Spherical Model: Preserving the Constitution Includes Knowing What’s In It

This coming Tuesday is Constitution Day, the 237^th anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution on September 17, 1787. I love our Constitution and try to celebrate it every year. This year in particular it seems urgent to do so. I’m getting offers for ebooks and online courses for educating people on our Constitution, more than usual. And I think it’s because our country, which is based on the law of our Constitution, is on the ballot—up and down the ballot, but particularly in the presidential race.

"Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States" by Howard Chandler Christy
image found on Wikipedia

Back almost a decade ago, I didn’t originally jump on the Trump train, because I didn’t believe he valued our Constitution—until, as President, he more strictly abided by it than we’d seen in decades. I still think he—and everyone around him—needs monitoring; we need to be vigilant in our insistence on abiding by the Constitution, every letter of it. But I believe Donald Trump is someone God can use to defend our inspired Constitution.

On the other hand, his opponent, our current VP (who obviously isn’t running the country, either before or after the coup that has technically dethroned the mentally incapacitated Biden) is the daughter of a socialist/communist professor, who had the most extreme leftist (anti-Constitution) voting record as a one-term senator, who rose to prominence in California by having affairs with political influencers, who champions baby killing as the most important “right” to “protect,” and who lies incessantly—when she can remember what she’s saying at all.

I watched the September 10 presidential debate on Robert Gouveia's
livestream with commentary. Screenshot from here.

Rather than go through this past Tuesday’s debate (there are plenty of people doing that quite thoroughly, including the necessarily ubiquitous fact checking), I will share just a couple of information sources:

· “Everything You Need to Know About Kamala in Her Own Words in One Place,” Breitbart’s collection of video clips, by category, September 12, 2024.

· “Kamala Harris FINALLY put some policy positions on her website. JD Vance offered his thoughts.” This is NotTheBee’s collection of responses from JD Vance to the “policies” that have finally appeared on Kamala Harris’s campaign website (cut and pasted, quite literally, it turns out, from the Biden campaign). This was from just before the debate, September 10, 2024, rather than in response to it.

One more small point, and then we’ll get back to the Constitution.

I’m affected by sound. The sound of voices. Women tend not to be as likely to have mellifluous voices as men. We lost James Earl Jones this week, whose voice was iconic in its richness. And Viva Frei interviewed Matt Christiansen, one of the content providers affected by the Russia 3.0 attack this past week. I hadn’t heard of Christiansen before, and I haven’t explored his content. But his voice is lovely to listen to.

Megyn Kelly does fine in the female voice category; it's resonant and not too high or low. Others, like Rosanne Barr, are rather grating but interesting; her voice contains both place and personality. I don’t have a great speaking voice either; allergies and age are part of it. Oh well.

Kamala Harris is in an irritating category that spans well beyond ideology. Her sound is nasal. This is not an instrument flaw; we forgive RFK Jr’s instrument challenges and get so we hardly notice. But hers is a wrong-use-of-the-instrument flaw. Anyone can talk with a nasal sound. You simply close the back of your throat and send sound through your nose. To avoid a nasal sound, you open the back of your throat and don’t send all the sound through your nose. For someone in the public eye as long as she has been (she’s supposed to be the young, fresh future, but she’s about to turn 60, and has been political since her 20s), you would think she would have had some voice coach say, “You know, you don’t have to talk like that.” I look forward to a day—soon, I hope—when we no longer have to be subjected to her voice.

US Constitution, first page,
image from Wikipedia

Our Beloved Constitution

I’m doing a sort of “best of” collection today. It turns out I’ve written on the Constitution quite a lot. Often I do that in celebration of Constitution Day. So I’m not going to come up with much new today; I’m going to reference what I’ve already written.

The Constitution is made up of distinct parts: Preamble, Article I (about the legislative branch), Article II (about the executive branch), Article III (about the judicial branch), Article IV (about citizens and states in relation to the government), Article V (about amending the Constitution), Article VI (about the Constitution being the supreme law of the land), and Article VII (about the ratification of the Constitution). Then come the Amendments. Amendments 1-10 were added by the time of the ratification, and are called the Bill of Rights. There are at this time 27 amendments, including those original 10.

The Constitution is not long—4,543 words (before the amendments). It’s a legal document, yet surprisingly clear and easy to read, despite some evolution of language over the past couple of centuries. That was the point I was making in 2020, when I wrote a series summarizing the first three articles.

So I’m starting with that collection today, and then adding in a number of other Constitution celebrations that I hope, in totality, would make a good primer for a budding Constitution scholar.

· Try Reading the Constitution, Part I, September 17, 2020: This is an introduction to the series.

· Try Reading the Constitution, Part II, September 22, 2020: This pertains to Article I, the legislative branch.

· Try Reading the Constitution, Part III, September 25, 2020: This pertains to Article II, the executive branch.

· Try Reading the Constitution, Part IV, September 29, 2020: This pertains to Article II, the judicial branch.

I had previously written about the Preamble, which probably belongs with this summary:

· Review of the Proper Role of Government, March 31, 2016: This goes through the meaning and importance of the Preamble, which identifies the proper role of government.

Now for some others, mostly from Constitution Day posts, plus a few other times I wrote about the Constitution. I hope these add to and enrich your understanding of the Constitution:

· Celebrating the Constitution, September 16, 2011

· Constitutionalism, September 22, 2011

· Happy 225th Birthday, September 17, 2012

· Remembering Constitution Day, September 18, 2013

· Timeless Constitution, September 19, 2016

· Revering the Constitution, September 18, 2017

· Can We Keep It? September 17, 2018

· Constitution Quiz, September 19, 2019

· No, We Haven’t Evolved Beyond Our Constitution, September 23, 2021

· Our Miraculous Constitution, September 15, 2022

· Divinely Inspired Constitutional Principles, April 5, 2021

· One Nation Under God, June 30, 2023