This Constitution Day, Let Us Be Thankful That We Rule through Words, Not Violence
We must commit ourselves to the idea that we can continue to chart our country’s course through deliberation, elections, and lawmaking.
We must commit ourselves to the idea that we can continue to chart our country’s course through deliberation, elections, and lawmaking.
O ur Constitution is composed of words: 4,440 as originally ratified, and 7,591 when including its 27 amendments. Those statistics may seem inconsequential — the answer to a question at a bar’s trivia night. But that the Constitution is made up of words is not insignificant.
Our Constitution, by its own self-definition, is the “supreme law of the land.” It forms the highest manifestation of America’s commitment to the rule of law. Through that rule, we protect our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By it, we exercise republican self-government.
The rule of law is grounded on the claim that human beings can exercise governance through words. In so doing, the rule of law treats us as human beings and citizens. It respects our human capacity to engage in rational persuasion achieved through common deliberation, and it trusts that, as citizens, we can turn our deliberation into written, binding rules to know and follow.
Rule by words protects us. It establishes standards for action that we can know ahead of time. In writing down the boundaries for government and private deeds, we can better assess their justice, and thus, whether they need to be amended.
Consider the alternative: If words don’t rule, then action apart from words does — that means force, violence, and an appeal to might making right. Such a system treats citizens as slaves and humans as animals. It assumes either that we cannot know words enough to live by them or that we don’t deserve to even if we can. Moreover, it allows persons with ill intent to act according to their own wills, sometimes cloaking their reasons from the scrutiny of the people.
The Constitution’s commitment to the rule of law as rule through words has reaped immense and long-lasting benefits.
Our Constitution’s Preamble articulates the purposes that our laws pursue. By those words, we commit ourselves to — among other ends — establishing justice and securing the blessings of liberty for us and our children. In writing them down, we set out a standard by which to judge our future actions, words to guide us so long as America remains. These words have encouraged us where we have sought justice and acted as an accuser where America needed to reform.
The Constitution’s first three articles create and define our national institutions: Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary. This structure comes from the theory of separation of powers. Our Congress makes laws by a process of deliberation. That deliberation involves discussion and debate that results in words — laws — under which we live.
Our executive might seem to embody force alone, given his use of executive power. But this use of force comes in service to the law; it is force controlled by words. Moreover, the Constitution gives him the power to speak, whether in vetoing bills or telling Congress the state of the union.
The judiciary, finally, does more than side with one litigant over another in court cases. The justices write down their interpretation of the law and reason with each other regarding its meaning. This action comes from a belief that words can explain the law and that people can be persuaded by those writings of the law’s meaning and its rightness.
Additionally, our Bill of Rights uses words to protect individual rights by restraining the government. In so doing, they teach all who will consult them about the rights essential to human beings and necessary for proper participation in the body politic. Words themselves — both spoken and written — receive protection in the first of those constitutional amendments. As the Constitution comprises words, so those words protect the people’s power to participate in our government through language, not violence.
Today, our nation faces genuine threats to the continuation of the rule of law. Foremost among them are those threats that undermine the primacy of words in our politics. Political violence rejects persuasion and written law, exchanging them for force and fear. Others seek to read our Constitution as elastic, ambiguous, and a product of its time. These perspectives threaten the rule of law as well, making the Constitution’s words so much putty to mold according to the desires of its interpreter. This manipulation of the text is the wolf of man’s rule cloaked in the lambskin of law’s reign.
On this Constitution Day, we should feel gratitude for the rule of law as the rule through words. We must commit ourselves to the idea that we can continue to chart our country’s course through deliberation, elections, and lawmaking. And we should feel both pride and thankfulness for the Constitution itself. Those words have stood the test of time, a beacon for justice and a bulwark for liberty.