Abstract

How relevant is the Constitution in today’s society? This is the document that guides the three branches of government in day to day operation, demonstrating that what the Constitution means to the people of the United States is essential in gauging how relevant people think our government is. In this experiment, I surveyed different college students on State campus with a list of different questions to first find out their general knowledge of our Constitution, then their opinion of it. Students were randomly assigned to receive a text about a Supreme Court case that involves interpreting the Constitution or receive no information. I predicted that providing information about different Constitutional interpretation would lead to more negative attitudes towards the Constitution. In contrast to my predictions, the results show us that when comparing the treatment and control group, even though the treatment group had a less favorable opinion of the Constitution, the difference was not statistically significant enough to indicate that people with greater knowledge of the Constitution and the Supreme Court interpretation had any different opinions about the Constitution than those who did not. This tells us that individuals may already have sufficient information about the Constitution or they have preconceived notions of the document itself

Introduction:

In 1789, the world saw the formation of a new government unlike any that had come before. In an era of aristocrats and monarchies, the United States Constitution was a bold step away from the status quo. Our founding fathers had a vision for a country ruled by the people that lived and worked in it rather than the people and families at the top of society on the other side of the globe. With this idea, they structured our Constitution accordingly. After much deliberation and multiple conventions, a final document was settled on and eventually pitched to the 13 states. When ratified in 1788, the Constitution was seen skeptically by our infant nation with many assuming that such a government would crash and burn not long after it started. Our success as a country and rise to the status of world hegemon today proves that a country can in fact be successfully run on a democratic government. This document we call our Constitution is, in today’s society, relatively unknown in its details to the citizens of the United States. Many people either blindly follow the Constitution out of a sense of patriotism or curse it because of their unhappiness with the current government. [1] These very same people hardly possess any real knowledge of the Constitution, making their patriotism for or rebellion against the document unfounded. One cannot necessarily blame them for not knowing every in and out of the Constitution, as it is still studied, interpreted, and changed to this day; it is surrounded by a labyrinth of legal code, precedents, and laws. My goal in this research is to try to bring more understanding to this complicated and intricate government we have created.

Historical background:

Starting at the first Constitutional Convention, the American people set out to create a government based on none other before it. After winning the Revolutionary War, the 13 original colonies, now states, found themselves struggling with problem after problem under the Articles of Confederation. The selfishness of each state seemed to take precedence over the idea of a union and the United States as a whole suffered from it. Max Farrand states in his book The Framing of the Constitution of the United States that once the colonies were on their own, in order to be taken seriously anywhere outside of our country, they needed “to justify themselves before the world and to justify themselves in their own eyes.”[2] The only way they saw to do this was to create an effective union. Up until the creation of the Constitution, this effective union was unattainable with our weak congress, missing executive, and little interjection from the courts. Demonstrating the governments ineffectiveness, Farrand states that “the decisions of congress were little more than recommendations”[3] as they had no official power over the states through the Articles of Confederation. With this in mind, the men of power in Congress and the states set the date for a Constitutional Convention in Annapolis in September of 1786.

Preservation of the Constitution:

At the center of its matter, American Federalism was the first and most aggressive defender of the Constitution. Federalism preached for the adoption of the Constitution and constantly lobbied for the powers vested within it. Today, we see people still preaching federalism in our government to uphold the original intent of the Constitution, also called “originalists.” The men at the Constitutional Convention knew that a stronger central government was needed to run the country, but still wanted a strong idea of individualism and independence present in it. The separation between states and the federal government was essential to their idea of a harmonious Union. A textualist approach is another popular method of interpretation used to read the Constitution, both in academics and in the court system. Textualism says that what is in the Constitution is the law of our country and if the issue before you does not involve some part of the Constitution, no further action can be taken by the Court or Congress. This narrow interpretation of the Constitution is called upon whenever looking at an issue in the Supreme Court or when a new law is being proposed, saying that one will find the answer within the Constitution as the founding fathers would have. In American Constitutional Law by Ralph Rossum and Alan Tarr, textual analysis is described as “If the Constitution 9 is to control the outcome of a case, and if its text is plain, then constitutional interpretation should stop right there.”[4] These boundaries are seen to create accountability, and with this comes distinct laws and outcomes that can be traced back to their origin if something goes awry. With this, textualism has both fought off policies and ushered in new ones, as how one can read the literal language of the Constitution changes from person to person. For example, Justice Anthony Scalia, known as one of the most conservative judges of the Supreme Court, used textualism to greatly expand the Constitutional interpretation in the case Citizens United v FEC.[5]

This court case was a large expansion of corporate power and, in an originalist sense, was an expansion of the current interpretation of the Constitution. How one reads the Constitution in a literal sense can also promote the expansion of the federal government we are seeing in today’s world.

Expansion of Constitutional Rights:

On the other side of the table, we see Americans advocating for more Constitutional protections at the center of the criticisms of the failings of the Constitution. One of the largest criticisms we see is the claim that the Constitution does not do enough to support the people of America today. The notion that the Constitution is ‘perfectly fine the way it is’ stems from the blind worship it receives from the general public on all sides of the political spectrum. Woodrow Wilson was a major critic of this unquestioning following of the Constitution, thinking that “the Constitution did not, in fact, strike a good balance between the government’s need to control the governed and its need to be controlled by the governed.”[6] Wilson was of the thought that the Constitution left the government overly restrained and unable to properly serve the people of the nation. Public appeal grew warmer to this idea as the Great Depression set in, giving Wilson’s admirer, Franklin Roosevelt, the spark needed to set out to correct the massive downturn of the American economy. People saw the inefficiencies in the federal government as a Constitutional problem and wanted reform for the citizens, not more power for corporate interests. Wilson says in his book “Congressional Government” that “the government of a country so vast and various must be strong, prompt, wieldy, and efficient. Its strength must consist in the certainty and uniformity of its purposes.”[7] Wilson is seen as one of the most influential constitutional thinkers in the 19-20th century, with his policies and ideas called upon to this day. Wilson started his ideas on the expansion of the Constitution in the late 19th century, not 100 years after the document had been formed;

Conclusion:

Constitutional knowledge is something that is not very common in America today. I predicted that our treatment group, which will be given a new way to interpret our Constitution, will have a less favorable opinion towards the Constitution. This is because I believe that as people learn more about the Constitution and the precedent that is set today, they will begin to think that it is not a document worth keeping. The questions I have designed are made to first gauge respondents’ knowledge and then determine their opinion on the Constitution; with this, my goal was to compare the two and see if there are any trends towards our hypothesis. I believe that blind patriotism was a large factor in our results as well as the idea of opinions versus values. But the low knowledge about the Constitution is something we saw across the board, no matter what group we tested. Even with these results, no statistical significance in what we tested for does not mean we cannot draw anything from this experience. Seeing that a super majority of people approve of the Constitution but a majority of people also believe the document should be rewritten shows an interesting relationship between the value of a ‘constitution’ to run our country and the want to reform our government. Moving this study forward and incorporating its results into approval of the government and favorability to changing certain parts of it may lead us to new understandings of what influences Constitutional values. Our founding fathers intentionally wrote our Constitution ambiguously in 1787 in order to allow it to grow and change with the country. Many argue that today the 36 Constitution limits our government far too much to be effective, while others say we have defied the founding fathers original intentions of the document. Our success as a democracy must be credited to these men, as they had the foresight and knowledge to design something that could carry us through over 200 years of struggles and turmoil. Our Constitution, though heavily debated at times, is not something that can be thrown away without great care and consideration beforehand

REFERENCES:

1 Daniel McCleary et. al., “Types of Patriotism as a Primary Predictors of Continuing Support for the Iraqi War” Journal of Political and Military Sociology, no. 37 (2009): 80.

2 Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (United States: Yale University Press, 1913), 2.

3 Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (United States: Yale University Press, 1913),

4. Ralph Rossum and Alan Tarr, American Constitutional Law (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2017), 4.

5. Ralph Rossum and Alan Tarr, American Constitutional Law (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2017).

6. Michael Greve, Upside-down Constitution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012), 61.

7. Woodrow Wilson, Congressional government (New York, New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 206.