The Constitution - Getting Started

"We The People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, 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."

This phrase should be familiar; many of us have memorized it in high school. Despite that, I have noticed that many people who talk a lot about the Constitution, and how great it is, or how they are upholding it and other people are violating it, seem to have no idea what is in it.

I am familiar with the partisan divide that will cause some to oppose anyone and anything because of who supports it, or because of a single issue, but still, your arguments should make sense, and if you want to make an argument or action based on the the Constitution, then do that accurately.

It is understandable that people don't read it a lot, because it is highly boring. The document is a legalistic setting forth of the nuts and bolts of a representative government - some people find that fascinating, but if you don't, that's completely understandable. However, these kinds of documents are necessary, and an appreciation of them is also reasonable.

I am going to spend the next few posts going over various sections, because this is going to keep coming up; it's an election year. If it can be an election year less dominated by the nonsense of the ignorant, that would be great.

We'll get into articles and amendments in later weeks, but first, with just this preamble, we can see the goals. The Union had not been strong enough under the Articles of Confederation. Honestly, that probably isn't studied enough. They still knew enough to know that key issues include Justice, without which it would be hard to keep the peace (domestic Tranquility). Those cannot be accomplished without the general Welfare of the citizens being promoted, and even if it could be done without Liberty, they don't want to. That will require mechanisms of defense. And even though they are considered upstarts, undertaking an enterprise that could easily fail, they want it to last, so that it will be there for their posterity. Those should be the guiding forces.

Here's the other thing that's important to know; there were some serious flaws. Under this Constitution women could not vote and slavery was allowed. Some of the founders may have been against that, but there were enough who didn't believe in liberty and equality quite that much, and the others went along with it. This meant injustice there, and it also meant that while the Federal Law had protection and sovereignty for the Indians included, that was violated over and over again.

It doesn't mean that there was no inspiration in the document. It doesn't mean that there aren't parts of the document that work really well, or at least have worked really well to a point. It's just not as good as it can be, because the people weren't as good as they could have been - an all too common problem.

So that's worth keeping in mind too. We can't be scared of finding flaws. The inclusion of an Amendment process indicates that the writers knew there were flaws. The repeal of Prohibition shows that even a supposed correction can be a flaw.

We can handle this.