Mike Parker: We should celebrate the U.S. Constitution’s birthday
Each year September 17 comes and goes with little notice. September 17 should rank with July 4th as a date we celebrate. On May 25, 1787, 55 representatives met in Philadelphia to begin drafting a new constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation. After months of often rancorous debate, the representatives signed the new document. The signing date was Sept. 17.
Sept. 17 is the birthday of both the U.S. Constitution and our Republic.
Few people today understand what a radical and ground-breaking document the U.S. Constitution was – and is. In fact, the U.S. Constitution turned theories of government upside down. The fundamental premise of the U.S. Constitution, a premise initially proposed in the Declaration of Independence, is the rights of people are granted directly and irrevocably by the Creator – not granted conditionally by the government.
People do not have rights because government grants them rights. Instead, the Creator grants people rights, and then the people grant limited powers to government to make their lives better and more stable.
The Declaration of Independence said people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and asserted that governments exist to protect those rights. The U.S. Constitution was an attempt to organize the responsibilities and powers of government in such a way to grant individuals maximum liberty by outlining powers and limitations of government. The Preamble to the Constitution, which every school student once memorized, sets forth the goals of the document.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, 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.”
On July 9, 1776, Thomas Paine anonymously published his pamphlet “Common Sense.” The document captured the essence of the philosophy of the people of the colonies prior to the American Revolution. In just two years, “Common Sense” sold 500,000 copies in a nation that had about 3 million people.
“Common Sense” reflected the general distrust of government. Paine wrote:
“Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”
In short, bad and oppressive government forces us to pay for the very government that oppresses us. The U.S. Constitution was designed to minimize the opportunities for oppression by what Paine calls “a necessary evil” – government.
About a decade after the completion of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote in an early draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798:
“... [I]n questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution....”
According to the National Center for Constitutional Studies, those who framed the U.S. Constitution based their work on five principles:
An acknowledgment that individual rights are derived from a Creator;
Governmental powers must conform to enduring principles compatible with “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”;
Recognition of human imperfection and the human tendency to abuse power that is ever-present in the human heart;
Restraint of those in power through a written Constitution which carefully divided, balanced, and separated the powers of government and then intricately knitted them back together again through a system of checks and balances; and
Recognition that all powers reside with the people, except those that, by their consent, the people delegate to government.
So absolute is the power of the people to control the government they were creating that the founders included provision for withdrawing those powers if government abused that authority.
We should celebrate Sept. 17 just as joyously as we do July 4th. Sept. 17 was the birthdate of the document that established our Federal Republic – the republic to which we pledge our allegiance each time we salute the flag.
Mike Parker is a columnist for Neuse News. You can reach him at mparker16@gmail.com .
