It is Constitution Day once again, but because it fell on Saturday this year, I haven’t seen as much publicity.  That does not mean that we ought to overlook it.  It has now been 229 years since the new United States met to overhaul its first constitution (the Articles of Confederation) and ended up proposing an entirely new kind of government, a new experiment in governance, to determine whether men could construct a government based on reflection and choice that both limited power and distributed power among various offices sufficient to achieve its intended ends.  Constitutionalism as a concept had already existed, though it did not come to mean what it does today until roughly the seventeenth century—some sort of explicit structure, ideally embodied in a written document.  And the United States was the first nation to actually write and enact such a written document.

Many scholars have written about the Constitution eloquently and expertly, and I can’t really improve on what the best have said.  But a few comments might be in order.  First, as with any governmental form, ours is not perfect.  Some argue the United States Constitution did not go far enough in limiting the power of government.  There is some truth I think in that assessment.  But in fairness, in that era, few had believed power could be divided and limited even that much.  In addition, few believed then that the Federal Courts, especially the Supreme Court, would deviate so far from the intended meaning of various parts of the document, allowing a huge growth in government power and activity.  Both opponents and proponents pretty much agreed on what its provisions meant in the eighteenth century, even if they believed the other side was wrong in what they wanted to be written in it.  We have obviously come a long way.  Congress inevitably claimed more power over time, but the courts allowed it to happen.  The president also attempted to claim more power—no surprise—but again, the courts allowed it.  And let’s not let Congress off the hook, since it too gave quite a bit of delegated power to the president which in truth belonged to it.  Moreover, who really thought the states would be so reduced in their roles—except some Anti-Federalists.  Once again, the Federal courts had a hand in that, as did the Congress in initiating the power grab.

But in spite of its defects in retrospect, or its perceived defects, this document has still survived in a way much more favorable to the truly common good, limited power and individual rights than we have any right to expect, given human nature.  No other nation in the world has a constitution that has survived so long.  The French Constitution has gone through 15 iterations—that is, fifteen different constitutions.  And it has even more (and in some respects) fatal, defects.  The British, despite their talk about the “Ancient Constitution” or just their Constitution, have no written, enforceable, document or governmental structure.  It is only be virtue of tradition and preference that the British have maintained an essentially representative, rather than monarchical, government.

In the end, the Constitution still “works” much better than we really could expect.  Even the Founding Fathers were not sure their grand experiment would work.  But after 229 years and some bumps in the road, and some uncertainty in the future, we can be thankful that it does work as well as it has, and even better than we can imagine.  In this era, very different from 1787, we have to be reminded not to make the perfect, the ideal, the enemy, of the good.  Utopianism is not our concern. The good is.