07/02/15: Growing crowd of We the people

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, we were required to memorize the preamble to the 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.

I don’t recall any real conversation about it; perhaps it was covered in more depth in the government class that I didn’t take since I entered college a year early. Still, as is typical of an eighth-grader of a certain era, I memorized the preamble, regurgitated it for the fill-in-blank test, and promptly forgot nearly all of it.

The intervening years have forced me to look at that sentence — and the entire Constitution — often. Our modern day interpretation of the phrase “a more perfect Union” is apparently not what the authors intended; instead, the reference is to the Articles of Confederation, which had proven woefully inadequate for the new nation.

(It is worth noting that the constitutional convention of 1787 was called to amend the Articles, but the delegates agreed to go further and produce a new Constitution. This should give pause to anyone pursuing such a convention. Legislation in Virginia to join other states in calling for one on specific proposed amendments — Article V of the Constitution allows the states to do so if two-thirds agree — has, so far, gone nowhere, primarily for this very reason. Nevertheless, I expect it will be back on the agenda in the next General Assembly session.)

Article III of the Constitution established the Supreme Court, which, thanks to technology, no longer toils in relative obscurity. Court-watching, particularly in the last few weeks of each term, has become a political junkie’s dream.

As the court renders its interpretation of the Constitution, it is easy to see how we’ve come to interpret “a more perfect Union” differently from the authors’ original intentions. At the time the constitution was written, “We the People” was a pretty exclusive club: white male landowners.

Two hundred and thirty-nine years after the Declaration of Independence, our country has inched toward far more inclusion.

“We the People” now includes blacks, women and gays. At least one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, saw this as inevitable. Inscribed on panel four of the Jefferson Memorial is this portion of a letter he wrote on July 12, 1816, interestingly enough on the topic of a constitutional convention:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

As we celebrate our independence this weekend, let us also celebrate the wisdom of the founding fathers in crafting a document that has brought us here.

“We the People” indeed