The Constitution Explained | A Primary Source Close Read w/ BRI

0:00 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Bill of Rights Institute’s Close Read series. I’m Kirk Higgins and I love history and digging through different documents. And today we’re going to continue that journey. So we’re going to take a look at the Constitution of the United States. I’m excited you’re here. Our goal with the Close Reads has always been to unpack different documents and try

0:21 to find different important ideas and themes that we can unpack. We’ve looked at all kinds of documents, but for the last few rounds, I’ve been trying to break down sort of big works from American history, big works from sort of the American understanding of government and trying to do it really quickly. And so today I’ve picked out a big task for myself. I’m going to try to get through the Constitution in under ten minutes.

0:43 So I hope it’s helpful, I hope it’s interesting. I will say that in going through with this quickly, we’re only looking at the big, high level stuff. So if you’ve ever wondered why the Constitution structured the way it is, where big things are, if you’re looking for a good summary video of just what’s in the thing, this video is for you. If you’re looking for more details about different controversies that have come up, or more about how enslavement is treated in the Constitution or how it is

1:05 that we’ve developed and built new states and territories and how all those kinds of things have happened, I’m not going to be able to go into a lot of that in this video, but we’ve got lots of different resources that you can explore that more down in the description. So if you go down there, I think you’ll be able to find everything you’re looking for. But for now, we’re going to go on a 50,000 foot tour of the Constitution. So let’s dive in. So, as I mentioned, I’m going to try to go

1:26 for two different big questions here today. One, how is the Constitution structured? So what are the different Articles? What are the Articles about? And why are they positioned the way that they are? And I’m hoping that by looking at that, we can begin to understand what’s going on with this document. Why is it created this way? What kind of government is it trying to create? And where is it that some of these principles that we talk about all the time emerge from?

1:46 Whether it’s separation of powers or whether it’s federalism, how do these things actually find themselves in the Constitution? Where do we actually see them? And I’m hoping that we can do that and maybe pick up some fun and interesting things along the way. First, I’m going to start with some historical context. So, as I’m sure many of you know, the Constitution was put in place to replace the Articles of Confederation.

2:07 So the Articles were sort of our first Constitution. It was ratified in 1781 in the middle of the American Revolution and it got us through the Revolution. But after the Revolution, it wasn’t working the way that we thought we needed it to. And so the delegates got together in Philadelphia from May to September of 1787 to rewrite and revive the Constitution. There’s a lot more history to that,

2:27 but for now we’re just going to leave it there. If you’re interested in digging in, I promise you it’s worth the story. But what they did during that hot summer was to come up with a new Constitution that they thought would better join together the states in a more effective union. That would help iron out some of the challenges they were having for the Articles of Confederation. Showing up there were 55 delegates from twelve of the states.

2:48 Rhode island did not send a delegate and 39 of them are around at the end to sign the actual document. They left for different reasons. There’s actually more people at the convention, three of whom chose not to sign it, but 39 did put their names to it and they sent it out to the states for what’s called ratification or the actual legal signing and voting on and debating of the new Constitution.

3:13 So that finally happened. The requisite number of states ratified the Constitution in June of 1788. But the final state, Rhode Island, our friend who I mentioned earlier, didn’t ratify the Constitution until 1790. So that’s pretty interesting. So the document itself really isn’t that long. It’s about 4500 words, which if you write double space papers in your classes, it’s only about nine pages.

3:36 So that seems like a lot. But really in the grand scheme of things, for the document that governs how our government functions, it’s kind of short. It’s pretty impressive. So let’s check out the structure of the Constitution. So it’s just a high level overall what’s in the document and how it’s put together. First, you have the preamble. This is the we the People part of the Constitution. It’s introduction. It lays out what this document is intended to do and it has a little bit more

4:00 flourish, a little bit more style than the rest of the government. And that’s really intended just to outline exactly what this document is going to accomplish, what it’s going to do next. It goes into Article 1. This is the legislature. So this is the legislative branch, or the branch that’s passing laws. That’s a big section. It has ten different sections and details

4:21 different parts of the legislature and how it’s structured and what its powers are. We’ll dive into that a little bit more in a few minutes. Then we go into Article 2, which is the executive. This is outlining the presidency, but really it’s outlining how the executive power is structured and the executive power being what’s? Executing the laws or carrying them out or enforcing them.

4:42 Next it goes into the judiciary branch. This is Article Three, and this structures how that judiciary branch is going to be built, what it’s going to look like and what powers it’s going to have. Next we go to article four, which I call the nature of the union. I’m not sure that that’s the official term, but for me this is looking at things like how it is that the states function

5:05 together, how it is that they’re having to recognize each other’s laws and what the actual tangible pieces of the union are going to be, what makes it unified, in other words, what brings the states together. Next, we have Article 5, which is the amendment process. This is sort of a recognition that this document is going to change over time and outlining the process for how that can happen.

5:27 Article 6 is the supremacy clause of the constitution or the supremacy clauses contained in there. But what it really is, is looking at why the constitution is the law of the land, establishing what that’s going to mean and what that’s going to look like. And finally, we have, as I mentioned earlier, this ratification process in article seven. And that’s really it, seven different articles with lots of different sections and clauses, but it’s really seven articles

5:50 that outline the entire structure for the constitution. Let’s take a closer look at the legislature. So within the legislature, within the legislative branch, again, this is the branch that’s going to make laws. And it’s interesting, in the words that were chosen in this constitution, this is why they were meeting from May to September. Everything is chosen very specifically.

6:11 So the opening of the legislative branch section says all legislative powers here in granted. This means that we the people, as the constitution started out, are granting to this body of individuals these legislative powers. In other words, they are going to be able to make laws over the powers that are included and outlined within this document.

6:33 Now that’s grown and changed and expanded over time and again. That’s another one of those stories we’re not going to go into today. But we do have lots of resources, like I mentioned down in the description. So if you want to learn more about the legislative branch and how congress has changed and evolved over time, take a look. I think you’ll find it really interesting, but within this article they go into the different qualifications. So who is it that can or what qualifications do you need before you can become a member of this body?

6:57 What’s going to be its structure? So as many of you probably know, the structure is a bicameral one. So it’s got two houses. We have a house and a senate. Those are structured differently. And so far as how they’re elected, the number of representatives that are represented from the states, and each and then they each have different responsibilities. So whether it’s raising revenue in those bills coming out of the house or it’s

7:20 dealing with foreign policy and things like that being in the Senate. Those things are all delineated within this article in the Constitution. It also details out how elections are going to work. And really here it turns to the states and says that states are going to determine how it is that these individuals are elected. The number for each house is outlined in the Constitution. But how they’re elected, so specifically how the functioning

7:42 and the timing of elections is going to happen is to the states. And this is a part of something we call federalism. So it’s how it’s dividing between this large federal government or national government. And then the individual state governments also deal with in here are the powers. The powers. And this is the big clause in Article One is Article One, Section Eight. And that actually details out what these powers are.

8:05 And it begins with Congress shall have power too, and then delineates out all kinds of different powers, whether it’s taxation or whether it’s postal roads. All of those things are detailed in that Article One, Section Eight. But it goes on to have a few other different sections, ten in total, as I mentioned. Those other sections are dealing with things like what powers are reserved in states and what things can Congress not touch or not pass laws over.

8:32 This obviously gets expanded later in the Bill of Rights, where there’s explicit things that Congress cannot make, laws that it interferes with the history of the Bill of Rights. And us being from the Bill of Rights Institute, I promise you we have lots of things to say about it is complex and changes over time. But really this inside of Article One is where some of these first restrictions on what Congress can do are outlined even

8:54 before the Bill of Rights was passed, after ratification. Next, we’ll take a little bit closer look at the executive. The executive branch begins earlier we said that Congress shall have the power to hear the executive power shall be vested in. So there’s an interesting change in phrase there in that vesting of the executive power is not that we are delegating out power that is now going to be legislated,

9:20 but that the power of executing those things shall be vested in this structure. And so what’s outlined is a unitary or singular executive. So we have one person that is the President of the United States. And then from there it outlines the mode of elections. This is where the Electoral College has found. This is something that is in the news a lot every four years.

9:42 It’s how we elect the President of the United States. It also talks about the qualifications and the structure of the office. One interesting thing there, and I always think this is a fascinating thing to point out the President must take an oath of office in order to come into the office. That oath rather, is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

10:02 So the president takes an oath to protect not the country of the United States or not the government in some abstract sense, but the oath is specifically to this document and to protect what powers it outlines and what controls it has. And that’s the oath to which the president is swearing allegiance, which I think is pretty interesting if you think about it.

10:24 And finally, this article also outlines that the president must go and talk to Congress every once in a while. Let’s give them an update on how things are going in the country. And this is interesting. So this is when we see the State of the Union. It’s what it’s become known now, but that really shows and represents how the president is responsible to Congress,

10:44 not to anybody else, but to Congress specifically. So again, here we’re seeing some of those checks and balances. Next, let’s take a quick look at the judiciary branch. So the judiciary is interesting because it is a shorter one and it basically outlines the structure of it says there’s going to be a Supreme Court, but then it kind of says everything else is TBD. Essentially what happened with the structure of the judiciary is that they left it up to Congress to really

11:08 define what this branch was going to look like, what these courts were going to do. The method of election here, unlike Congress, where the states were deciding it the electoral college for the president here, these individuals are appointed. So the Supreme Court is an appointed position by Congress. They hold those for good behavior,

11:29 so essentially for life, as long as they don’t get impeached. And that again is another check and balance that we’ve talked about that is separating the judiciary from popular will or from the desires of the people, hopefully to create some kind of neutral distance. At least that was the theory. And then finally it talks about the different responsibilities that this Court is going to have.

11:51 So it has this fancy phrasing, all cases and law and equity arising under the Constitution, the laws of the United States and treaties, and then goes on to talk about something called original jurisdiction. Or in other words, what cases is the Supreme Court specifically going to have rule over? What’s not outlined in here is judicial review. So judicial review has become a huge part of the role of the Court.

12:15 We often look to the Court to determine the constitutionality of laws that was not established in the Constitution. It’s not established until later in a case called Marbury v. Madison, where that is actually set as precedent and becomes sort of the tradition that we look to for the establishment of judicial review. But it’s not outlined here, although many, including Alexander Hamilton,

12:35 who wrote about this in the Federalist Papers, kind of thought that’s the direction the judiciary would go. It’s not actually delineated here in the Constitution. So next we have what I called earlier the nature of the union or the union. And this is a bunch of different clauses within article four that talk about how things are going to work. So we have full faith and credit, meaning that everybody, the laws in one state are going to be

12:59 recognized by people in another state privileges. And immunities saying here that things that you are, if you are a citizen in the state of Wyoming, let’s say, although Wyoming didn’t exist at the time, you’re also a citizen in the state of Montana, another state that didn’t exist at the time. But the point being that altogether this forms the union.

13:20 These are how these states are going to interact. Before the civil war, this article in these different sections, particularly Privileges and Immunities Clause, had a lot of controversy around it. After the civil war, hasn’t been so much. The nature of the union changed a bit, but it’s still significant that this is how these states come together and how we function and where that unit is actually established.

13:41 Also talks about bringing in new states and territories, how that process is going to work, and this guarantee of republican government, that the states will have this republican government, but it still is reserving. And this was touched on in article one. There’s a lot of powers that the states have that the national government does not have. The division between those two things again is federalism.

14:02 There’s a lot to that concept. But this is sort of, again, how this is manifesting itself within the constitution. And finally we have these last three articles that I’m just going to breeze through really quickly. Article five being this amendment process. So again, how is it we’re going to make changes to the constitution if changes need to be made? We have an article six supremacy,

14:22 the supremacy clauses there, there’s a few other things contained within it. But the idea is that the constitution is the law of the land. So if things violate that constitution, this is where some of the judicial review ideas come from. But if something violates that, if something violates the constitution, whether it’s a state law or it’s a federal law, it can’t do that. The constitution is it.

14:44 So everything gets judged against it. And then finally the ratification process. So how is it we’re going to take this from just being a document that was drafted by these 55 individuals and signed by 39 of them and make it a document that’s going to be governing over everyone within the country and that’s outlined in article seven in the ratification process. All right, so that was a lot.

15:06 So we talked about that structure, so we talked about how it’s delineated. We looked at the three branches of government, the legislature, the judicial, the executive. We looked at how those things are sort of intervening and together you can see that the constitution is structured with these specific designated powers. So there are different spheres of responsibility, and those things overlap a bit, and that’s all sort of dissected out

15:29 in these different articles in the Constitution. So really, articles one, two and three, and then 4567, you have sort of the operation of the union and then how it is that those things are going to function together, what the Constitution really means and how we can change it if we decide that something needs to be amended or changed or what have you. And I think so our second question was,

15:50 how can knowing this help us understand the government? I think it helps us really to conceptualize what it means to have a Constitution, which means clearly outlined powers that can be looked to as the people can hold the government accountable to. And then we have debates over over whether or not we think things are functioning

16:10 properly or whether or not things can get changed. And I think that’s part of the amazing thing about our Constitution that has lasted for as long as it has since 1787, is this idea that it can be structured, and that as we debate and we discuss and we have conversations in the public sphere, we can work to make it function better for the nation and work to more fully realize the ends of Republican

16:35 government towards which the document was created. So I wasn’t quite under ten minutes, but I think we covered a lot of ground. If you ever have any questions, please do submit them to us. We’re on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. We’d love to hear your comments. And again, as I said, I know I only barely scratched the surface of the Constitution and doing this sort of breeze through. So do check out the other resources

16:55 that we have down in the description, or check out the Bill of Rights Institute’s website for all kinds of different lessons and essays and studies and different pieces from American history that can really help you dive into the complexities that emerge from the document. This is really a starting point, but I think it’s an interesting one sometimes take this big step back and then take a look at what’s in front of us.

17:16 So thanks you all for joining. I’ll look forward to seeing you in the next one.