The Present Implications of the Constitution (essay)

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Whenever we consider or debate an issue of national significance, it would be very good for everyone to use the same frame of reference and vocabulary in the dialogue. Bringing my own religious tradition to bear on such an issue, for instance, is helpful to me and believers like me, but once we have made up our own minds as to right or wrong in the matter, that frame of reference is not likely to be useful in a public discussion.

And what better frame of reference could we all use than the U. S. Constitution?

Preamble to the U. S. Constitution

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, 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.

The Constitution to which this introduction is attached was "ordained" and "established" in order to improve the rather loose affiliation established among the states by the Articles of Confederation. In other words, these concepts – establishment, make more perfect – are matters of history; this is what the Constitution did when it was ratified.

The other concepts – "promoting the general welfare" and the others – are the purposes for which the Articles were replaced by the Constitution; and since the Constitution, as amended, is still in effect today, these purposes remain the goals and responsibilities today of our democratic republic.

In somewhat more current language, that is, our government exists today in order to do (at least) the following:

1. Establish justice
2. Keep peace within the nation
3. Provide for the nation’s defense
4. Promote the people's general wellbeing, and
5. Guarantee freedom to ourselves and our descendants.

Actions that jeopardize any of these worthy purposes - whether public or private, individual or group-led, executive or legislative or judicial - are reprehensible and should be stopped and punished. Laws and proposed laws that threaten any of these goals should be rejected or repealed. Leaders, media, and public figures who advocate or promote actions contrary to these fundamental goals of our nation’s government should be criticized and prevented from such behavior.

Let's look at these founding notions one at a time.

2. Justice

One has the impression that the concept of justice was unambiguous to the nation's founders. The colonies' experience with the government of England in the decades preceding the outbreak of the Revolutionary War had been filled with injustice. The colonists' lack of the ability to participate in governing themselves at home and in the mother country was unjust. Without a modicum of democracy, they felt, there could be no justice. "Taxation without representation" was a particularly onerous injustice to all the colonies.

At the micro-level too, the concept of justice seems to have been clear. It is unjust to imprison an individual and refuse to tell him (or her?) why. Conviction of a crime without a trial by a jury of one's peers is unjust. Establishing laws capriciously or arbotrarily is unjust. Punishing an individual for breaking a law that was not adopted until after the individual's offensive behavior is unjust. This was all clear.

Whether or not the concept of justice can be applied to all of society (a claim called "social justice") is not determined by the Constitution or its preamble. Can all of a society be said to act unjustly, or only individuals? But this question too could not even be debated, as it has been and is today, unless the concept of justice itself were understood with reasonable clarity.

Perhaps like us, two and a half centuries later, the citizens of the new United States agonized over precisely what was or would be unjust in their world. Would it be just to establish a high tariff on manufactured goods, produced mainly in the North, without doing the same for agricultural products, most of which came from the South? Would it be unjust to require every able male citizen to serve for a term in the military? Was it just for the right to vote to be limited to land-owners?

But in order to debate these questions and others like them, or even to deliberate within oneself over such questions, what justice is has to be reasonably clear, as it was and still seems to be.

3. "Domestic Tranquility"

This essential concept, on the other hand, seems somewhat less clear. We can note at least that this concept seems intended to contrast with the following purpose of the federal government: protection from external threats or defense. If peace with other nations should be maintained by the federal government, peace within our own country should likewise be maintained.

An armed insurrection by one group of citizens would certainly be a threat to internal peace, which may explain President Washington's firm and decisive response to "Shay's Rebellion." (Shay and the others were outraged by what they as poor farmers, of course, saw as the injustice of high taxes applied to rich and poor alike and unrelieved debt leading to debtors' prison. Work to insure that their representatives in both the state and national legislatures voiced their concerns and peaceful demonstrations in public would have been a "tranquil" or peaceful, non-violent means of overcoming such perceived injustices.)

On the other hand, injustice affecting large numbers of citizens with no voice in their government and continued over a long period of time would perhaps also be a threat to peace in the nation, because widespread and prolonged injustice provokes potentially violent public outbursts (like the American Revolution itself!). Taking this line of reasoning leaves to the individual the determination of precisely what social conditions are just and what are unjust and are not the responsibility of government. But the responsibility for maintaining "domestic tranquility" implies the responsibility to avoid creating wide-spread and enduring conditions that a significant proportion of the citizenry consider unjust.

In order to provide for the domestic tranquility, that is, the government must establish just laws, enforced justly.

At the micro-level, threats to the domestic tranquility may come simply from individual criminals. Interstate connection between crimes would naturally make it a responsibility of the national government to respond, as would violation of federal laws - such as income tax fraud or the denial of equal opportunity to a woman because of her gender (a violation of federal anti-discrimination laws) - despite these crimes' occurring entirely within one state.

Insuring peace and security within the nation thus requires federal action protecting against mob violence as well as individual crime.

4. Defense

The responsibility of the federal government for defense was apparently unambiguous to our nation's founders, as it still seems today. The original phrase, about providing for the common defense was evidently necessary to clarify that the national government is responsible for protecting the entire nation, all states in common, from external attack.

5. "The General Welfare"

The term "welfare" in the Preamble is not to be confused with public support to a disadvantaged individual (as in the phrase "a welfare check"). With this simple understanding, however, the concept of "promoting the general welfare" does not seem particularly ambiguous.

It is the duty of the U. S. federal government to insure relative prosperity for the people generally, not just for a few.

Even before the Constitution, our Declaration of Independence had declared that among the "inalienable" or inherent rights of every individual is the right "to pursue happiness" or wellbeing. Over the generations, it has become if anything even more apparent that guaranteeing an equal opportunity for all individuals to achieve personal prosperity is a key to maintaining the prosperity of the nation generally. Of course, all will not succeed equally well, but each must have a reasonable chance to succeed in order for the general welfare to be sustained over time.

(The first inalienable right is the right to life itself; the "general welfare" of the nation cannot be maintained over time, it seems obvious, if every individual does not have the wherewithal simply to survive.)

6. Liberty

And the other unremovable right of everyone is to liberty, the blessings of which it is the government's duty to insure are available to all. The meaning of this emotion-laden concept seems clear. Liberty is freedom from control of others, freedom to decide for oneself what one will do.

It is also apparent, on the other hand, that the freedom of one may actually threaten the freedom of another. In 18th-century America it was natural for some to feel they were free to own slaves, as many of the founders - and we today - understood and understand is self-contradictory. One cannot be allowed to feel free to infringe on the freedom of any other adult.

The freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, since 1791 a part of the Constitution, list what seemed to the nation's founders the most important liberties to cite individually: freedom of speech, freedom from an established religion, and so on. But in listing these specifically it was not thought necessary to clarify what the term "liberty" means, other than to use it interchangeably with the term "freedom."

Although in practice a complex matter, liberty or freedom is still well understood as a concept.

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These are the most basic purposes, then, which the United States' government is designed to serve. I have written elsewhere that the cardinal American values are peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty and justice for all. "Peace and prosperty" are identified in the Preamble to the Constitution by the terms "Domestic Tranquility," "Defense," and "The General Welfare." "Equal opportunity," too, is addresed by the purpose of our national government to "promote the general welfare." The two phrases from the Pledge of Allegiance to the U. S. flag, promoted by presidential decree in 1892 and formally recognized by the Congress in 1942, "Liberty" and "Justice" are named explicitly in the Preamble.

As issues arise in the public debate, it seems obvious that these founding principles should be the first considerations in our minds as we attempt to decide where we stand. We should not argue, that is, for a proposal merely because it "seems right" to us at the time. The prohibition against one person's freedom impinging on that of another must be considered as well. What is obviously right from my point of view is not necessarily what seems right from another's perspective; I do not have the right to impose my belief on others, unless my view of what is right also serves the national purpose as described in the Preamble.

A proposal benefitting one group of people should be considered first in terms of whether or not to do so may reasonably be expected to address an existing injustice and in terms of whether or not the wellbeing of our society generally will be promoted by such a move.

A social condition that deprives any group of individuals an equal opportunity to participate in the general prosperty of the nation should be considered a threat to our shared value of justice and to the goal of insuring the wellbeing of all.

Whether or not to approve or endorse an individual's or a group's actions that may reasonably be expected to threaten the internal peace within the nation must be rejected (even when I sympathize with the individual or group in question).

And these are only a very few examples of issues the discussion of which could be clarified and focused by keeping in mind the Constitution's purposes, which should be considered as shared by us all.

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