Constitution Day Conundrum

September 17th is Constitution Day in the United States. As of this post, it has been 235 years since that dubious signing. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the political philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment tended to favor democratic republics and written constitutions as safeguards against political overreach. In 2022, we can clearly see that has not been the result. The moment pen is put to paper to restrain government, there are legions of legislators and lawyers ready to talk their way around those restrictions, and hordes of enforcers willing to stomp on dissenters for a share of the wealth stolen by the new democratic political class.

The US Constitution is essentially a framework for how government may impose laws and taxes upon us. It neither grants nor acknowledges the preexistence of any rights or liberties. The Bill of Rights was added as the first ten amendments to placate critics of this new document which was created by people purportedly assigned the job of refining the Articles of Confederation.

We all (well, at least those of us who stayed awake in Civics) learned in school that the Articles were ineffective, but were they? The new Constitution was essential, but was it? I suggest reading The Anti-Federalist Papers and asking whether they were more accurate in representing the consequences of this new form of government than its apologists were in The Federalist Papers.

The Constitution is neither a contract nor a compact. None of us consented to its terms, delegated anyone to sign it on our behalf, or had a voice in its creation. None of us are bound to obey those who cite it as the source of their authority to rule us by any principle beyond their threats of violence against us if we disobey. If it can be used to occasionally bind the avarice of politicians and bureaucrats, good, but never imagine it serves as a shield for your liberty.

Those of us who started questioning our civil religion over the last couple decades have had no choice but to reject its tenets as they collapse under scrutiny. If this seems heretical to you, re-read the Declaration of Independence and ask how the modern United States fares in comparison to the England of King George III. The Bill of Rights is decent where it tells government, "no," but an honest assessment shows it has been routinely trampled, and the alleged limits of its parent Constitution were disregarded since the ink was barely dry. Even if we set aside the dubious actions of Washington, like his response to the Whiskey Rebellion, his successor Adams promptly trampled the first, fourth, and sixth amendments with the Alien and Sedition acts.

And so, as Lysander Spooner wrote in his appendix to No Treason no. VI,

Inasmuch as the Constitution was never signed, nor agreed to, by anybody, as a contract, and therefore never bound anybody, and is now binding upon nobody; and is, moreover, such an one as no people can ever hereafter be expected to consent to, except as they may be forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, it is perhaps of no importance what its true legal meaning, as a contract, is. Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist. [emphasis added]