Transcript of Constitution 101 (Lecture 1) with Larry P. Arnn

The constitution provides a form of government. And when you read it, I regard it as beautiful and think I understand why it’s beautiful. It has to do with its structure, which Madison says is the most important thing about it. But, you know, on any given passage, it’s full of details. Like, there’s a list in article one section eight, things that congress can do. Well, post offices and post roads is among them. It’s hard to write a beautiful sentence about that.

This is a document about how the government’s going to work, even how it’s going to look. It looks like a thing that operates in three branches. If there are interviews going on in front of the White House, which there are every day on the nightly news, there’s a picture of the White House in the background because that’s where the president works, and that’s where executive things are done. And if there’s something big in the congress, then there’s cameras looking up at the Capitol dome because that’s where the congress operates and where the legislation is made. And the same for the supreme court building. In operation, the government looks like the constitution.

And sure enough, the first three articles in the constitution, the first one sets up the legislative branch beginning with the words “all legislative power herein granted.” And one thing you’re going to learn in this course is that, we don’t make our laws through the congress anymore. That’s why there can be so many of them, and that’s why it’s impossible to hold to account those who make them except very indirectly. Indeed, it’s even hard to find out who makes them. I think there are 150 lawmaking agencies in the federal government now.

Final Cause and Formal Cause

So each of those clauses establish one, two, three, the way the government of the United States looks. And so if you think about it, you couldn’t have any serious activity that did not have a final cause. A whole bunch of people cooperating sometimes at risk to their lives, suffering and trouble and sacrifice that started right at the beginning because the first thing that happened after the victorious independence was we – well, actually, it already happened a bit before. We’re having a war with England, the greatest power on Earth. And to undertake that, you need a big reason. You need some ultimate reason. And anytime people think of their deaths, they always think of what they live their lives for. That’s what the Declaration of Independence is.

But then on the other hand, if you’re actually going to have a great government, then there’s going to have to be ways for it to operate. Because think what it has to achieve. It has to grant power. The doctrine of the Declaration of Independence is that all legitimate power stems from those who are governed. No other source. But then somehow, you’ve got to get some way to get legitimacy into the things that the government does and have that operate on a routine basis. So if you’re going to have a legitimate government, you’re going to have to have a form, a recognized way by which it operates. And so the constitution provides that. One, you could say, is the final cause, and the other is the formal cause.

Why Government Is Necessary

Now I’m going to back up a step and ask a question that’s prevalent today, and that is why should you have any government at all? What do you need it for? We were just over in England as we’re making this course, and we were celebrating the completion of the official biography of Winston Churchill. And there was a couple of young English guys who were working and helping us get around. And they were delightful people, and I got into long talks with them.

And they just made the point because, you know, they’re having the big debate about whether they separate from the European Union over there or not. And the young, as a rule, don’t favor the separation. And they said, “Well, we’re not English. We’re European.” And I said, “What if you don’t like something the European Union does?” “Oh, there’s a lot we don’t like. We want to see it reformed.” And I said, “Good. What means do you have to achieve that reform? Because it’s kind of difficult, isn’t it? There’s twenty-nine countries, I think, aren’t there? They don’t all speak the same language. How would you have a conversation with a wide body of fellow citizens to establish a thing like major reforms to the government?”

And that’s a point, isn’t it? Because in the constitution – well, in the place in the Federalist Papers, which you’re assigned to read along with this course, and I urge you to read them and reread them because they’re a great achievement in political thought, one of the greatest and one of the greatest American such achievements. And in the fifty-first Federalist, Madison is explaining why you have to build a constitution that has precautions in it. It has to grant power. You have to have that. But, also, it has to constrain power. You have to have that.

And the way he puts the point is, “What is government but the profoundest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls on the government would be needed.” See what that means? He’s locating us in the hierarchy of nature. Down at the bottom are the beasts or the rocks, and up at the top are angels and god.

Human Nature and Government

And if angels were being governed, although there’s a record in the Bible that their behavior is not perfect, still it’s true that as a common run, it’s probably a lot better than ours, and they don’t – they’re imagined as disembodied intellects, and so they don’t have all the needs and pressures we have. And the beast, they just always obey instinct. Whereas we’re moral beings, which means we’re called to do right and we don’t always. And that is actually the reason why we need laws.

But Madison just makes the common sense points. The people who make the laws are people too. How do we know they won’t make them in their own interest? Well, you need a constitution, and it needs to be in control of the governed. And so the reason nations – and that word nation, it comes from the Latin word “natura,” which means nature. And that means that the making of laws is written in human nature, and it actually proceeds, Aristotle says, from our ability to talk because that’s a pregnant thing about us. That’s the big thing about us.

And so this need for government is fundamental. And on the other hand, we need to be able to control it. And nations, therefore, are conceived as natural things where people can understand each other. They share a common final cause as in the Declaration of Independence, which tells us what our nation is for, and then they can cooperate with each other to appoint and manage a government that responds to their will.

Universal Rights and National Government

So it’s actually true then, isn’t it, that in this age where we’re eschewing nationalism for internationalism, the Declaration of Independence talks about that. And mark the point I’ve already made it, the Declaration of Independence begins universally. It says that everybody has rights, every human being, the same in every age no matter where. And then it says that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In other words, these universal rights that we have, they call for government to protect those rights, and they call for a kind of government that will be responsive to us. It’s a remarkable thing, I think. It’s hard to quarrel with the assertion which I make all the time that the greatest of the modern countries is the United States of America. Well, its story is tremendous. Right? Because it begins with a new world. Nobody knew where it was. Nobody knew what it was, until about 1806, I think it was. Nobody really knew how big it was. Nobody had gone across the new world and all the way back until about then, Lewis and Clark.

So something happened on this new land. And what was it? They picked up a civilization. It’s like in the western movies.

The Western Frontier and American Civilization

They’re often a contest between somebody who’s got a law book and somebody who’s got a gun. And in the towns where the westerns take place, there’s no capacity at all to produce either a law book or a gun, but they know about them because they’ve come from a well developed civilization and brought it out to the frontier. That’s what the whole Western movies are – just recreations of American history. Because the civilization mostly of Europe, with its understanding of God and its understanding of right and its learning and its understanding of nature, that comes over here, and those people brought all that in their minds and hearts. What they didn’t bring was aristocracy.

They didn’t bring an established elite to run everything. What they brought instead was ideas of freedom and equality. And so there was this new world, and a bunch of people got to take it over. And they had because, you know, the first settlements are about a hundred and fifty years before the Declaration of Independence. And that hundred and fifty years was a time of great learning.

Religious Freedom and Early American Settlements

One of the most remarkable things that was learned was that, most of the early settlers came because of religious persecution. And they thought the solution to that was to set up communities where their religion was installed by law and protected, and everybody had to practice it. And they thought it’s a big old country. If somebody doesn’t like it, they can go somewhere else. So religious conformity was more or less the rule. Early on, though, the idea came to be, we don’t really have to fight about that.

Because first of all, we do fight a lot about it. They were, they used to in Massachusetts Bay Colony, they used to hang Quakers for coming to town to try to convert people to Quakerism. And Quakers are Christians, you know, different brand. And so they thought that through. And in the course of that hundred and fifty years, they adopted the idea of civil and religious freedom.

And that’s in the Declaration of Independence. Right? Because life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that has to do including with our duty to God. And so that religion should be respected but also free, that’s born. That reaches its perfection in the Declaration of Independence.

God in the Declaration of Independence

God, I should say, occurs four times in the Declaration of Independence. And it’s an interesting thing because it demonstrates the way they talk of him, how important God is, and it demonstrates also how important limited government is. Because God appears, first as the maker of the laws of nature, nature’s God, the legislator. Then he appears as the supreme judge of the world, the judge, and then he appears as divine providence, the executive branch, and then he appears higher up as the creator, the founder of all things. Right? And the lesson of the Declaration of Independence is, one, God is a standard greatly to be respected and worshiped and understood. But, two, you wouldn’t combine all those powers in the hand of any being except God, not for men.

So you see, this tremendous opportunity, which I can’t see myself, how would it ever be repeated in history, because there isn’t a new world anymore, maybe space. But there’s nowhere to go like that anymore. And so they went there, and they got a hundred and fifty years to work on it. And then they proclaimed a regime defined by these two documents.

That’s one of the most important events in human history, in my opinion.

The Constitution and Limited Government

Let me say a thing or two about the Constitution because that’s important. First of all, I mentioned that it’s divided into groups, and there are seven articles in the Constitution of the United States. And the first three set up the three branches of government. But then a second thing about it’s interesting, and that is that it’s not an unlimited government.

There’s something called the police power, which comes from English common law, very old, and it’s the general authority to legislate for the health, safety, and welfare of the people. State governments in America have that. And that means that if a state government tries to do something, you know, there are provisions in state constitutions and in the federal constitution that forbid them to do many things. But the presumption is they have the power to do it if it fits within that common law definition, which is very wide. Whereas the Constitution of the United States delegates certain powers to the federal government.

And just think what a different thing in kind that is. Like, Hillsdale College has articles of incorporation, and they’re very beautiful, by the way, and we follow them here closely. But when it comes to the operation of the colleges, it basically grants us, the board and me and the staff here, power to do anything a college needs to do. Well, the federal government is not like that. The federal government has Article One Section Eight, and that’s a limit on the government, you see.

Powers of the Federal Government

The clauses are not hard to state what they’re about. It’s about national defense, the big job of the federal government. The second biggest group is provisions to guarantee a system of national commerce all over the nation, one nation as regards economics. Contracts are to be respected. Bankruptcies, there should be a provision for them so that you have to be a legal process before you can get out of your debts, but there should be such a process.

Money, weights and measures. It’s going to be a great nation trading freely inside its borders, and that will make the nation strong, and nations need to be strong in order to defend themselves. And the only other things that are powers given to the federal government are basically to operate in the states on the ground where the federal government has installations. So the post office is federal territory. And the federal building, there are way too many of those now, but there’s a provision for them right from the beginning.

So it’s a limited government. And whatever it does, it has to justify by a specific provision in the Constitution that permits it. And that’s not the strictest rule in the world. You know, there’s leeway. But it’s a different kind of thing than to begin on the basis you can do whatever you please.

The Purpose of the Constitution

The last thing I’ll say about the Constitution is, what’s it trying to do? We like to say today if we’re conservative minded people, which I happen to be, that the Constitution is to limit the government. But, of course, that’s obviously not true. The first thing it does is empower the government. And it’s all over the Constitution and the documents surrounding it that everybody understood they need a strong government.

In fact, the Constitution itself, which replaced the Articles of Confederation, was written in part because the Articles were failing. And the reason they were failing was the government wasn’t strong enough to protect our rights. There were foreign troops on our soil, we couldn’t do anything about it. Couldn’t pay our debts. There were riots in the states, and they couldn’t be put down.

Madison writes all this up in a really great essay before the constitutional convention called “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” It’s in our constitution reader. And so they need a stronger government, but they divide it. Now what is the purpose of the division? And you have to think about how profound the division is.

Division of Powers

Although it’s been much overcome by the growth of the administrative state and the bureaucracy, which you’re going to hear a lot about in this course, it’s still true that it’s a tremendous achievement. Because in dividing the powers, they arranged for different methods of election of the different parts. So the president serves for four years. The House of Representatives serves for two. The Senate serves for six.

The judges are appointed by the president on advice of the Senate. The constituencies are different. The constituency for a senator is a state. The constituency for the president is an electoral college made up of the which you win by majority, that’s under pressure these days, which you win by majority of the electors in the states, and the electors are calculated according to the number of senators and representatives each state has. So you see what it does?

It spreads authority across space. And you remember, this is the greatest and most extensive republic in human history, and they were trying to unite a continent the full size of which they did not quite know yet, although George Washington did name his army the Continental Army. So they want it spread, and so the Senate spreads political authority, and that means people who live in the very different and widely separated parts of the country all get a say even if they’re not very numerous. And then on the other hand, it spreads authority across time. Because if you want to change something in the American government, the fastest you can possibly turn the whole government over is six years because it takes three elections to elect a whole Senate and the president two thirds of that amount of time.

So that means that, it places a premium on opinions that we hold firmly and for a long time. And Madison makes this point beautifully in the Federalist Papers and more than once. In the forty-ninth, I think it is, he says, it is our reason alone that must be placed in control of the government. Our passions must be controlled by it. So we’re supposed to think before we act.

Representative Government

Here’s another feature of the Constitution. In the sixty-third Federalist, Madison says that this is the first purely representative government in history. He’s claiming a uniqueness. And what does he mean by purely representative? He means that sovereign in England was the king, and he was the executive branch.

The sovereign in Athens was the free citizens, and they were the legislative branch. Sovereignty in America is the constitutional majority, but they don’t occupy a branch of government. We don’t control—I mean, they’ve introduced the referendum, things like that in later years, but there’s no federal referendum process. Why? Madison thought it would be good for us because, you know, just like you can’t trust the government fully because they’re people, you can’t trust us fully either because we’re people too.

And so we can only act through elections. That makes elections important in America, and it also means we can’t do anything by the spur of the moment. The best decision is not being made on the spur of the moment. And I’ll state a telling exception to that too. The president is specifically empowered to act alone, and that’s in matters of execution.

Think of the different meanings of that term, execution. When you’ve got a war, you have to act suddenly. But laws prevail because, of course, if the president starts a war and the Congress doesn’t like it or if he sends a bunch of troops somewhere, they don’t have to supply any money from that. And the money will run out if they will put a stop to it, and they have often in American history and threatened other times. So you see, the idea is that we have all the power, but we can’t act except through our representatives.

And that adds patience and deliberation to the process. And then a last thing, the size of the United States. The fact that it’s spread so far. The fact that it includes so many people in so many jurisdictions. You know, the states are supposed to have a lot more authority than they have these days, and one of my wishes is to see it restored.

The Size of the Nation and Public Discourse

A lot of other things like that too. But when it’s spread all over the place, let’s say, you’ve got ten little conspiratorial friends. You know, if you got ten little conspiratorial friends, you can meet in dark rooms and whisper to each other, and nobody need find out. But what’s ten going to do in a country this size? In fact, to influence the country, you have to talk across millions of people, hundreds of thousands in the founding, millions now, tens of millions now, and you have to speak across vast spaces.

And Madison writes, that will teach us to be more candid with each other. We love to say that all politicians are liars, and I think that’s not quite true. But it’s a rough truth. But on the other hand, think how much worse it would be if they didn’t have to talk in front of us and if they weren’t free to contradict each other. And I want to close with this point because it’s fundamentally important.

Speech vs. Force in Governance

There are just two ways of governing human beings, and one is by talking and the other is by force. Because we are the speaking beings. This rationality that we have that lets us use common nouns, that’s what makes us political. And so legitimate political systems are always built on talking, not on violence. They may take violence to install. They may require violence to persist and to defend, but they must not proceed in their ordinary workings by violence of one citizen upon another. And so we have a political system that, first of all, is meant to protect our rights, which are written in our nature, the decisive part of which is our ability to reason and talk. But, also, we have a nation where we’re supposed to discuss things and teach each other and learn from each other.

And I’ll go back to the European Union. The Poles and the Czechs and the English and the French don’t really have a good way to talk to each other except through the agencies of the European Union.

And that means it’s very difficult for there to be a culture in which public opinion is formed freely among all of the people who are affected. They can’t speak with each other routinely. There are translation programs and lots of people speak more than one language in Europe and yet to talk in your native tongue, the tongue in which you’ve been educated and by which you articulate your best thoughts, that’s what you do especially with fellow citizens. It’s become a very great country in the course of its history. Beyond the imaginings even of the people who founded it who were extremely ambitious people, they had the highest possible hopes.

Right? Well, if that’s true, there must have been some cause of it. But also, it’s in that final purpose we serve that we have adopted. It’s a purpose available to all human beings. We have adopted it for our own.

And then finally, in this form of government we have under the constitution, which is itself a reflection of human nature, and that is why it has worked so well. So I’ll close with the editorial point well known. I think we ought to restore the authority of the constitution and the declaration of independence. Thank you.

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