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Happy Constitution Day! Today marks the anniversary of September 17th, 1787 — the day thirty-nine men signed the greatest governing document in the history of the world. For the first time, a government was formed not by the decree of a king or at the barrel of a gun, but by the consent of the governed. We the People. Three words that had never carried that kind of legal weight before. It is impossible to overstate how radical this idea was — or how much it still matters today.
When every public servant in America takes the Oath of Office, they swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Not the president, not the ruling party, not the latest mandate from the administrative state — the Constitution. The Founders understood that no man should stand above the law, so they built the law first and put men under it.
But here is something worth understanding on this Constitution Day, because it has largely been lost in our national conversation. Our Constitution was not written to restrain the American citizen — it was written to restrain the federal government. This distinction matters enormously. Too many Americans have absorbed terrible ideas that have been fed to them by the left and their government indoctrination centers. The First Amendment doesn’t mean that government censors get to decide what kind of speech or religion is acceptable in the public square. The Second Amendment isn’t an asterisk rather than a right. The Fourth Amendment is not suspended simply because government finds some emergency demanding “safety.” The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are a line drawn around federal power. The Tenth Amendment says it plainly: the powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and to the people. The Constitution is not a leash on the American people. It is a leash on Washington.
That is worth remembering and defending today, and every day. One of the best things you can do to celebrate is simply to read the document. It is remarkably brief. Most Americans can read the entire Constitution in about thirty minutes. Start with the Preamble — those fifty-two words that tell you exactly what this Republic was built to do and who it was built to serve: We the People. That’s us!
Happy Constitution Day!
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