Constitution Day

By Adam Winkler, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. This post is part of an ACSblog Constitution Day Symposium.

Over the past three decades, conservative legal commentators have promoted a narrative about our Constitution that puts our hallowed text at odds with the goals of liberals. The Constitution, this story goes, is a profoundly conservative document whose words and principles tilt favorably towards the policy goals of today’s Republican Party: Small government. Law and order. Hostile to gay rights. Opposed to campaign finance law and affirmative action. Favoring nearly unbridled executive power in matters of war and foreign policy. If only jurists stuck to history – by interpreting the text by way of original intent or, alternatively, original meaning, rather than the living constitutionalism favored by Warren Court liberals – we would see the Constitution in its true light.

There’s just one problem with this story. It’s not true.

The Constitution was designed by the Framers to be a radically progressive document. The founding generation was comprised of revolutionaries, people who sought to make a new system of government that broadened rights rather than limited them. Their handiwork was itself thoroughly reformed by another group of progressives: the radical Republicans who added the Reconstruction Amendments. Over and over again, the Constitution has been revised by people inspired by liberal ideas, from the populists who sought the direct elections of senators to woman rights proponents who fought for the right to vote. Taken as a whole, the Constitution is anything but a conservative document. And while its words and principles don’t favor any political party, many of its core ideas support the policy goals of modern-day liberals. 

Take, for instance, the argument that the Constitution favors small government. It is undoubtedly true that the framers wanted to circumscribe the power of government; that’s why we have the separation of powers, federalism, and a Bill of Rights. Yet often ignored is that the Framers crafted the Constitution to expand the powers of government so that Congress could effectively solve national problems. The document the Constitution replaced – the Articles of Confederation – hobbled government too much and the men who met in Philadelphia sought to rectify that error.

By Alan B. Morrison, Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public Interest & Public Service Law George Washington University Law School. This post is part of an ACSblog Constitution Day Symposium.

As Constitution Day approaches, there is much that will be and should be said in praise of the document that has successfully guided the United States for more than 220 years.  But when there is some part of our governance system that is broken, it does not denigrate the Constitution to recognize that and to propose to do something about it. That is, after all, why the Framers included Article V that makes it difficult, but not impossible, to correct a flaw in the grand design.

Over 12 years ago, I signed on to a publication of The Constitution Project entitled "Great and Extraordinary Occasions: Developing Guidelines for Constitutional Change."  The authors argued that constitutional amendments should not be used without a showing of great need for an important part of our system and the absence of any lesser means of solving a problem.  I continue to hold that view, but have now concluded that those stringent criteria have been met and that only a constitutional amendment can fix the problem of uncontrolled spending in elections for public office.  Some would disagree because they believe that elections awash with money from those with strong economic (and sometimes other) interests in the outcome are good for democracy (or for the interests that they support), and hence would oppose such an amendment on its merits.  But for those who decry the current excesses in campaign contributions and expenditures, there is little choice other than to amend the Constitution.

Much of the discussion about this issue lays the blame solely on the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. But as I have detailed elsewhere, “It’s Not Just Citizens United,” that decision is only one part of a much larger set of problems, going back to 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo, when the Court held that the First Amendment precluded the Government from limiting the amount of money that individuals could spend to support candidates via independent expenditures.  In those days, that may have meant expenditures of at most tens of thousands of dollars, but in 2012 that has ballooned to tens of millions, significant portions of which go through organizations that collect money from multiple sources and whose independence is at least open to question.  Citizens United permitted for-profit corporations from doing what individuals can do on the independent expenditure side – albeit with vastly greater resources than all but a very few individuals – and many observers think that the century old ban on direct contributions by corporations is set for a similar demise.  Finally, in Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, the Court has put a serious crimp in the effort to create a public funding system by outlawing the effort to augment basic public funding to counter massive spending by an opponent that chooses not to be part of that system.  Additional disclosure would be good (assuming that Congress can pass it), but alone it cannot be enough to overcome these major rulings.  It is possible that the composition of the Court will change, but it is highly unlikely that all of these decisions will be overturned, which is pretty much what is needed.