A More Perfect Union


Volume 1 Issue 5 -- 17 May 2007
Preamble

By: Marcus Smith
The Preamble to the Constitution reads as follows:
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.
“With simple words placed in the document’s most prominent location,” writes Akhil Amar, “the Preamble laid the foundation for all that followed.”
Some of you may find it interesting to know that the Preamble itself “was not proposed or discussed on the floor of the Constitutional Convention.
Rather, Gouverneur Morris, a delegate from Pennsylvania … composed it at the last moment.”
Furthermore, it is important for you all to not fall into the trap of appealing to the Preamble as a source of Constitutional power.
Aside from the Supreme Court having declared that the Preamble does not grant political power to any branch or entity (Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 1905), it was the “understanding at the time [of the founding] that preambles were merely declaratory and are not to be read as granting or limiting power.”
Although some may feel that this is an irrelevant piece of information; it is not.
I have consistently seen socialists use “general Welfare” to argue that the government should make the rich should give up their money to the poor, and I have seen other factions twist its words to imply specific governmental powers; it does no such thing.
Nevertheless, the Preamble does have much significance;
that is, it shows us what kind of a government our founders had formed, and what their intentions were in forming this new government.
. The kind of government being formed:
The preamble to the Articles of Confederation states its intentions of forming a “firm league of friendship” between the states entering into the union (and it names all of the states individually).
This clearly notes that it was a union between state governments that considered themselves as independent as if France, Great Britain, and Italy were to form a confederation.
When the Preamble to the United States Constitution was first written it too named all of the states involved individually, just as the earlier Articles of Confederation had.
However, before the final draft to the Constitution was written the delegates to the Constitutional Convention decided that they should remove the list of states from the Preamble and in its place insert the phrase “We the People of the United States.”
Now, I want all of you to think about something for a couple of minutes.
Read the following question and then stop reading and think for a minute, try to formulate an answer in your mind. The question:
Why did the delegates to the Constitutional Convention decide to make this change;
that is, why did the delegates replace the list of states (ex: We the States of New Hampshire, New York, …) for the phrase “We the People”?
The answer lies in the bolded title of this paragraph;
it was because of the kind of government being formed.
The Constitution was not a contract between states, we were no longer united under a confederation, the states were no longer the possessors of supreme sovereignty in America.
Rather “We the People” were from that time forth the owners of this land and this government (the federal government).
In Akhil Amar’s words the phrase We the People “did more than promise popular self-government.
[It] also embodied and enacted it … As the ultimate sovereign of all (God) had once made man in his own image, so now the temporal sovereign of America, the people themselves, would make a constitution in their own image.”
Of this founding father James Wilson declared, “You have heard of Sparta, of Athens, and of Rome; you have heard of their admired constitutions, and of their high-prized freedom….
Were their constitutions framed by … the people?
After they were framed, were they submitted to the consideration of the people? … Were they to stand or fall by the people’s approving or rejecting vote?” No, they were not.
The Preamble states very clearly that the owners of this new government were the people of America and that it was We the People, and not the states, or some monarch, or the Supreme Court that ordained and established our government.
However, the downside to all of this is that We the People are no longer awake.
For the most part, the people of America have no clue what goes on back in Washington, and if you think that merely watching ABC every night is good enough for you, your wrong.
Your being educated by fools if you let the news, radio stations, and uninformed friends teach you about government.
You must teach yourself.
You must educate yourself.
You must learn for yourself, or others will be happy to continue spoon feeding your their biased opinions of the Constitution forever.
After all, we are some of the people in the phrase “We the People”; let us care for what we own. 2.
Intentions of the New Government formed: This portion of the Preamble, the rest of the words following the phrase we just learned about, deals with the intentions behind what the new government was supposed to do.
“Form a more perfect Union”, Establish Justice”, “Ensure domestic Tranquility”, “Provide … defense”, “Promote … Welfare”, and “Secure … Liberty”, would be the new governments task.
Interestingly enough, all of these tasks dealt specifically with a problem Americans were having under the government of the Articles of Confederation
(this would have the effect of reassuring people during the ratification of the Constitution that the way to avoid the problems they were having was to ratify the new Constitution).
A full fledged essay on the defects to the Articles, however, are not needed here, and does not satisfy the purpose of this newsletter; to learn more about the Constitution, thus, we will end out letter here.
In conclusion I will restate that while the Preamble does not carry with it any legal or constitutional power, it is a great sentence that lets Americans know that they are in charge, and that lifetime politicians camping out in D.C. are not the sovereigns of this land.
However, now that We the People have “ordained” (or, transferred power to) the Constitution, let us continue to take care of it, and not stain it with the sin of political corruption and apathy.
For, something ordained looses all of its power once it is drooped in sin.
The sin of America does not lie in the hands of politicians, it lies in the hands of apathetic people.
Let us not rationalize our apathy as did Pilot of old, by washing our hands free from the actions of those we put in office and the laws we allow to be established in our states.