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FDR during a fireside chat recommended the American public to read and
reread the constitution.
Its language isn't particularly complex, but it is often deliberately
ambiguous and increasingly settled by jurisprudence and precedence.
Its context sometimes helps clear things up:
- Notes kept by Constitutional Convention participants
- Federalist papers
- Correspondences of delegates and leaders
- Anti-Federalist tracts
Believed deeply in political theory
- Social contract, government by the consent of the governed
- Legitimacy for self-government from constitution
- Wanted civil liberty (freedom except detriment to common weal)
- Used written constitutions to ensure consent of governed
Even anti-federalists were committed to republicanism and personal
liberty.
Both sides accepted political science and the multiple interests in
government and the importance of preserving public opinion.
Anti-federalists feared the absence of a bill of rights, "unrestrained
power," and the possible development of an aristocracy, that helped make
the Constitution a good compromise.
- Happiness an important factor
Social contract:
- People govern the people
- Didn't want to be "enslaved" by the British (Lockean analogy)
- Actual slavery was a huge compromise
- When James Madison's sealed notes released after 50 years,
(1788+50 -> 1840) it was revealed that huge compromises were
made for SC and GA.
American Constitution is oldest national constitution in the world.
- Essentially an usurpation of authority by the Phil. Convention
- Incredibly stable, not even second convention because of worries about
weakening it
- Permanent in the minds of citizens
- State constitutions, by contrast, are unstable, long, and lightly
changed
- Ambiguities that were left in constitution -> judicial leeway (room
for much more fluid changes than a constitutional amendment)
- Tested by constitutional crisis of 1860 (civil war/secession)
Democratic constitutionalism implies concerted effort of the citizens.
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