Reverencing the Constitution without actually taking it seriously

Our posts so far have been directed towards persuading readers that the Constitution deserves to be taken seriously, and not just as binding law. We are laying the groundwork for a close study of the text of the Constitution itself. Our next post will begin that close study with the Preamble, and thereafter our historical and philosophical posts will alternate with posts focusing on the text itself. We will set apart the latter posts by placing them in the “Textual analysis” category, which you can select from the site sidebar. These posts will be organized in parallel with the text, and they will be living posts, updated from time to time.

Before plunging in to the text, we wish to revisit the topic of what it means to take the Constitution seriously. In our first post, we laid out four requirements:

1. The U.S. Constitution must be regarded as the supreme law of the United States, binding on all persons claiming U.S. citizenship or living under its jurisdiction.
2. The U.S. Constitution must be regarded as a superb intellectual achievement. One cannot take seriously the random poundings of monkeys on keyboards even if a tyrant proclaims them to be law. Much of the power and legitimacy of the Constitution comes from its intellectual coherence.
3. The U.S. Constitution must be regarded as a product of a worldview that deserves to be taken seriously. The Constitution has as its foundation a particular view of humans and the universe humans live in. It assumes that humans have an inborn nature, that there are natural rights arising from human nature, and that government is most likely to be successful when it is organized to protect those rights. A belief that humans are infinitely malleable, so characteristic of the totalitarian ideologies of the last two centuries, is not only inconsistent with the foundational assumptions of the Constitution but with reality.
4. The U.S. Constitution as it now exists must be regarded as the foundation for a still greater work. The pyramid on the Great Seal remains incomplete. If we take the Constitution seriously, we consider it worth the effort to carefully craft such amendments as experience shows are necessary — not amending the Constitution lightly, but with the careful deliberation and consensus required by the prescribed amendment process, and with due respect to the lessons learned at great cost by our forebears. To paraphrase Edmund Burke; We approach to the faults of the Constitution as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.

We have previously laid out the dangers of taking the Constitution seriously without reverencing it. The Constitution is thereby converted to nothing more than a powerful cudgel against one’s political or cultural enemies. But it is possible to make the opposite error, of reverencing the Constitution without taking it seriously.

We reverence the Constitution without taking it seriously when we praise its high ideals while ignoring inconvenient portions of its text.

We reverence the Constitution without taking it seriously when we focus on individual clauses of the text without considering the overall intellectual framework. It is the business of judges to work within the letter of the law; there is no dishonor in their doing so, so long as they keep the spirit. The rest of us should beware of Constitutional prooftexting.

We reverence the Constitution without taking it seriously when we abandon the original concept of natural rights and the role of government in protecting those rights, and speak and act as if it is the Constitution itself that creates those rights.

We reverence the Constitution without taking it seriously when we refuse to amend it using the Constitution’s own process, and either let it ossify or (at the other extreme) amend it by unconstitutional means.