09/17/2024
Today is Constitution Day.
The Constitution of the United States was signed 237 years ago today. The signing was preceded by months of debate. Ratification and implementation lay more months in the future. Change and perfection of its content, including the drafting of a Bill of Rights, were to be part of its passage. But the main thing itself, the Constitution in its fullness, was done.
It is with us still. There’s a reason for it: our Constitution is quite possibly the most extraordinary and admirable governing document in the history of mankind. It is definitively the most enduring: no nation possesses an active constitution that is older.
Why does it endure? Why do we have this same Constitution with us today? Credit must go to the genius of the American people, who grasped the ancient problem of how to live in liberty — and created a framework for it in a New World. It is the plain common sense of the American nation that has preserved it down through the centuries, knowing that it would be nearly impossible to do better, but dangerously easy to do worse. Wisdom is not some innate quality so much as it is a choice.
An essential part of the wisdom chosen by the Americans is the understanding of what the Constitution is. It is not the source of our nation, because that source is the ideas set forth in the preceding Declaration of Independence, which affirms the rights of man under a Creator God. But it is the fulfillment of those ideas. It achieves the near-impossible task of creating a government in line with those ideals — and perpetuating it across time and space.
This alone is reason to honor and celebrate our American Constitution. But we are called to do more than that: we are called to defend it. Our Constitution, after all, promotes liberty — and, properly understood, it discourages rule. Those who wish to rule Americans, rather than allow Americans to rule ourselves, have always found our Constitution a hindrance and an obstacle, one they would discard if given the opportunity. This is not inference: it is the explicit goal of progressivism and its offshoots for more than a century, advanced under various guises from a phony efficiency to a pernicious equity.
Keeping what we have means defeating them. Keeping what we have means staying American.
So, on this 237th anniversary of our Constitution, remember what it means. And remember that the fight to preserve it is not a relic of the past. It is the fight now, in 2024, as much as in 1787. What lies before us is to be worthy of the Americans who handed us this inheritance.
For America First, always
