ROGER KIMBALL: A Small but Practical Step to Start Dismantling the Regime.

Back in January, I wrote a practical column, that is, a column that, unlike so many opinion columns, actually put forth a simple pragmatic suggestion that, if implemented, would ease partisan tensions and otherwise improve life across the fruited plain.

In brief, I suggested that the next presidential inauguration take place somewhere other than Washington.

Some people laughed at that suggestion.

Surely, I wasn’t being serious.

On the contrary, although I recognize the novelty of the suggestion, I was entirely serious.

There’s nothing in the Constitution that specifies where that ceremony should take place.

Indeed, the Constitution is gratifyingly quiet about all such details.

It specifies the minimum age at which a person is eligible to be president (35); it says he must be a “natural born Citizen,” and that he have been “fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

It also provides details, some of which have changed over the years, about how electors are to be chosen, how many there are to be, and who is ineligible for that role.

It also sets forth an “Oath or Affirmation” of office that a person who is elected president is required to pronounce before he takes up his duties.

This solemn formula will sound almost comical to ears tainted by modern disillusionment, but it’s nevertheless worth repeating: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Those titters you hear are from the scribes and Pharisees who populate our government but who wouldn’t have a clue about what it might mean to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

But one thing the Constitution is silent about is the inauguration.

The word doesn’t appear anywhere in the document.

There’s no suggestion that the ceremony—the swearing in—should take place in Washington or any other particular spot.

I understand that the inauguration, like the Oscars, is a ceremony festooned with precedent and expectation.

But with each passing day, it becomes clearer that Washington is the source, the living embodiment, of so much that’s wrong with our society.

Then, once sworn in, start moving federal departments to unpleasant locales across the nation.