“If I cannot live in the land of my birth, I wish to live in America, under the Constitution.”
I owe my existence to this sentiment, uttered by my great-grandfather, a Czech who escaped Soviet rule.
I never met him, but I know his story: When he realized that he could not raise his children under the totalitarian boot of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, he did not choose to escape to a nearby country with similar customs, manners, and language. He did not go to live across the border in Austria, or in the still-divided West Germany, or in any of the other European countries.
Despite not speaking English, despite having no connections to anyone in America, he chose to bring his family here.
Why? Because of the U.S. Constitution.
Because, in his mind, the Constitution was as close to divinely inspired as one could get without being the Bible.
And this Constitution Day, we must resolve to defend and protect it from all attacks, foreign and domestic.
It is no overstatement to say that the Constitution is perhaps the greatest advancement in human history—greater than the steam engine, than electricity, than plumbing. Why?
The Constitution broke the millennia-old law that power rules. It understood, and tried to solve, something no other governmental structure ever had—the fact that because power corrupts, it must not just be limited, but also incentivized to limit itself.
The United States of America is unique. It was not an organic nation that grew from a small collection of people into a city, then into a country, then into an empire. America was founded. It was created intentionally, carefully.
But the Constitution was not our first attempt. As we move towards celebrating the 250th year of American independence, we must remember that we are not celebrating the 250th year of the American government as we know it—rather, we are celebrating the 238th year, if you count from the date the delegates signed the Constitution, or really, the 236th year, if you count from the First United States Congress.
The United States of America almost didn’t survive its early days—we had a different government in the 1770s and 1780s, the Articles of Confederation. The Articles spawned crisis after crisis, and America almost failed. A colleague of mine, the Honorable Chuck DeVore, explores what America may have looked like without the Constitution in his excellent alternative historical fiction, “Crisis of the House Never United.”
America’s ascendency was never a sure thing, and we have the Constitution to thank for it. The Constitution gave the world the first government to ever deliberately separate the powers of government, implement checks and balances, and set up, as James Madison says, ambition to check ambition.
And yet, to many today, the Constitution is some old document that holds the government back from doing the things that it really “should be doing.” This sentiment is almost as old as the Constitution itself, and it affects every political party alike—from modern Democrats and Republicans all the way back to the Whigs, the Democratic Republicans, and the Southern progenitors of the Democratic party.
When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision with which he disagreed, war hero and Democratic president Andrew Jackson apocryphally said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!” President after president and Congress after Congress have struggled against the Constitution’s checks and balances, its limits on governmental power, and its constant and consistent hamstringing of their plans.
But it is this exact set of limitations that makes the Constitution so great. Rather than straining against those limitations and bemoaning them, we must challenge ourselves to work within them and remember that even when the Constitution limits us, or “our side,” it does the same to the other side.
Every power we give the federal government has been twisted by those who seek to bring down our way of life. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the government was desperately trying to figure its way out of the Great Depression. One of the ideas it pursued was regulating how much farmers could grow, even for personal use—a gross misuse of federal authority, but one helpfully halted in its tracks by the Constitution.
Yet frustratingly for lovers of liberty, the Courts came down on the wrong side of that in the case, Wickard v. Filburn, and even though that decision, which greatly expanded the commerce clause of the Constitution, had noble intentions, its use has been anything but noble.
When the Biden administration tried to force a vaccine mandate down the throats of the American people, how did they justify it as a constitutional use of governmental power? They cited the Commerce Clause, as expanded under Wickard.
Luckily, this time, the Court saw through that blatant attempt at authoritarianism and struck down the Biden Administration’s mandate.
You can point to examples throughout the past 200+ years of American history to much of the same: the Constitution does not discriminate; it limits everyone in the government.
This is part of the brilliance of the Constitution, and it is the part that my great-grandfather respected and loved. It plays no favorites, and it works to the benefit of the American people.
This Constitution Day, let us resolve to protect that venerable document, even when it stands in the way of the things we want, because it is a greater roadblock to the enemies of freedom. Let us uphold the Constitution, protect it, and even strengthen it, because every power we take from the government is one that we reclaim for ourselves.