Someone please tell me WTF is the point of not reading reading the document out loud in its entirety if the whole point of reading it out loud is to bring the government back to its roots?
First, the point is not to 'bring the government back to its roots'.
It is propaganda, political gamesmanship, that they are pushing the idea that the government is NOT 'back to its roots' of the constitution under Democrats. Not true.
They wrap themselves in the word 'constitution' to play on ignorant people's patriotism, and give themselves cover to do bad things by hiding behind it.
You always find demagogues who want to do bad things fervently praising something 'good' and insisting he'll protect the good thing and the people from some 'harm'.
Hitler is a classic example, with his idea that the Aryan people were the best race and mankind would benefit by their taking more power. His message didn't sell well to all Germans - many of whom saw him as dangerous - but it did with enough to allow his faction to grab power and create an environment where to oppose him was very dangerous, and that was enough (one of the lessons for us to learn from). Many other demagogues have risen to power similarly.
Some of our very corrupt leaders have been the ones to most strongly wrap themselves in the flag, the constitution, anything usable like that for their own power (even religious overtones, and this includes George Bush) while they have implied that those who disagree with them are dangerous and hype the fear and opposition, and often demonize them.
There is a natural human tendency to like to feel like you are on the side of something right while fighting evil that can be exploited such that you are the one doing evil.
Think about Vietnam for a moment - our nation killing 2 million Vietnamese peasants for what turned out to be uninformed and largely wrong reasons but feeling so good about the war, about people risking their lives to go fight the 'evil' of the communist menace - but really doing little more than being an army of mass murder, despite the good intentions, that were misguided.
Many nations have these examples - Russia with its neighbors it hurt, Indonesia with East Timoor, England with its empire, Japan with China and others, and many more.
Anyway, to the point, it's the same technique here - Republicans understand their 'top priority' of getting income over $250K a lower tax rate is corrupt and won't sell all that well to a lot of the public, especially at a time of economic downturn, so politically, rather than the image that's more accurate of their being sellouts to the rich class, they'd like the voters who fall for it to view them as 'protecting the constitution' - and that needs them making these accusations the constitution is under attack from Dems.
So the point of their ceremony was NOT to 'return to the roots of the constitution'; rather, that's a propaganda bit of demagoguery to get political support.
But as to your question, if you take their propaganda at face value, it makes good sense to 'return to the roots' of the constitution - the one that's in effect now.
Should they read the English laws, too, that were part of our history before the constitution? The story they're selling is 'follow the constitution' - but the one in power now, not the amended things. It's not a history exercise, but rather saying 'this is the constitution today', as if the last Congress did not know what it said. It's pure dishonest, cynical propaganda for a harmful agenda, to fool people and demagogue.
You Americans tout this piece of paper like its some kind of holy grail that is the end-all-be-all document of the land, yet seem to forget that it has been deemed to be in error several times, is a living document, and has had some pretty bad stuff in it in the past.
When the Caesars took power, Rome had a long tradition of respecting 'the people' and its 'democracy' or at least Senate and not having a dictator. These people seizing power (hence the name seizer, bet you didn't hear that in class) look how careful they were to say they were not doing so and acting under the Senate - even as they turned the Senate into nothing more than a body of their appointed lackies to rubber stamp their policies, but keep the lie that the country had a 'democracy'.
The constitution has a similar purpose, to sens a message that the US does not have a dictator, but it run by 'a democracy'. That appeals to people, naturally.
They tout it so much because they're saying we don't have a Stalin or a Mao, we have a man who is subservient to the people.
They are saying 'notice how we broke free of oppressive power and put the people in power instead' - even if they don't notice so much when we are the new 'England'.
Part of it is just nationalism, too. But there is a basic idea there of the constitution protecting basic rights of people from the government intended to serve them.
They praise that just as the Romans once praised their Senate and as the people of communist countries once praised the lack of 'robber barons' exploiting them that their system offered - even if they did not much like the government. Funny enough, the communist leaders used the same techniques I describe above, except they replaced the 'Democrats' being demonized with 'Imperialist westerners', and so on.
Communist citizens had to deal with communist corruption; we have to deal with corporatist corruption.
Americans will admit your points that the constitution isn't free of bad things, and so on. It's the role it has in protecting rights they are pleased with.
And it's sad to see it used to dishonestly for crass politics by a corrupt group of Republican Congressmen who dirty it with their propaganda.
Just as the Roman Senate was dirtied by the Caesars who used it for propaganda.
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