Try Reading the Constitution, Part I

Our beloved Constitution is 233 years old today. That’s worth celebrating.

There’s so much opposition to our Constitution and our constitutional republic form of government right now that we might have reason to be amazed a year from now to be able to celebrate again, instead of mourning its passing.

Image from Texas Attorney General's Facebook page

In my very limited ability to preserve it, I thought our celebration could be going through the articles to make sure we know what they mean.

It’s not that long, around 4,543 words—plus amendments. For comparison, this year’s yet-to-be-finalized Texas Republican Platform is around 17,000 words. You could probably read the Constitution in half an hour.

Then the question is, would you understand it? If you haven’t tried it, you might be surprised at how clear it is—even with some legal and archaic word usages.

First a quick review of how the Constitution is structured.

You’ve got the Preamble. (We talked about that here.)

Then come the main three articles. Why three?

In case it is no longer self-evident, placing power in an individual ruler was something our founders intended to avoid. They assumed that, given human nature, if they divided up the power into different branches, each branch would be jealous to maintain its own power, thus checking the power of the other branches.

They divided these into the three basic actions a government would need to take: make laws, execute those laws (as Picard would say in Star Trek, “Make it so”), and judge according to those laws.

These separate actions are divided up into the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. The Constitution is laid out to address the powers and duties of each. Article I addresses the legislative branch. Article II the executive branch. Article III the judicial branch. These main articles are further divided into sections.

There are four additional articles related to additional details, like adding states, proposing amendments, handling debts, and ratifying the Constitution originally. And then come the Amendments. The first ten are what we refer to as The Bill of Rights; they were part of the Constitution by the time it was ratified and became law—effective December 15, 1791.  So far there are 27 amendments.

The Light of Freedom, by Ken Turner

This painting was done by my artist friend, Ken Turner, who did the painting "Out of the Ashes" I shared for 9/11. He said of this one:

After fasting and praying in 1987 about how to paint something about the Constitution, I had a dream in which I saw Washington signing the Constitution and knew how to begin. I then added figures symbolic of those yet to come.

It's going to take multiple posts to get through this exercise of reading through the three main articles of the Constitution for understanding. Next time we’ll start our series with Article I, pertaining to the legislative branch. Go pull out your pocket Constitution for that, so you can read along and see if we get it right.