Well, and happy Independence Day, Gentle Readers all. It’s been some 237 years since the residents of this region declared themselves independent from their nonresident government, and, oddly enough, made it stick.
When the rebellion succeeded, they managed to putter along with a constitution of sorts, but it didn’t last long. A few years later (17 September 1787, to be exact), work was finished on a new Constitution, and that one stuck, and how! The area (and population) under it grew, and grew and grew, and times changed, in that way they have of changing, and the Constitution has been tweaked a few times, but essentially, it’s the same document. Have you ever thought about how unlikely that is?
To be specific: We still have a lower and an upper legislative House, the lower apportioned by population and the upper by geography. Except for the popular election of Senators, the terms or method of choosing legislators hasn’t changed. The method for choosing the President and Vice-President needed some tweaking, which was done 199 years ago, and later a limit was set to the length of time a President can serve. The constitutional duties of the President and Vice-President haven’t changed at all, although the whole succession thing needed to be cleared up. On the judicial side, almost nothing at all has changed. Of course, either explicitly or not, the qualifications for all federal offices used to have restrictions of race, sex, creed and means, which are not there now (at least legally). Still and all, it’s the same setup under which Henry Clay became Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1811; and John Marshall became Chief Justice.
Think about that: the method for choosing the federal legislature, executive, and judiciary, and the duties of federal officers have changed negligibly over the last two hundred years. Only one change could be considered major: the method of election for Senators. Other than that, we have the same setup that they had in 1805.
England just changed their Upper House a few years ago. France has gone through republics and dictatorships. Germany, well, we know about Germany. Russia went Bolshevik and then back; the ink is still wet on their constitution. China? Fifty years or so. A trifle longer for Japan (I don’t actually know whether there have been more recent changes in their federal structure). Poland didn’t exist (as a federal entity) a hundred years ago, nor did India, Brazil, or Rhodesia (hee hee). Is there a country whose essential government mechanism has remained unchanged for even the last hundred years? Has there ever been a nation whose selection and duties of legislators, the chief executive and the high court remained in place for two hundred years?
Change is the natural state of the world; fast or slow, it happens. I wouldn’t wager that the United States will make it a hundred more years under its current Constitution. On the other hand, who would have guessed, in 1787, that two hundred and sixteen years later, some guy would be writing up an analysis of the candidates for the 2004 election, under a government that James Madison would recognize far more easily than Pitt would recognize Blair’s England?
Just some thoughts for the Fourth of July. Enjoy it, all.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
So does this make the Constitution a living or static document?
(I’m being slightly silly; I ask b/c I, my sweetie & my dad got into a conversation about this, and I would wonder how you would define the terms.)
(In a side note, I’m trying to encourage my dad to read your journal. One fo these days!)
Many thanks for trying to increase the readership; I’m always looking for more people.
As for your question, I’m not sure how to answer. One of the amazing things about the Constitution as written was its capacity for growth; we were able to amend it in several substantial ways in the first fifteen years, and in one major and a variety of minor ways since. We were able to create (for instance) an Air Force, of which there is no mention in the Constitution, without even amending the document. So there is certainly a good deal of elasticity in it; that lets out static.
On the other hand, as time has passed, it has become more and more difficult to amend the thing (partially because of the demographics, and partially because of a cultural shift). Also, as the Founding recedes in time, Americans (not naturally historically minded) have more difficulty placing the document in its context, which is vitally important to understand anything. In addition, certain basic assumptions of the Founders, most importantly about communications, are now false. For instance, it was a natural assumption of Federalism that any voter will naturally know his local representative to the state government better than his US Senator; that is no longer true. There are a variety of problems that these assumptions exacerbate, and that leads to and contributes to the basic underlying problem of our government; that many, and in fact most, citizens are not active participants in civic life.
So, because some of its basic assumptions are wrong, and because it has lost a lot of its elasticity over time, I can’t really call it living, either. I would prefer it to be living; does that help?
Redintegro Iraq,
-V.