Tomorrow, September 17, is Constitution Day in America, celebrating the day 229 years ago when the Framers of the Constitution finished their work in Philadelphia over that long hot summer and then sent the document they’d just completed out to the states for ratification. Reflecting a vision of liberty through limited government that the Founders had first set forth 11 years earlier in the Declaration of Independence, “We the People,” through that compact, sought “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.”
The political and legal history that has followed has been far from perfect, of course. Has any nation’s been otherwise? But in the great sweep of human affairs, we’ve done pretty well living under this, the world’s oldest written constitution still in effect. Much that has happened to and under the Constitution during the ensuing years has been good, such as the ratification of the Civil War Amendments, which incorporated at last the grand principles of the Declaration of Independence; much has not been so good, such as the major reinterpretations of the document, without amendment, that took place during the New Deal, giving us the modern executive state that undermines the Founders’ idea of liberty through limited government.
Here at the Cato Institute we’ve long celebrated this day as we did yesterday with our 15th annual Constitution Day symposium. Those who missed the event, which concluded with Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick’s B. Kenneth Simon Lecture in Constitutional Thought, will be able to see it in a couple of days at Cato’s events archives. At the symposium, as we do every year, we released our 15th annual Cato Supreme Court Review, which is already online, along with the volumes from previous years. As the Founders and Framers understood, liberty under constitutionally limited government will endure only as long as it remains alive in the hearts and minds of the people. That’s why we mark this day each year.
