It’s Time to Give Up Our Cheap Obsession with the Constitution
By: Jeremy Helligar
Tags: President, Politics, Strawberry2021, The Constitution, American History

It’s Time to Give Up Our Cheap Obsession with the Constitution

“Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States,” by Howard Chandler Christy (Photo: pixabay)

I’ll never forget the afternoon I fell in love with American presidential history. I was in second grade, and after finishing my classwork, I asked for permission to go over to the “reading” section, where I took “P” from the World Book encyclopedias stacked on the shelf.

I’m not sure why I chose “P” or why I landed on “Presidents” or why I spent the next hour staring at the photos of mostly dead White men on those pages. By the time I returned to my seat, I had memorized the names of all 39 presidents (Jimmy Carter was in office at the time) in order.

After I told my teacher and recited the names to her on the spot, she took me on a tour of all the second-grade classes to share my newly acquired knowledge. Not long after, on my own time, I read up on the contributions of James Madison, the fourth US president.

He was, as I learned, the Father of the US Constitution, an iconic document that is far more revered and remembered today than the man who wrote it in 1787. Two centuries and 34 years later, it’s due for a thorough reassessment. It gets named dropped by politicians and civilians regularly, especially in defense of freedom of speech and the right to bear arms, the two most-cited rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Their relationship to the Constitution is mostly opportunistic. People, usually conservative Republicans, love to refer to it when defending racist speech, opposing gun control, and dismissing the current US Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. “It’s un-Constitutional,” opponents of Trump’s second impeachment keep telling us (much as they did the first time), as if the founding fathers could have foreseen the unprecedented and unimaginable events of January 6.

The US Constitution is, after all, a document that originally placed the census value of my ancestors as three-fifths that of Whites and still doesn’t recognize women as being fully equal to men.

We constantly hear about the sanctity of the Constitution from people who have never actually read the entire document, much less made any attempt to examine it with the same critical eye they apply to global warming, covid-19, and presidential elections. They hold it as a hallowed document, as worthy of worship as the founding fathers who signed it — as long as it supports whatever agenda they’re peddling.

For the record, the Constitution laid the foundation for the United States of America, and it deserves merit and respect. Still, the man who wrote it and the 39 men who signed it (including Madison) lived in times with wildly different challenges and circumstances. Despite what we’re conditioned to believe, their ideas are no more sacred than those of the men who wrote the Bible claiming it was the word of God.

Just as the common sense I gleaned over the course of my childhood eventually led me to side-eye the Bible, my experiences as a Black man in America have led me to look at the Constitution with less unquestioning reverence than the average White American. It is, after all, a document that originally placed the census value of my ancestors as three-fifths that of Whites and still doesn’t recognize women as being fully equal to men.

Since 1789, the year George Washington became the first US President, 27 Amendments have been added to reflect societal changes: The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. The 14th granted Blacks US citizenship, and the 15th gave Black men the right to vote. The 19th extended that right to women. They prove that the founding fathers, many of whom were slaveowners who thought Blacks were no more human than animals and that their wives were also their personal property, did not have all the answers.

If the United States is ever to become the moral beacon it was meant to be, its citizens need to face the limitations of its most significant document and the men who endorsed it. Sadly, that’s unlikely to happen. Downgrading the founding fathers to the status of mere mortals would mean relinquishing the manifest destiny that’s kept White men at the top of the American food chain for centuries.

That, I suspect, is what the obsession with the Constitution is really about. It’s not about the love of country or love of democracy. The American terrorists who invaded the US capitol on January 6 and the ones who walk the streets of the US claiming to be Constitution-loving patriots prove that. It’s about power — the power to say what they want, the power to attack and kill their political enemies, and the power to topple the democracy they claim to love if it gets in their way.