I was listening to someone recently saying that he was a strict Constitutionalist. I've heard this phrase spoken in many recent debates and campaign speeches. The implication is that one side is right because they are following the true intent of the constitution, and that everyone should know that anyone that opposes this viewpoint are flagrantly flaunting all constitutional dictates and just making up new rules as they see fit. This is similar to what people say about activist judges. You only gripe when a judge makes a ruling against what they believe.
What I find interesting about the Constitution is that when the President is sworn into office, or if you take a commission as an officer in the military, you are sworn to defend the Constitution. Not your country, not your family, not the leaders, but a piece of paper, an idea. I still find this a little strange. You can simplify it and say that the Constitution defines your country and that's what you are defending. I think maybe the framers of the Constitution meant people to be loyal to the rules, and the rule of law calls for the free election of new leaders. This prevents us from making leaders permanent fixtures.
I was looking at the World Almanac later, thinking about the Constitution and I opened it up and found the text on page 579 of the 2006 edition. I realized that I have never read the whole Constitution. I assume that most strict Constitutionalists have not either. It reminds me of people that say they believe in everything in the Bible, but when asked, they admit they have never actually read the whole Bible. So I read the Constitution.
To be fair, I had already read the Amendments many times, as the exact wording of the Bill of Rights comes up often and is worth re-reading. The original Constitution is the document that was written in 1787 and outlined how we would become the United States we are today. It took the U.S. from the Articles of Confederation, which was the way that the government was set up after declaring independence, to a government with a central, federal core that the states would form around.
People often question how the Constitution could possibly be correct for all times when it was written over 200 years ago and the world has changed considerably since then. One point that strict Constitutionalists will make pertaining to this is that you can always amend the Constitution. This is true, the method for amending the Constitution is written right in it. Article V states that either 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or 2/3 of the States Convening to form amendments must pass, then 3/4 of the states must ratify the amendment for it to become law.
I had a discussion with a gun enthusiast and told him that I had discovered that the term "Militia" was not just in the 2nd Amendment, but was all throughout the main body of the Constitution. There is no exact definition of Militia in the Constitution, and there may not be a modern equivalent. I'm not sure that a Founding Father, if rushed forward in time and asked to comment on what a Militia is, would even be able to find for us a comparable group that exists today. In the time of the Revolution, people at a state and local level may have to defend themselves from Indian attack, or possibly from an external invasion (foreign power) to their homes. Everyone was armed to hunt, and I suppose there were occasional wild animals that would enter areas inhabited by people, forcing them to band together in self-defense. The Militia was just a bunch of average guys that picked up their ever present firearms and came together as a group. We don't allow this. We have Police, but you have to have training and pass a test and get hired to do that. We have National Guard and State Reserve forces, but these are people that were trained by the Federal Government and while they can be called out by state Governors, they more typically belong to the Commander-in-Chief (especially since 9/11, after which the Bush administration called on these reserves to fight to a degree that they were not even called on in the Viet Nam War). So, if aliens from space landed tomorrow and began a War of the Worlds - style invasion, do you really think that anyone that you handed a gun to would not willingly step up and fight? Excluding the cowards that would lose their composure and simply run for the hills, the average pacifist that is against firearms in theory will gladly kill to defend his family. The problem is that we do not ever face this situation (and we do not need to hunt for food), so the ownership of firearms as the Founding Fathers envisioned it is not applicable to today's world.
The gun enthusiast pointed out that the proposal of a Constitutional Amendment on gun rights would fail if written either way, pro- or anti- gun ownership. I think he's right. There is no clear overwhelming majority either way. Given the margin of divide on most political issues right and left, there are not many ways the Constitution could be amended with the current mood of the populous. So gun ownership falls into an ambiguous middle ground. People seeking to make what they feel are reasonable restrictions to gun ownership are not usually thwarted by Constitutional arguments and those wishing to extend gun ownership rights, such as the recent trend to allow concealed carry laws in many states, are also not restricted by the Constitution.
There were other things in the Constitution that surprised me. Just how much of the original Constitution has been superseded is surprising. One real surprise for me what the language for return of the slaves to slave states or rather to their owners if they escaped their masters and ran away to another state. At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there were no free states. By the time the Constitution was being framed, states in the North were only just started to outlaw slavery. I remember learning in my pre-Civil War history how the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law inflamed Abolitionists in the North. What you don't realize when you read the Constitution in detail is that this provision was already written into the Constitution almost 60 years before the Fugitive Slave Laws were enacted. You see in the Constitution the struggle to bind together the free and separate institutions that were the states into a single federal group, with central governing authorities. As the United States under the Articles of Confederation (and later, the seceded Southern States under their Confederation) proved, if you do not have strong central authority, you will not have the power to act as a group, and you will not have the power to survive.
Their were a number of things that were amended since the original Constitution. There is a very strange clause in there about the way Presidents are to be elected. The expectation was that there would be multiple candidates running for President, and there was a provision for what I will call a run-off election, but in reality, it's a matter of narrowing down the top two candidates. It used to be that you picked who you liked out of a large field, then the top two would not have clear majorities and they would redo the vote with just the top two. In the event of a tie or dispute, the House would decide. This happened between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was one vote away from not being our third President.
There were other odd things. It sounds like there was an expectation that states may want to combine or further subdivide into more or less states. The ability to raise taxes is throughout the text. The problem I have is that I do not understand a portion of the text. What is a Letter of Marque and Reprisal? There are lots of phrases that seem to be preventing states from being able to screw over one another competitively. There is also language that what one state grants its citizens is supposed to be recognized by other states. So what about gay marriage? How is that not a national right as soon as one state extends it as a right for themselves?
One very interesting phrase at the end of the body of the Constitution, before the last Article that tells how the Constitution will be ratified, is that there will be no religious test for qualification for any office in the United States. This certainly flies in the face of people today that like to say that we are a Christian Nation and that our Founding Fathers intended for us to be Christian. If that is so, why are they explicitly saying that there be not test for religion to hold office? If we are a Christian Nation, that clause should say that only Christians can hold office. We are not a Christian Nation, only a nation that is predominantly Christian.
The Bill of Rights comes along and immediately limits the power of the new Government that was established. Everyone knows that the Bill of Rights consists of 10 Amendments. What I did not realize until I re-read this was that there were originally 12 proposed. The first original Amendment was about the apportionment of Representatives which was never passed, and the second was about compensation to members of Congress, which was only passed in 1992.
I only recognized four names on the list of the people that signed the Constitution. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. I was surprised John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were not involved, but I found out that they were in Europe serving as ambassadors at the time. I recognize many more names of people that signed the Declaration of Independence. I would venture to say that most people probably consider the signers of the Declaration of Independence as our Founding Fathers, even though that document only says what we are not, not what we are. The true Founding Fathers that set up the United States and made us what we are today are the writers of the Constitution.
So, after reading the Constitution, I would have to say that I believe we should follow it as we do all laws and regulations, but we also have to revisit it and recraft it from time to time. The original Constitution makes it pretty clear that slavery was not only accepted, but protected by the laws of the land. We had to fight a bloody Civil War to change that. My point is that laws are made by men, and men make mistakes. Times change, and the way we govern ourselves has to change with them. Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of Liberty has to be watered with the blood of patriots from time to time. It's simpler just to amend the Constitution to reflect changing realities. I prefer pruning the branches of the Constitution to descending into chaos.
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