Miracle At Philadelphia

The Constitutional Convention established a new form of government and supreme law of the United States, but as Bowen shows, the delegates were under severe pressures of time and politics, compromising on some issues and leaving others unaddressed to arrive at a satisfactory result. From the moment of its ratification, the US Constitution has been the subject of intense argument over its precise meaning and broader purposes. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is the Bill of Rights, 10 amendments to the Constitution added very shortly after ratification. Another example is that the precise powers of each branch with respect to foreign policy remain undefined. The president is named commander-in-chief, and Congress holds the power to declare war and raise armies, but as early as the Washington administration, there was disagreement within his own cabinet over the president’s ability to act independently of Congress with respect to the military and treaty partners. The most severe early test to the Constitution was the question of slavery. The Constitution avoids the actual word, but also banned the importation of enslaved people within 25 years of ratification. For many, this implied a general aversion to the practice and a desire to see it gradually phased out of existence, but since abolition was not explicitly stated, others argued that slavery was not only permissible but also sacrosanct, and that there was no Constitutional barrier to its expansion into the territories. The Supreme Court, which had claimed the power to invalidate federal laws despite there being no such provision in the Constitution, infamously argued in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that Black Americans, enslaved or not, could never enjoy the full rights of citizenship.

After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments affirmed equal citizenship for all under federal law, but did not settle whether those rights were guaranteed by the state governments as well as by the federal government. This uncertainty allowed many states to impose “Jim Crow” segregation, denying Black Americans their constitutional rights on the grounds that the Constitution only defined the purview of the federal government. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), along with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other pieces of federal legislation, helped end legal segregation, but the difficulty of defining the boundaries between state and federal power remain.

The current debate over the meaning of the Constitution is between two schools of thought. The first, originalism, holds that the original intent of the Constitution should be the sole guide for contemporary federal law. In the Dobbs v. Jackson decision (2022) overturning the federal protection of abortion rights, justice Samuel Alito claimed that since abortion was not protected under the Constitution or generally understood to be a right in 1787, the Court could not add their own meaning to the document’s original intent. The other school envisions a “living constitution,” which evolves with time to meet new needs and concerns. Major examples include the Brown decision, as well as criminal procedure cases requiring the police to read Miranda rights upon arrest, and the federal protection of gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). The very fact that the courts take such a central role in arbitrating these issues is itself not something anticipated by the Constitution, which shows how engagement with the US Constitution remains politically and historically contingent.