Franke: and Government Power
by Mark Franke
Sept. 19 is Constitution Day by act of Congress in 2004. It supplanted Citizenship Day which had been set for Sept. 19 but I can’t recall ever hearing about that growing up.
Upon reflection it is a natural progression from citizenship to the Constitution, which reduces the duties and rights of citizens to writing. A really good explanation for commemorating our Constitution on a day already dedicated to citizenship can be found on the National Flag Foundation website:
“Constitution Day . . . is an important part of the cultural heritage of the United States of America, because it recognizes the value of the American experiment, and the success of a nation of free people whose rights and liberties are protected by a written Constitution.”
The concept of peoples’ rights and liberties is the theme of the Declaration of Independence, the philosophical godfather of the Constitution. But how to guarantee those liberties? The Bill of Rights was added immediately once the new government formed. As important as these amendments are, something more fundamental was built into the structure of the government in the original Constitution itself — a separation of powers within the federal government as the means of ensuring adequate checks and balances among the branches.
While he hardly ever gets the credit he deserves, this careful separating, balancing and checking of governmental powers owes much to John Adams. Adams may have been the least likeable of the Founding Fathers, his irascible personality and dour disposition not among the traits taught by Dale Carnegie.
His biggest problem was that he was often right, although sometimes this wasn’t fully appreciated until years later. He saw in the British constitution of his day that the tripart structure of Crown, Lords and Commons made each the natural auditor of the actions of the other two. He was more correct in theory than in practice perhaps but he instinctively recognized the natural tension between a government strong enough to be effective in its delegated responsibilities over against the natural rights of a free people.
The Constitution separates and balances the powers of the executive, legislative and judiciary in several ways. For example its basic structure is to establish three separate branches each with its own article in the document. Congress and the President interact in numerous, not always collegial, ways. Witness the current contretemps over the Senate’s delay in confirming Trump administration appointments. Then there is the presidential veto power to slow things down in the opposite direction.
The judicial branch is significant due to its independence from the other two branches, at least after appointment and confirmation checks. It is designed to be above politics, meaning not that it stays away from political issues but that it decides political cases on constitutional and legal grounds. The Supreme Court should not be in the business of reading political approval polls.
It sounds like a mess but it somehow has served us well for 236 years despite all the present furor over which branch is the threat to democracy. Just the fact that this is controversial is an endorsement of the Founders’ prescience in establishing a government that would work but not too well. Liberty is to triumph over efficiency.
The Founders liked to cite ancient Rome as their model of personal and governmental virtue. Rome’s constitution was a true mess; anyone who tries to sort out all the Roman legislative assemblies will quickly come to this conclusion. Then there was the corruptible career ladder for politicians who were supposed to progress from one level to the next over their public lives.
In the final analysis it didn’t work, as witnessed by the constant civil wars in the first century BC and its replacement by a military dictatorship that we call the Roman Empire. But it did last for over 500 years, a credit to its balance of powers structure among those overlapping citizen assemblies and the oligarchic Senate.
Our Constitution is well-regarded throughout the world for establishing a workable form of representative government, one that has aged well since its drafting. The paradox in this is that it was written to prevent government from becoming too powerful at the expense of the citizenry and the states. See the Ninth and Tenth amendments for clear statements of this limitation by design.
We Americans have a right to show satisfaction in our Constitution but there is another nation which has pride of place for being the oldest republic with the oldest constitution. San Marino, a miniscule independent state totally within Italy, is smaller than a rural Indiana township but it has survived the warp and woof of history. Its republic was founded in A.D. 301 and its current constitution was adopted in 1600.
Good for you, San Marino, but that does not diminish the outsized role played by the American constitution as the model of Enlightenment self-government.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
Comments...