Constitution Blog

The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are three of the documents that started the growth of the United States of America. But how relevant are they today? Can we, as Americans, base our understanding of our rights and freedoms on those three documents? When special interest groups and politicians are using those documents to defend any cause they see relevant, it doesn’t seem to have the same meaning as it once did. Amendments are a form of modification that has been provided to allow that meaning to mold with the times, but the process of ratification is long and difficult. If the Constitution is to truly represent the American people, why do only politicians have the power to change it? They hardly represent the voice of America, though they claim to. In order to bypass this process special interest groups have simply interpreted the Constitution to benefit their cause. But because the Constitution is “a framework for balancing liberty against power.” (American Government, How Not to Read the Constitution, 47), it shouldn’t be taken as absolute rule. Other countries around the world, especially France, have had multiple Constitutions. The fact that the American constitution has lasted so long can only be attributed to the fact that the details have not been filled in. The entire document has been used to support various cases and causes. Even the abstract words used in the document, such as “Life”, “Liberty” and “the pursuit of Happiness”, allow for the free interpretation of the document.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (The Declaration of Independence) The inalienable rights talked about in the Declaration of Independence are part of a balance between personal freedom and the power of government the Founding Fathers did their best to create. The balance is something being threatened by the free interpretation of the Constitution. There has always been a debate between those who are for furthering government control and those who desire more personal freedom. The Constitution gives the sections of government considerable amounts of power, but sections of the Bill of Rights also give the individual certain power. This constant struggle is something that goes against the fact that “From its very creation, the Constitution was perceived as a document that sought to strike a delicate balance between, on the one hand, governmental power to accomplish the great ends of civil society and, on the other hand, individual liberty.” (American Government, How Not to Read the Constitution, 47) Laws like the Patriot act constantly violate the balance that the document tried to achieve, and still needs to be achieved.
It is also stated in the declaration that began the birth of America that all men are created equal. This can be argued to mean many things, equality of rights, equality of social status, equality of economic standing, etc. But true equality between all people doesn’t exist. We live in a time where money is everything. Outsourcing to third-world countries and paying those employees pennies on the dollar is common business practice. The rich and famous are getting more decadent in their spending the more money they make. America has become dependent on oil, driving up demand, and driving up prices so the oil companies can make more money. American people lose their homes to debt every day. The dollar is weak. Even when you go past all of the economic and social status given to a child the minute he or she is born, we are still not equal on a genetic level. Some people have better eyesight, better skin, better everything just because of who their parents are. Political influence isn’t equal either. Though American democracy allows any registered citizen to vote, the process of getting on the ballot is hardly an equal challenge. “Political effectiveness, the study concludes, depends on three varying factors: resources, especially time, money, and skills; psychological engagement with politics; and ‘access to networks through which individuals can be recruited to political life.’” (Democracy’s Romantic Myths, Debating Democracy, 36) So, by leaving the type of equality open to interpretation, the statement can be used in any number of arguments, as it has been throughout history. But also by the use of the phrase “all men”, shouldn’t those who interpret it literally have a certain duty to protect other peoples? The way some only take parts of the Constitution, interpret them literally, and follow them vehemently leads to the disputes special interest groups have with each other all of the time. Some of the rights listed in the Bill of Rights lend themselves easily to free interpretation as well. The right of the accused to “enjoy a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district” is an unclear one. The how speedy depending on the seriousness of the case is never specified, nor is to what standard of impartiality the members of the jury are to be held. In the right of freedom from “Excessive bail”, “excessive fines”, or “cruel and unusual punishment” to be imposed on a citizen, what qualifies as excessive is also never specified. Though the documents probably would’ve been more boring, providing concrete rules may have helped to keep the multitude of legal disputes from happening today. Political figures throughout history have had no problem in using the Constitution to defend whatever cause they deem fit, “readers on both the right and left of the American political center have invoked the Constitution as authority for strikingly divergent conclusions about the legitimacy of existing institutions and practices,” (American Government, How not to Read the Constitution, 47). So is it really fair to ask all Americans to follow a set of rules set down by men over 200 years ago that can just as easily be bent to support their beliefs as something that differs from those beliefs? The answer, just as the interpretation of the document itself can be multifaceted. It could be argued that the idea of still following the Constitution, the Bill of Right, and the Declaration of Independence is ridiculous, but it could also be argued that the values that those documents represent are still at the core of American life. So perhaps the answer is to still follow the principles offered by the Founding Fathers but to keep from following them word for word. It could also be said that it is our duty to fill in the gaps left in the documents by achieving the balance between an effective government and individual freedom, and providing concrete definitions of the unalienable rights. Because, after all, the Constitution “is only a framework; it is not a blueprint.”. (American Government, How Not to Read the Constitution, 47) Its purpose was not to guide us carefully through every step of governing society, but to provide the American people with guiding principles that would help in the forming of new relevant laws. Continuing to interpret the Constitution literally does not help to define our country today, but hinders it because we, as Americans, must define our society in our own words.