A better Bill of Rights, Constitution 2.0

When I was in college, the entire political science department (Marxists) believed they had all the answers for a better Constitution, better governing system, and better political system. This is debated all the time. It was even debated while the Constitution was being ratified. The Confederate Constitution of 1861 sought to make improvements. Certainly the infallible reputation for the Constitution and the Framers is debatable.

I was considering it as an exercise, not necessarily in futility, but in understanding what happened to the Constitution.

We started off with a pretty good vision statement, the Declaration of Independence, where it laid out the foundation for government that would serve us well and yet we ended up with the Constitution. Being more of a project minded person, I have to ask, what happened? Our deliverables are not at all what our vision statement was leading us towards. The proper body of the Constitution is all about government, the Amendments are nice addons but don’t really do what they were supposed to, and there is no mention of any need to protect our Rights. I am looking for parallels in the Constitution to these points from the Declaration of Independence:

1. It is a self-evident truth that we are all created equal from our Creator (and hence treated such by the State)

2. We have unalienable Rights. Both the word ‘unalienable’ and the capitalization are important as the first defines them to not be a gift from government and the latter makes them proper nouns, along with other elevated things like God and Country.

3. The purpose of government is to secure and protect our Rights.

4. Government powers come from the governed.

5. How to deal with a government that has become insufferable.

Like I said, I am project minded and I sometimes also think a little bit like a lawyer. I am missing a lot of things in the Constitution that seem to have been requirements before. I see a mention of ‘establishing Justice’ which might mean something about equality but in a weaselword way I have to note that establishing something means it only has to happen once and doesn’t mean that you need to continue it. Any good lawyer should have noted that before ink hit the page.

Our ‘rights’ in the Amendments are legislative rights, given by the Constitution and implicitly taken away just as easily with the stroke of a pen. They are not unalienable and they are common and not treated as special in any way. As I suppose they were intended to be.

The purpose of government is to… make a more perfect Union (they capitalized that…), Justice, Tranquillity, defence, general welfare, Blessings of Liberty… nothing there about securing and protecting our Rights. Of course, the Constitution didn’t have any Rights to protect, that was the Amendments, so maybe there is some symmetry. But the Amendments don’t have that either. Where does it say that the purpose of government is to secure and protect our Rights? Nowhere.

There is a reference to the People, “We, the People…”, but that is about all that is said. What happened? That is the only reference to powers coming from the People? That is how my wife says I say thank you. There is no causal link from the powers that the People have to the powers that the Constitution names. I understand why, the Constitution wants to have those extraordinary powers that the people don’t have, e.g. regulating interstate trade, but without that linkage there is no throttle on what may be conceived. It is not a matter of what powers we give to our proxy now, it is a matter of what can be invented and legislated in. Bad. Very bad idea, FF.

And lastly, if the Constitution was still being written and I had read up to the next to last page, I could have predicted that there would be no out clause. It is every lawyers coup de grace that they write a contract that is so in their favour and that there is no way to get out of it. I think they learned from the guys before them who said in perpetuity but which actually lasted about 10 years. Make it so it is even harder to do to the new guys what was done to the old guys.

If my SOW (Statement of Work) was the Declaration of Independence, if it really was just the vision statement my customer had agreed upon for our project, and I delivered the Constitution, I would have major issues. There are too many deviations from the original points, or no mention of them at all. Did someone forget to do a Gap analysis? So, what happened here? Why are we so far off base on this? And, more important, how do we fix this mess? People died based on the ideals in the Declaration, why are they ignored now?

(Sorry for the length of this post but I didn’t have time to write a shorter one)

I didn’t know what a “Straussian position” was so I googled it. The first two hits said that Straussians are political philosophers who argue that Socratic method is still possible and the second defended them as not being fascists but being liberal democrats instead…I don’t know if I’ve ever been identified as that yet so thanks for the new experience.

I understand that the Declaration was not intended to be a vision statement, the FF at that time didn’t know that they needed one. However, it becomes one by default when one tries to understand what we all agreed on at the founding of this country. It simply defines what we told the world about us, our principles, our objectives, and our reasons. I don’t understand how a public description of what we considered good government in 1776 would not be relevant to any government we formed, esp one that is formed only a decade or so later. If I were good King George at the time I might have been amused at what we say and then what we do.

That said, I don’t think that your answer was an answer to the question(s) I posed. It lumped the discussion into a category of things that are not useful to discuss. I only know that argument as a debating tactic so I am not sure if it is meant to inform me of something or just to make me stop asking questions. I make a poor groupie so if it is the latter reason then so long and thanks for all the fish. If it is the former reason, however, then please inform me better. I don’t understand if you think you have answered the questions I asked, if you are citing doctrine, or if there is an additional meaning to what you said.

The idea of the Declaration of Independence as a mission statement originated not with the Straussians, but with black abolitionists during the Revolution. In general, no one bought the idea at the time; indeed, you will search in vain for anyone having said that during the ratification campaigns.

As to the absence of the idea that power comes from the people from the Constitution, I suggest that you re-read Articles V and VII with the fact that “states” refers to “the sovereign people of each state” in mind. Then you’ll see that the Constitution is actually based on this idea.

I’m not sure what part of this you intended as a response to me.

The reason the US Constitution does not include basic philosophical statements is that it was intended as a federal constitution–that is, as a means of establishing a government with a few, delegated powers. Since the government would have only the enumerated powers, there was no need for a philosophical statement. A state–Virginia, for example–might precede its constitution with a philosophical declaration of rights, on which the state constitution would be based, because the state constitution was creating a government whose only limitations were those listed in the declaration. Former Philadelphia Convention delegate James Wilson explained this in his famous Statehouse Speech of October 6, 1787 (19 days after he signed the Constitution):

http://www.constitution.org/afp/jwilson0.htm

Wilson was one of the handful of leading orators in the Philadelphia Convention, and this speech was more widely reprinted and cited than any other Federalist argument during the ratification campaign–certainly more influential at the time than The Federalist Papers. Soon after Wilson gave this speech, President Washington appointed him to be among the first members of the Supreme Court.