It is worth putting aside your potential outrage over such an idea and read Seidman's piece in full. Here is a taste:
Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the
Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional
disobedience. When George Washington and the other framers went to
Philadelphia in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the
Articles of Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the
legislatures of all 13 states. Instead, in violation of their mandate,
they abandoned the Articles, wrote a new Constitution and provided that
it would take effect after ratification by only nine states, and by
conventions in those states rather than the state legislatures.
No sooner was the Constitution in place than our leaders began ignoring
it. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the
First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Thomas Jefferson
thought every constitution should expire after a single generation. He
believed the most consequential act of his presidency — the purchase of
the Louisiana Territory — exceeded his constitutional powers.
Before the Civil War, abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William
Lloyd Garrison conceded that the Constitution protected slavery, but
denounced it as a pact with the devil that should be ignored. When
Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — 150 years ago
tomorrow — he justified it as a military necessity under his power as
commander in chief. Eventually, though, he embraced the freeing of
slaves as a central war aim, though nearly everyone conceded that the
federal government lacked the constitutional power to disrupt slavery
where it already existed. Moreover, when the law finally caught up with
the facts on the ground through passage of the 13th Amendment,
ratification was achieved in a manner at odds with constitutional
requirements. (The Southern states were denied representation in
Congress on the theory that they had left the Union, yet their
reconstructed legislatures later provided the crucial votes to ratify
the amendment.)
In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed
devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than
obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to
extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to
threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal
legislation. In 1954, when the court decided Brown v. Board of
Education, Justice Robert H. Jackson said he was voting for it as a
moral and political necessity although he thought it had no basis in the
Constitution. The list goes on and on.
