Sign of the Times

The Point Roberts Events sign continues to get heavy use, even though our summer festivalizing is largely over.  As you can see from this photo, however, we have this Saturday not only a Seafood and Music Festival (I think of it as the Singing Salmon Festival), but also a Historical Society Potluck Reunion, and a Classic Golf Memorial.  Regular AA meetings have come to us only in the last few years, presumably as a result of a sudden inflow of new residents from ROTUS where they are a little more organized.  The Sustainability Group is, I think, new, and is beginning with a forum on Ridek (an electric car, whose inventor is a Point Roberts resident).

But what I am looking to write about is the ‘Help Our Country’ sign, which seems less an event than a plea.  What struck me about it was that I couldn’t immediately tell whether it was the work of the left or the right (although the ‘God Bless America’ suggests the latter, not because only the right has religion but because the left is less likely to incorporate its religious messages in its political messages).  But both sides of the political spectrum are up in arms these days about the threats to the Constitution.  We all have our views about this, but it seemed to me that the urging to read the Constitution itself was not a bad piece of advice, regardless of its origins.

And so, after taking the photo, I went home, printed the text of the Constitution out and sat down and read it.  And then I had Ed read it.  And then we talked about what we read.

I recalled that the great Constitutional expert Sam Irvin (U.S. Senator from North Carolina and chairman of the Watergate Investigation Committee hearings) used to say that he always carried a copy in his pocket and read it every day.  Neither of us had ever felt that compelling a need, but over the years we had both read it  for one reason or another, mostly in connection with some organized educational endeavor, but we didn't remember that much, so our expectations were somewhat open.  (Our copy, as it happened, did not include the Bill of Rights or the Amendments.)

We were struck with how short it was; how (for the most part) right to the point and comprehensible it was.  Nowadays, such a document would require an introductory chapter before it could even get around to describing what it was intending to do.  But here, in the initial 50 words, the writers pretty much nail it.  The point of the enterprise is to "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 authors have a few things to say about each of these in the following 3-4 pages, but it is interesting to note the things it worried specifically about and the things it didn’t specifically mention but that its writers were very much worried about, and things not mentioned because either they were worried, or they weren’t and thus didn’t think them worth mentioning.  For example, the famous elimination of ‘titles of nobility.’  It seems odd, by now, to think that would be uppermost in their minds.  But that tells one a lot about how the context and culture in which you live naturally arranges your priorities.  They had plenty of problems from ‘titles of nobility.’  Today...not so much.

Slavery is, of course, not directly mentioned, although the text does permit ‘importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,’ which I think refers indirectly to slavery, since the document refers to immigration as different from’importation of persons’.  I was surprised to see that that permission was allowed to extend only until 1808, at which time Congress could prohibit such state-sanctioned immigration or importation of persons.  They were indeed hopeful about getting a handle on slavery if this was, indeed, intended to refer to that issue.

A second indirect reference to slavery comes later when the document addresses the matter of  persons ‘held to service or labor’ in one state who find themselves in a different state.  This of course required the return of escaped slaves to their owners.

We were pleased to note that the Constitution’s text, itself, reminds us that the President is the Commander in Chief of the military and, by its phrasing, makes clear that he is NOT the Commander in Chief of the People or even of The Country.  We are not a great Army led by the President.

And finally, the all-time-great one-sentence paragraph: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”  I think that’s about all that needs to be said on that topic, although my granddaughter, interning in D.C. this semester, recently reminded me that the Supreme Court had found Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War unconstitutional on the grounds that, as long as the Courts were functioning, the Constitution's prohibition could not be overcome.   Lincoln and the Military ignored the ruling, but we are a nation of laws, not men, and that’s why we were reading the Constitution today.

Finally, what’s it got to say about religion?  Only one thing: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”  No mention of the U.S. being a Christian nation nor of God having some special interest in our trajectory.  Just for the record, I mention this.

So that was our Constitution Event.  The next day, when I drove by the Community Events sign, the announcement signs had all been re-arranged, but the ‘Read the Constitution’ sign had been removed.  I guess it didn’t seem like a community event.  But maybe we could make it one.  We could all meet at the Community Center and have somebody read it out loud to us once a year, and we would listen with care.  It wouldn’t take more than 15 or 20 minutes, I’d guess.   We could then go home and choose our own discussants.  And if we had questions, we could ask Google. [added: the granddaughter tells me that today is Constitution Day, so it really was even-oriented.]