By the People

I originally began this post describing the first of the eighteen enumerated powers granted to Congress by the U.S. Constitution. After composing a few paragraphs I deleted the text. The reason I did that is because anyone is able to read the entire Constitution and come away with a pretty clear understanding of the document. Now, semantics always come into play and I'll address those issues when they arise. However, simply going through the eighteen powers like I did with the Preamble won't serve much of a purpose as you can glean most anything I can from the written lines by reading them yourself.

While I feel it was important to break down the Preamble like I did in my first post, that's not a direction I want to consistently take. There are many people out there who will say "Well, you didn't go to Harvard or Yale, you don't have a law degree, you didn't sit next to me in class and study under "Blah, blah" Law professor, so you can't possibly grasp what the Founders had in mind." This is not true. While many signatures at the bottom of that parchment were lawyers, the Constitution, like I mentioned in my last post, was a document by the People. It wasn't scrawled in the legalese, written-to-confuse language that our present Congress so loves to use. 4,500 words. That's our Constitution (about 7,000 once all 27 amendments are added). It was written on 4 sheets that measure about 28"x23" each (If written on paper sized 9.5"x11," there'd be fewer than 12 pages). Today's healthcare law? Over 2,000 pages. Interesting that it takes 2,000 pages to create a single law, but only 12 to design an entirely new republic. Nancy Pelosi famously said "We have to pass the healthcare bill so you can find out what's in it." Is that what Benjamin Franklin said before he signed the Constitution?

Today we are so far removed from a government "by the People" that even many ordinary citizens believe you must have formal training to go through our founding document and understand it. In fact, it wasn't until the early 1900's that law students started studying case law instead of Constitutional law. Before that time people would actually discuss the Constitution in their daily lives. When is the last time you sat down with anyone and actually conversed about those four sheets of parchment that makeup our government? Very, very slowly, the Constitution has moved from a common, everyday document that citizens knew inside-and-out into a highly academic, even abstract article that seems to have little affect on us anymore. That's not how it is supposed to be. You want to read the Constitution? Then do. It takes about 30 minutes, amendments and all. When reading, don't be surprised if a few lines standout from the rest and you think "That's what they're using to justify (insert law here)?!" I'm sure there will be situations in the future where I'll recap different sections and articles of the Constitution in order to better understand the point I'm trying to make at that time, but that won't be common practice. Anyone with internet access or a library card can find the document that begins with "We the People..." read it, and understand it. It doesn't take a scholar, it just takes a small bit of time and the desire go through it. So that's why the hand-holding ends with my first post and going forward, I'll do what I set out to do: show where our government by the People has trampled over the limits of The Eighteen.