Celebrating Constitution Day during a constitutional crisis

Today we celebrate Constitution Day, the anniversary of the 1787 signing of our federal charter. We honor a document that we need more than ever: a Constitution that is both strong but pliable, rooted in federalism and individual liberty, yet also capable and ready for the inevitability of a world the Founders had not yet envisioned.

Change is the core of our Constitution and our federal system. The Constitution is inherently forward looking, and in that way, relentlessly progressive in its design. It is precisely because the Founders anticipated change and the unforeseen that we have been able to overcome blind spots, mistakes, and grave injustices that continue to challenge us. Chief among them is that the Constitution of 1787, among its other historical blind spots, explicitly denied the equal personhood of African Americans and the civil rights of women.

The flexibility in our Constitution allowed us to begin to address those original sins. And in critical ways, our Constitution and our nation continued to change and progress through the Civil War and into the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments; through the First World War, when the 19th Amendment recognized the right of women to vote; and into the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, when Congress passed laws that gave the 14th Amendment new force.

In 1787, our Constitution entrenched slavery; in 1865, the 13th Amendment rooted it out. The Constitution of 1787 had nothing to say about the Declaration of Independence’s principle of equality. But in 1868, the 14th Amendment guaranteed equal citizenship to everyone born on American soil and equal rights to all people in this country. And in 1920 we recognized that it isn’t just men who are created equal.

Today, we confront a new crisis, in which America threatens to devour itself through hate, distrust, and an attack on the Constitution and the institutions and freedoms it establishes and protects. The president of the United States leads this attack every day through his weak man’s strongman act: defying Congressional oversight; manipulating his office for personal financial gain; corrupting the mechanisms of justice and independent agency expertise for political advantage; and “joking” about staying in power indefinitely.

Our current constitutional crisis is also playing out in our courts, where those advancing an increasingly transparent conservative political agenda blatantly ignore constitutional protections while masquerading sickeningly as “constitutionalism.” We can and should celebrate Constitution Day by fighting back against the dangerous fiction — relentlessly marketed by judicial partisans on the right — that our Constitution only means what it meant in 1787. We cannot be silent, for instance, when the Supreme Court throws its arms around property rights and federalism while dismissing the 14th and 15th Amendment’s protections for open, participatory democracy by all Americans. Our Constitution cannot countenance striking down the Voting Rights Act in the name of federalism as though the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments never happened.

The irony, of course, is that the president disdains both the original text and the Constitution that has been strengthened and bolstered by generations of Americans. The president seeks to override the 1787 Constitution’s separation of powers to build a vanity wall in defiance of Congress’ appropriations power. At the same time, he also seeks to undermine the 1868 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.

We are a different — a more complete — people today than in 1787. Despite persistent injustices, the majority of us are working hard to be better, to each other and to our world. In that way, our world is changing, progressing, moving forward, and so are we. The Founders knew that we would, and they wrote a Constitution ready for change. And they gave us a Constitution that empowers us to pursue real justice and equity — to be a more perfect union, and an even better people.

Kevin Kreneck