Sometimes even pets need an explanation of current events

The other night I spent the evening talking Constitutional law with my puppy.

She is a West Highland Terrier, named after a Russian hockey player, Alex Ovechkin. Ovie (aka “Alex Ofetchkin”) does not have a job and spends her entire day in a manner most Communists would truly admire—intermittently sleeping, eating and watching television broadcasts chosen by someone else. Sometimes, Ovie’s Scottish/Russian/Communist mixed breed makes it hard for her to understand the current events she sees on television vis-à-vis the United States Constitution.

And, who could fault her? The basics of American Constitutionalism are hard, even for a purebred dog.

Now, mind you, I took Constitutional Law in undergraduate school at Eastern Kentucky University and had two semesters of it at Chase Law School. I am also one of those geeks who keep an annotated copy of The Federalist on their desk. In retrospect, I’m not sure I ever used Con Law very often in my law practice. I mostly use it to create cat memes about a standing army for Twitter posts.

But watching the news recently, Ovie had questions for which she could not find Facebook answers and I had to dust off my copy of The Federalist to ease her pubescent puppy anxieties. Like most parents facing tough conversations with their children, this was not a comfortable dialogue.

“What is this Constitution thing that everyone keeps talking about?” Ovie asked, cocking her head in that cute puppy move, which usually results in a tasty kibble treat.

“Well, there was a time when people living in America were not happy with the government they were living under,” I explained.

“Trump or Biden,” she queried, retrieving a tennis ball I had tossed.

“Oh, it was much longer ago than that,” I countered, faking a toss of the ball to the left before throwing to the right.

She grabbed it and returned. “OK,” she said. “That Obama fellow.”

I was getting nowhere. “Over 200 years ago…”

“Dog years, please.”

“Sorry,” I replied, while doing the math in my head. “Over 1,400 dog-years ago, America was governed by something called the Articles of Confederation.”

“OK,” she said, nudging the ball towards my feet, before snatching it and retreating to the friendly confines of her favorite chair.

I ignored her playful antics and continued in my serious lecture voice. “Some people thought the Articles of Confederation were a bad thing,” I said. “So, they demanded a new governing document. That’s how we came up with the Constitution.”

Ovie’s head perked up, her tail wagging. “So, to get a new Constitution they repelled the walls of Congress, sprayed bear repellant in the faces of police officers and tried to kill the vice president and speaker of the house.”

“Not exactly,” I said slowly.

She was bouncing with excitement. “So, what did they do?” Ovie asked. “Did they bop someone on the head with a fire extinguisher?”

“Well, it went down a little different,” I replied. “They held a meeting.”

“A meeting?” The ball dropped from Ovie’s mouth in canine disbelief.

“Well,” I continued, “they actually had a bunch of meetings.”

“What for?” Ovie had lost interest in the ball.

I grabbed her Busy Bee to try and regain her attention. “To work out their differences about what should be in the new Constitution,” I said.

“No bear repellant?”

“None.”

“Doggonit.”

I ignored her cursing and continued. “And they got the nation to accept it by writing these columns to convince all Americans why the new Constitution was a good thing.”

Ovie’s ears perked up. “Now we’re talkin’,” she said. “They started a movement on Facebook to overthrow the deep-state rulers.”

“Actually, it was in newspapers,” I replied.

“No,” Ovie barked. “No newspapers. I didn’t pee in the kitchen. That was the cat.”

“Calm down,” I assured her. “They printed them in newspapers under an anonymous name.”

“Q?”

“No,” I replied. “It was three people—Hamilton, Madison and Jay—and they called themselves Publius.”

“I’m totally confused,” Ovie said while jumping into my lap. “Hamilton? The guy from Broadway? I saw that play like 20 times and there wasn’t a single song about the Constitutionality of muzzles.”

“What?”

“The muzzle mandate, Dad,” Ovie said, exasperated by our entire conversation. “Where humans are supposed to wear cloth muzzles to keep them from being angry and biting each other.”

“If only that were possible,” I sighed.

“This is a stupid story,” Ovie said as she curled into a ball on my lap. “Change the channel for me, please. I’m going to take a nap.”

“It is stupid,” I concurred. “About as stupid as trying to explain current events to your dog.”

Rick Robinson’s latest political thriller,
Opposition Research, was the Grand Prize winner at the New York and Paris Book Festivals.