"In spite of its complete lack of constitutional foundation..."

"In spite of its complete lack of constitutional foundation, this belief that the president may take the country to war on his own authority, without consulting anyone, has become the conventional wisdom in both major parties, although there has been a modest backlash against it since the Iraq war.  Neoconservatives have been particularly eager to promote this deviation from the Constitution.  This, it seems, is their version of the "living" Constitution." -Page 52 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Now, isn't our Constitution a "living" document that evolves..."

"Now, isn't our Constitution a "living" document that evolves in accordance with experience and changing times, as we're so often told?  No- a thousand times no.  If we feel the need to change our Constitution, we are free to amend it.  In 1817, James Madison reminded Congress that the Framers had "marked out in the [Constitution] itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest" - a reference to the amendment process.  But that is not what advocates of the so-called living Constitution have in mind.  They favor a system in which the federal government, and in particular the federal courts, are at liberty - even in the absence of any amendment- to interpret the Constitution altogether differently from how it was understood by those who drafted it and those who voted to ratify it. 

A "living" Constitution is just the thing any government would be delighted to have, for whenever the people complain that their Constitution has been violated, the government can trot out its judges to inform the people that they've simply misunderstood:  the Constitution, you see, has merely evolved with the times.

That's why on this issue I agree with historian Kevin Gutzman, who says that those who give us a "living" Constitution are actually giving us a dead Constitution, since such a thing is completely unable to protect us against the encroachments of government power." -Pages 48 & 49 of The Revolution, A Manifesto