with Cass Sunstein made the rounds on the Internet this weekend. In it, Sunstein marginalizes the notion that the Constitution means what it says:

“Some conservative legal thinkers, like Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas, think that the Constitution means what it originally meant,” said Sunstein, regulatory administrator for the White House. “That means we should understand the document by going into a kind of time machine and capturing the public understanding of the public that ratified the document a century or more than a century ago. So that is a very distinctive approach.”

Sunstein advocates a “second bill of rights,” which would protect the right to health care and the right to a home. He shows little interest in amending the Bill of Rights we already have — the legal avenue for protecting rights.

The purpose in writing a Constitution, and making it difficult to change, is to create a set of rules and values that will be passed down and protected by force of law.

Because we have a constitution, all opinions are not equal. Majority sentiment may find outrage, perhaps for good reason, at plans for a mosque within blocks of ground zero of the terrorist attacks on our country by Muslims. But the First Amendment prevents government from infringing on the free exercise of religion — any religion. Therefore, the opposition to Islam cannot rightfully interfere in the permitting process for a mosque. To protect the mosque is to protect the soul of our country, which is defined by the Bill of Rights. Majority sentiment may rightly conclude that society would be well served by random and warrantless searches of homes in bad neighborhoods, but the Fourth Amendment means “what it originally meant” and it says no way.

Without these rules, we become a hellish democracy — a place of ever-changing mayhem. We become a country in which freedom belongs only to the popular and powerful.

Sunstein, a majority in Congress, the president, and an on-again off-again majority may want to require that all Americans buy health insurance. But the 10th Amendment says: “Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively.” Scour the Constitution and nothing will delegate to the United States the power to require an individual to buy insurance. If we’re to obey the law, the matter is settled. That’s why Sunstein envisions a constitution that doesn’t mean what it originally meant.

The Constitution anchors radical principles of freedom that would otherwise be ravaged by changing tides of circumstance and opinion. The Constitution was written to uphold the value, dignity and freedom of individuals. It means exactly “what it originally meant.”