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We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I hold the Constitution of my Republic in about the same esteem and awe that many of my evangelical Christian friends hold their Bible. Having served in combat in the US Air Force, and with the scars and injuries from that service, it hurts me when people use the flag of my country as a protest symbol and burn it or trample it. I wish they would find another outlet for their protests, and if they really must burn it, I'd like them to wrap themselves in it before striking the match. That said, I realize that the Flag is but a symbol of my Republic ... our Constitution is my Republic.

I wonder how many Americans have a copy of our Constitution in their home. I have a copy with amendments on the computer on which I'm writing this, of course. If you don't have it, you can find it at this link in a variety of forms, including some for kids. In fact, Google "united states constitution" and you'll get something over a million hits, so every American can easily have a copy of this extraordinary document. But the copy I really use is in a paper bound book that one of our kids used in college and that is now falling apart. It was published in 1971 and only shows 25 amendments, but it also contains the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Rights, Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution of the State of California. It has a neat index to the Constitution, and also includes a fairly concise and readable history of its drafting and ratification.

What Makes Our Constitution Remarkable?

Just recently, while enjoying a 15-day cruise through the Panama Canal (an awsome adventure!), I was looking in the ship's library for a book to read on our balcony in the evening while at sea. I found one titled, "The Hidden Wiring of the British Constitution," or something close to that. I didn't know that there was a British constitution, so I decided to check it out. The book turned out to be unreadable by anyone but citizens of the UK (and I'm not even sure about them), but, for as far as I got, I was right ... Britain does not have a written constitution. The term "hidden wiring" referred to the unwritten customs, traditions, laws in some cases, and the "This is how we do it but we're not sure why" knowledge that makes the UK government work.

Obviously, the US model for government is quite different from the UK model. So what makes our Constitution so remarkable?

Length: The United States Constitution is 7,591 words long ... one of the shortest in the world, especially considering that it creates a Republic which has become the strongest economic powerhouse in the world. In my little reference book, the US Constitution and Amendments occupy 26 pages. Contrast that with the Constitution of the State of California which requires 102 pages in the same book, and it is impossible to count the number of times it's been amended because out here on the western frontier, we do that on every second Tuesday after a full moon (or so it seems), and we're about to do it again if our Governator gets his way.

Age: The United States Constitution is the oldest written national constitution still in use on the planet.

Durability: It is durable -- incredibly so. Since it's original drafting in 1789, it has been amended only 27 times, and the first 10 of those that we call the Bill of Rights were concurrent with the document itself. Of the remaining 17, one (18) was a stupid mistake of one group of people trying to impose their beliefs on everyone else, and another (21) fixed that mistake, leaving us with 15. Of those, 8 (12,17,20,22,23,25,26,and 27) deal mainly with procedural matters in government, leaving a grand total of only 7, in 217 years, that made fundamental modifications to the original plan for our Republic. I don't know about you, but I find that astounding!

Readability: Although written over 200 years ago, anyone with a high school education can easily read and understand it. In fact, I'm not sure that a high school diploma is really necessary. Language has changed a lot in those years. How much of what is written today by our elected institutions can be expected to last and be understandable in 200+ years?

Applicability: How much has changed in our world since 1789? Transportation was animal-powered. Steam had not yet been harnessed, nor had the power of petroleum been discovered, and of course there were no automobiles, trucks, trains, or airplanes. There were ships, but all wind-driven or powered by humans. Communications consisted of either writing something, and physically moving it to its intended recipient, sometimes taking weeks or even months, or someone going there and telling him or her the message. No telegraph, radio, telephone, or television ... well, OK, no electricity, light bulbs, or electric motors either. Newspapers were printed one page at a time (movable type had been invented but it was hand composed and slow). The United States hugged the eastern seaboard. The Appalachians were wilderness. The details of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers were unknown.

Medicine couldn't even be called primitive by todays standards. Diseases were caused by "vapors" rather than germs, and treatment regularly consisted of blood-letting. Anesthetics hadn't been invented so surgery was worse than death, and very often led to it anyway since doctors never thought to wash their hands. A family that gave birth to 8 children considered themselves fortunate if half survived to productive adulthood. And let's not even bring up subjects like human beings walking on the moon and returning, satellites that tell us exactly where we are, and live, moving pictures with sound from this or that battlefield half a planet away.

And strangely, despite all of this change, our Constitution still successfully defines and regulates our Republic, so long as we allow it to. I find this astounding also.

Embarrassments

The Constitution of my Republic contains a few embarrassing items as well. It was written in a vastly different time.

Apportionment of Representatives: Article I, Section 2, Paragraph 3 states in part:

Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons."

"Free persons?" "Those bound to service?" Fairly archaic concepts for us at the beginning of the 21st century, no? "Three-fifths of all other persons?" The 'other persons' were of course slaves, and yes, my Constitution reflects a time when one of the most abhorrent of human practices was fully accepted by at least a portion of the new Republic ... enough of a portion that it got written into the document. The 13th Amendment (ratified in 1865) corrected this, but if you just read the Constitution, it is an embarrassment ... why did it take so long

Slave Trade: In the same vein as the first embarrassment, Article I Section 9 Paragraph 1 states:

The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.

OK, this is still slavery, and it sucks big time! But note that Congress can't do anything about it until 1808 (20 or so years), and until then, the Federal government can tax this travesty of human rights for as much as $10/slave, a rather large sum for that time. In fact, Congress didn't do anything in 1808, and slavery continued beyond for nearly 60 years until the 13th Amendment was ratified.

The Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments: The 15th gave former slaves the right to vote, and the 19th gave that same right to women. The embarrassment is not in the amendments themselves, but both in the fact that they were ever needed, and how long it took. The 15th was ratified in 1870, but we all know that I was already serving in Vietnam before it began to become a reality, and it really isn't over yet in some places in our Republic. The women fared worse than the slaves when it came to the right to vote -- the 19th Amendment wasn't ratified until 1920, although once ratified, they began voting very quickly, as long as they were Caucasian.

All in all, however, the embarrassments aren't as prevalent in our Constitution as we might expect, given it's age. They tend to clump around slavery and Women's Suffrage. From today's perspective, they should never have been been there in the first place, but one of the good things about history is that it is forever what it was when it was made, and you can't go back and change it (unless, of course, you are a member of Congress or the President, and why we let them get away with this is a giant mystery of life for me).

So, Why Is The Constitution So Durable?

I think this is a very tough question, but the answer might shed light on how to craft documents today that will stand the test of time. My own opinion is that, when it was being written, the men doing so had their eyes focused way down the road. Note the words "...blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity..." in the Preamble (I'm currently reading "The American Sphinx," which is an investigation into the mind and values of Thomas Jefferson. Strangely, he believed strongly that one generation could not bind the next one, a concept bordering on anarchy every 20 years or so. Fortunately, his views did not prevail, although given the current debt we are heaping on our progeny, maybe he got it right!). They certainly had differences between the states to consider (e.g. slavery) in order to even get started, however the overall tone and language of the Constitution is one of setting up administrative bodies composed of people, and creating procedures and constraints by and under which those bodies will operate. The Founding Dads knew that, for the Republic to endure, its Constitution had to endure well into the future too, and that they could not predict the issues and problems that would be encountered and actually prescribe rational solutions to them. Consequently, throughout the document and the amendments, you will find phrases such as:

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

In essence, they drafted a Constitution that set up political structures populated by people who were elected (OK, sort of) by the entire (well, not exactly) population to represent them. They prescribed how these structures were to operate and interact, and placed prohibitions on certain fundamental actions (mainly in the Bill of Rights -- the Constitution itself is remarkably devoid of "Thou shalt not" language). They divided responsibilities between these institutions to assure that one or the other could not dominate the process. And they then placed responsibility for the resolution of all future issues, needs, and problems facing the Republic in the hands of those elected representatives at the time they were needed, subject to the procedures and structure laid out in their document. And, except for the fundamental concepts of freedom, liberty, and what we now loosely call "democracy," the Constitution steers well clear of the philosophical and religious questions that seem to dominate today's thinking.

How About Today?

Today, we find ourselves facing a growing clamor to amend our Constitution. Some want it to declare us to be a Christian nation, whatever that means. Some want to require everyone to speak English. Some want to define marriage in the Constitution. It is reminicent of the 18th Amendment all over again. Let's be very careful how we tinker with our Constitution. The Constitution is not broken and we shouldn't be trying to fix it. Our Constitution has worked for over 200 years, and it can work today without further amendment, but only if we the people demand it.

In the agony of Watergate in the 70's, it was often said that we faced a Constitutional crisis. The President and many of his administration committed criminal acts, and indeed, many of them were ultimately convicted and served sentences in prison. The President would have certainly been impeached, and almost as certainly convicted by the Senate, given the breadth and strength of the evidence, and the loss of trust of nearly all Americans. He chose to resign instead. It was an agonizing time, and our government and all Americans were distracted badly. But, was it a Constitutional crisis?

Personally, I think not. In fact, I think it was one of the finest hours for our Constitution. It worked! Just as the Founding Dads had intended, it worked! The provisions for impeachment in the face of high crimes and misdemeanors functioned, the House of Representatives heard the evidence and brought forth the Articles of Impeachment for vote. They would undoubtedly been approved and the President taken before the Senate where he undoubtedly would have been convicted and removed from office, had not Richard Nixon resigned abruptly.

But, we as a people must be vigilant for our Constitution is fragile in places, and in one place in particular, it is only 32 words long.

Article II Section 2 contains one very long sentence (81 words if "Commander-in-Chief" counts as one word). I'll save you the trouble of looking it up, here it is:

"1. The President shall be commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment."

Now, that's pretty clear to me. A civilian commands our military forces, not the other way around. This is good since governments run by the military do not have a stellar track record throughout history. It also provides that a state militia (National Guard), normally commanded by the Governor of that state, will be commanded by the President when called up in service of the United States. That's good too. And that's all that it says, and it does so in 32 words ... 39.5% of the 81 total. The remainder of the section deals with totally unrelated things, and this sentence is the only place in the Constitution and its amendments that the commander-in-chief subject ever arises.

It's important to remember that in 1789, there was universal distain and fear of a "standing army" in the new country. The concept was that, "If we need an army, we'll raise one" from the State Militias and volunteers." The President was to be a civilian, and to prevent him [and maybe someday 'her'] from taking the country to war by himself, they vested the power to declare war in the Legislature. Likewise with the power to ratify treaties and international conventions. Once ratified, all Americans ... including the President ... are bound to comply with their provisions until the Senate decides to un-ratify them.

Our previous administration believed otherwise. They (and especially the President) believed that those 32 words convey "inherent powers" to the Executive Branch; powers to suspend or ignore duly enacted laws, to abrogate treaties and conventions ratified by the Senate, and to suspend provisions of the Bill of Rights regarding due process, rights of accused, and judicial processes.

We now have a new administration, and a number of those asserted "inherent powers" have been repudiated [but not all]. However, we must be very wary for much of the law and interpretation today is based on previous interpretations. Having been challenged for eight years, our Constitution -- subject to interpretation by the Supreme Court -- may be seen in the future to have been subtly altered.

The scary part of all of this is not so much what the Executive Branch was actually doing, although that is way more than enough to lose a lot of sleep over, but the fact that Americans didn't seem to really care what was happening. We are fortunate among nations. We have a real thing, an object you can see (and touch if they'd let us) constituting and defining the "Fabric of our Nation." It'll only work if we make it work however, and apathy of Americans when our government runs amok will surely spell the downfall of the United States faster than any terrorist or nation that tries to destroy us. As long as this apathy continues, those who would bring the United States down have only to wait and watch us do it to ourselves.

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