I am not your lawyer. This is not legal advice.
Preamble
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
I imagine this is the part if the Constitution that you have read, and that you have perhaps tried to parse. In some sort of grade-school lesson, perhaps you memorized this, perhaps you recited it, and perhaps you talked about what the words mean. It’s been a while, so, even if you can still recite the preamble as a trick at parties when the hour’s late and the fun’s dried up, let’s briefly go back over the language.
As an initial matter, why should we? Are these words magic? In a word, yes. The Constution is Law. It is not aspirational. It does not say things like, “The Government should support the Endeavors of the People.” It contains legal language that assigns powers and delineates the limits of those powers.
That means the Constitution can be cited as binding law to restrict the government. This sentence is an exception. The preamble hints at the history of the Constution, sets out its goals, and clarifies its purpose, but it isn’t operative language. It doesn’t assign or deny power. It’s an aspirational sentence to start a legal document.
I’m not a grammarian in my soul, and I won’t diagram the sentence. It’s actually a short sentence larded up with high ideals and purpose. Lard can be delicious, but let’s look at the low-fat version.
“We . . . do . . . establish this Constitution[.]” That’s it. The preamble just says, this is the Constitution, guys. Here it is.
Let’s fatten this thing back up a little.
First, the people establish the Constitution. This speaks to an important quality of the Constution, that it comes from people, not States and not their Confederations. We vote (rarely) on Government actions and (often) on the people who represent us in that Government. The power flows one way, and one way only, here: from the Governed to the Government. This idea goes back to the Magna Carta, a document in which several rich men sat down and gave the King what for, insisting on some basic things. It’s not exactly equality by today’s standards, but at the time it was something to crow about. The Constitution harkens back to that idea, here, in the first couple of words.
And why do we do it? To form a more perfect union. Not a perfect union, but a more perfect one. The one that came before was crap. The Constitution was the second or third attempt to get just-over-a-dozen independent countries (self-governing “States”) to cooperate in a meaningful way.
As it were, to Unite.
The document that came before, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, effectively said, “We are thirteen separate NationStates, each Supreme Sovereign of the World, each surrounded by lousy jerks and saboteurs, but We guess We gotta live next door to them anyhow, so here are the ground rules: Everybody be nice.” That worked about half as well as you’d expect, and the wheels came off the first time anything went wrong (q.v. Shays’ Rebellion, in which farmers-taxed-into-the-ground met up with vererans-not-paid-for-service, then almost overthrew the Massachusetts government because it prosecuted them for being mad. Under the Articles, nobody could do anything. Good times.).
The Perpetual Union was not a perfect one. So the Constitution didn’t have to be perfect, just “more perfect” than that.
So, how do we get to perfect? We start with the things that the Perpetual Union failed to provide: justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and the (unspecified) Blessings of Liberty.
There would be an argument while the Constitution was being debated that listing the Blessings would exclude any that weren’t listed, so it was better to keep it to the vague umbrella term. The hard-core Federalist view was that, because people are generally good and honorable, they’ll govern with the idea that because no rights were specified, all were sacred. The Anti-Federalists argued that only those rights specified would be respected, because governments are bound by law, not honor. In the coming centuries, I suppose we’ll figure out who was right.
That was the preamble, one fatty little sentence. Next week: MEAT!