Today is U.S. Constitution Day. Why Celebrate It?

Before we get started, I need to correct something from last week’s blog. In that blog I mentioned U.S. Congressman John Boehner, mistakenly spelling his last name. I spelled it “Boehm.”
My apologies…….

OK, few people know what today is. That is a shame, because it is the anniversary of a remarkable event in history: the signing of the United States Constitution.

On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, held in the summer heat of Philadelphia for four long months (imagine how long it might have taken had they had air-conditioning) signed the document for which they had labored so hard to produce. During both the drafting of the Constitution and the ensuing debates over its ratification, the struggle to procure the new system of government was not an easy one. In the end however, America came down in support of what has endured as the oldest working constitution in the world today.

Because of that fact, the U.S. Constitution has a long history behind it—it is part of our American tradition and we should be proud of it. We should not respect the Constitution however simply because it is tradition. There are, after all, bad traditions. Rather, as American citizens we have a duty to understand the Constitution as fully as possible—which means understanding the principles upon which it was written.

Today, there are primarily two different understandings of our Constitution. There are those who view the Constitution as a “living document” and that what is good about the Constitution is that it is infinitely malleable, allowing itself to change as circumstances change. This interpretation was described most succinctly by the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan who wrote, “The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.”

This interpretation has been the constitutional vehicle by which most of the social and welfare programs, as well as affirmative action and other “group rights” have been implemented. The problem with this view is that it means, ultimately, that the Constitution has no meaning. Or, rather, it means whatever we want it to mean. But then, why should anyone be bound by someone else’s understanding of the Constitution, be that someone else a judge, a Congress, or even a President?

In opposition to this idea of an “evolving Constitution” and the subsequent expansion of governmental power, some legal scholars and yes, politicians (who tend not to be very scholarly at all) have advanced the notion for a jurisprudence of “original intent.” This argument postulates that until we consciously change (or abolish) the Constitution through the amendment process, we are bound by the intentions of those who wrote and ratified the Constitution two hundred years ago—we cannot simply make the Constitution anything we darn well please.

Naturally, this position immediately raises the question: What then were the intentions of the framers of the Constitution? Here, most proponents of “original intent” have not a clue. Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, for example, has written that the liberty and rights of individual human beings have no “intrinsic worth.” And, that great bastion of strict Constitutional interpretation, Justice Scalia said in a 1997 speech that under the Constitution, minorities have rights “only because the majority determines that there are certain minority positions that deserve protection,” implying of course that if the majority so chooses, the minorities must forfeit any or all of their protections. This, in my mind at least, asserts no more than might as the measure of right, or as we used to say as kids, “Might makes right.” Whatever can be said of such arguments, in my mind at least, they certainly bear little resemblance to the arguments made by the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
For me, our Constitution was based on the idea of an unchanging human nature. That concept is best captured in the Declaration of Independence and its statement that all human beings possess equal rights by nature. The idea of equal natural rights is not only the grounds for government by consent, but also sets the limit for what the government may rightfully do. If rights precede the formation of government, the primary goal of government is to secure those rights. It cannot grant them, nor can it violate them. To achieve this, government must, in the end, protect all of us, equally, under the law.

Speaking of the Declaration’s statement of human equality, Abraham Lincoln wrote, “The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word, fitly spoken which has proved an apple of gold to us. The Union, and the Constitution, is the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple, but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.”

The fact that slavery was offered protection under the Constitution meant that the Constitution, and more generally the American Revolution, was incomplete. It was the principles of the Declaration however, enshrined in the Constitution, which made the elimination of slavery a moral and political necessity. In fact, only by understanding the Constitution in the light of the moral truths expounded in the Declaration of Independence can we distinguish the true principles of the Constitution from its compromises.

The “self-evident” truth of human equality and its corollary principle of individual natural rights is the basis in nature for the reasonableness and goodness of the Constitution. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, the Constitution serves justice by its “inflexible and uniform adherence to the rights of individuals.” It is this unchanging truth that infuses a political document like the U.S. Constitution with goodness and makes the Constitution deserving of our respect and reverence.