Is The Constitution Good?

The United States Constitution, a document finalized on September 17^th, 1787, and fully ratified on May 29^th, 1790, is one of the greatest political documents of all time.  It is, by far, the most significant codification of rights outside of the Bible.  It led to the creation of a federal union of independent countries to form a galvanized block, ostensibly designed to work toward common cause.  Today, the Constitution is often viewed as sacrosanct by the American political Right.  Note, I did not state the Dissident Right.  Instead, I am referring to those Americans who still maintain some level of confidence in the political mechanisms of a democratic republic.  Yet, despite the inarguable position that the Constitution is a great document having led to the formation of a great country, I think it is worth exploring whether or not the Constitution is “good.”  It is my personal opinion that the Constitution is not good.  This article explains my position.

To begin, I must define “great” and “good” in the context of this discussion.  When I refer to the term “great,” I mean something of enormity and importance.  It is not necessarily an endorsement or praise that I wish to convey.  When I say, “God is great,” I mean He is both larger than our human comprehension and excellent in a manner that exceeds good.  I both recognize God’s power and I praise Him.  I am not saying that about the Constitution.  Rather, I am recognizing the profound influence and construct of a seminal document drafted to establish the boundaries of the government and the freedoms of those who empower the government.  The definition of “good,” is one that refers to the Constitution’s ability to achieve the objects of its intended purpose.  I believe it is abundantly clear in 2022 that the Constitution has failed that purpose.  That is not good.

The failures of the Constitution are multifaceted and deserve exploration.  It is important to remind the reader that the Constitution was not a document drafted to endure modernity.  It was designed to be destroyed by it.  It did this through the amendment process and executive authority system.  Let us begin with the Amendment process.

When James Madison likely conceived of the amendment idea, and Article V was built into the framework of the Constitution, Madison never likely considered the fact that blacks or women would have an equal say in the electoral process.  As a man of the 18^th century, he could not have foreseen black enfranchisement passing by means of the Fifteenth Amendment less than thirty-five years after his passing.  He certainly could not conceive of female voting by passage of the Nineteenth amendment.  But why is this important? 

Non-White minorities and to a lesser extent, women, tend to vote in a manner that dismantles the very protections enshrined in the Constitution.  They seek security over freedom.  They are genetically designed to do so. 

Women are made to seek assurances of safety by their feminine construct.  It is impossible to breed out human instinct in less than one hundred years.  For the majority of human existence, women relied on male and/or tribal protection.  Independence is a new social construct that defies their ingrained DNA.  Consequently, as it pertains to political positions, absent strong male guidance and companionship, women tend to gravitate toward popular political positions that provide safety in numbers.  Acceptance into the collective tribe becomes more important than acceptance by a questionable mate.  This is why beta males have women who vote leftist and alpha males generally do not.  Alphas do not concern themselves with security assurances provided by others.  They make their own security arrangements and women are designed to sense that fact. 

When greater numbers of women are single, as we have today, they are more easily manipulated toward leftist positions that empower the state over the individual.  Very few women are strong enough to intellectually and emotionally weigh the downstream consequences of compromising freedoms for security.  The state provides the physical protection that typically is provided by males; leftist adulation provides emotional protection – reassuring them that they made the correct policy choice.  The Left is excellent at manipulating this sense among young women, a phenomenon that the Founding Fathers could have never envisioned.

Non-White minorities, by contrast, are engrained to seek immediate comforts to the exclusion of long-term possible gains.  This is evident in their choices, whether in Africa, India, or the United States.  This sense of “now” manifests itself in choices of consumerism, such as purchasing an expensive pair of sneakers over a 401K contribution.  The following racial purchasing power dynamics have been studied by marketing teams for decades.  While Whites are guilty of impulse purchasing, they tend to do so as a means to satiate some sense of consumer immediacy when they feel the good times will keep coming (i.e., “I will pay that credit card off when my bonus hits…”).  By contrast, black purchasing behavior is predicated on the opposite – the good times will not last forever, time to purchase now.  This carries into the political sphere, as well.

In essence, the invitation to participate in some aloof concept like “freedom of speech” or “protection from unlawful search and seizure” is foreign to people who derive from more primitive societies.  Again, like women, DNA does not change in one hundred years or less.  The desire to be fed, clothed, housed, etc., are all more important and the voting of non-White minorities plays this out.  There is a reason that blacks vote nearly 95% Democrat with every election.  They are given social subsidies upon which they rely and fear those subsidies will be taken from them by less generous Republicans.  They do not care if that comes at the cost of a loss in some “freedom” they find abstract at best. 

Tired Republican arguments of tax cuts are meaningless to people who do not pay taxes.  Explaining Mexican migration as a desire to seek freedom is absurd.  Inviting Middle Easterners en masse to enjoy religious freedom is nonsense.  Those are economic refugees.  The Constitution is entirely obscure. 

Regardless as to their personal political leanings, the Founding Fathers saw the United States and European society as superior to all others, especially blacks.  This was not an exclusive Southern perspective, either.  The “savage black” taken from his primitive existence and impressed into service was regarded as little more than an advanced animal – worthy of pity, some level of dignity, but never equality.  This is found throughout the written works of the men of the era.  When black property was afforded the value of 3/5^ths a person, this was not an arbitrary amount designed to placate the potentially underrepresented South.  This was a valuation predicated on 18^th century racial viewpoints espoused by Yankee luminaries, such as Alexander Hamilton and his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler.

In his expansive Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”  Benjamin Franklin lamented the slave trade on racial lines: “Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawnys, of increasing the lovely white and red?”  Whereas Jefferson’s positions on race were largely known, Franklin’s were better guarded over time. 

Returning to the subject of women’s suffrage, the Founders would have had a very different perspective on equality than the modern sense of the term.  Their views on a representative democracy were grounded in the stake-holding family, led by the male head of household.  A true representative democracy would submit a vote that represented the needs of the family and community.  It was a somber obligation, requiring a serious mind and grounded by both information and local interests.  There was no need for a woman to vote in 18^th Century America.  The father and husband led by virtue of a Biblical mantle of authority, viewed the family unit as one.

Consequently, when the Constitution was drafted for free White men, it never envisioned the empowerment of others who may think of things differently.  Neither Roger Sherman nor Richard Lee could have considered a leftist voting bloc of black Marxists, transgender psychopaths, and single twenty-something-year-old females voting to limit free speech or eliminating the right to bear arms.  Neither James Madison nor Alexander Hamilton would have conceived of a coalition that supported greater levels of government aggression against the citizenry in an attempt to even outcomes or redistribute wealth.

My criticism, therefore, is not of the Founding Fathers, per se.  The failings to see the potential for such a political bloc are more poignant.  The Constitution was receiving state ratification consideration in the early days of the French Revolution, a precursor to the Bolshevik Revolution that would take place approximately one hundred-thirty years later.  The “us vs them” mentality was so brutal and divisive that the later Adams Administration would seek to limit its potential in the American republic’s infancy.  Yet, the Founders did little to address the potential of subversion through amendments.  My criticism of the Constitution is on a final product that did not anticipate the possibility that a class comprised of so-called “have nots” might someday weaponize the democratic process to overthrow the document itself. 

The other failure of the Constitution is the broad authority entrusted in the presidency to execute the decisions of Congress.  Again, the Founding Fathers could not have known that the bureaucratic state would grow as large as it did.  However, those who drafted the Constitution were well aware of the fact that presidential authority in the wrong hands was dangerous.  Too much latitude was left to tempt the wrong person, of which the United States had many “wrong persons.”  Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, George H. Bush, and Barack Obama are such examples.  With each subsequent administration, the presidency became more powerful through the exploitation of bureaucratic fiat.  Executive Orders, be they stand alone orders or instructions to executive agencies, transcended the legislative process.  The Constitution fails as it pertains to limiting the exploitative capability of the executive.

The use of bureaucratic management to restrict or deny Constitutional protections has been used to great effect by presidents with competent cabinets.  Lincoln famously suspended the writ of habeas corpus, using his military to suppress the rights of political dissent and detain “insurrectionists” in perpetuity.  It is not an accident that the modern American political Left calls their political rivals – MAGA supporters – “insurrectionists.”  They are openly advocating for a Lincoln redo.  They want arrests and indefinite imprisonment – which is largely playing out in Washington, D.C. jails over the January 6^th protests.  Obama weaponized the unconstitutional FISA Court to illegally spy on the main political rival of his chosen successor.  These are matters that the Constitution failed to address. 

For those who claim the Second Amendment was designed for just such a scenario, it is time to be realistic.  Most who advocate an armed insurrection are too fat to exit their recliners, let alone take on a leftwing SEAL team led by a transgender commander in Arlington.  If you have not been paying attention, the standing military the Founders feared is now a Far-Left organization that seeks your subjugation for the common good, but I digress.

More important to the failure of the Constitution is the manipulation of the executive authority to secure votes in an increasingly democratic and less republican system.  Presidents can make policy through broad based orders that bypass Congress.  This enables a president to effectively make a law to satisfy the demands of his constituents, even when those constituent desires are in the clear minority. This is how something like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) gets imposed against the legislative will of the people, supplanting existing immigration laws. The president becomes an elected dictator who can simply ignore the Congress or actual laws.  The Supreme Court agreed with this newfound power of the presidency when it imposed DACA on the Trump Administration, effectively making Executive Orders standing laws in perpetuity.

Worse is the fact that “laws” can further erode Constitutional protections without an amendment.  The so-called Johnson Amendment restricts the free speech of religious institutions, yet it is not an amendment.  It immediately killed the First Amendment rights of one class of people, religious leaders, by exploiting a tax code exemption, without requiring the Constitutional requirements of a new amendment to suppress either speech or religious freedom.  The Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act, also a non-amendment, deprives Second Amendment rights of convicted felons who served their time.  Ironically, that “amendment” was an amendment to another law that restricted the rest of the American citizenry’s Second Amendment rights.  In other words, the Second Amendment is useless at protecting itself, let alone other enshrined rights.

Then comes the technocratic class, which operates well above the law. The excesses of the bureaucratic state were most pronounced recently during the unequal application of the law regarding Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  Both parties were accused of the exact same crime: holding classified documents illegally.  Only one of those two parties enjoyed executive privilege regarding the documents in question: Trump.  Only one party was raided: Trump.  Only one party faces potential criminal charges: Trump.  The Constitution is useless in a system by which those who are charged with defending that document can ignore the document at will.

In sum, I believe the Constitution is a great document.  It is well intentioned.  It is also deeply flawed.  The Constitution will collapse. 

The Constitution failed to codify provisions necessary to protect the status quo.  It is too malleable and thus easily manipulated by political winds.  There are almost no provisions that are designed to hold elected officials accountable to the document itself, let alone unelected officials.  The impeachment process – a procedure that was reserved for egregious crimes, not petty political disputes – is too weak in some areas.  It was designed to be hard to execute.  The last Congress proved that was no longer the case, based on the target of their impeachment – twice.

The reality of the Constitution is that it is a document that attempted to transcend ethnic origin, but neither race nor sex.  It was designed for White men during an era when the social compact was understood, as was moral hazard.  Its concepts on liberty and freedom are far too complicated for simpler peoples led by impulse and emotions.  It is too high brow, making it a document that is not designed for the current electorate.  It was created for a people that are being rapidly replaced.  The Constitution fails because it was not designed to protect those people and consequently, it was not designed to survive.  Therefore, the Constitution, on its own, is not good.