Your Monthly Constitutional

YOUR MONTHLY CONSTITUTIONAL By: Stewart Harris

Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law

WE THE PEOPLE

My mother is dying.

It’s sad, but not tragic. She’s eighty-eight years old. She’s had a long and happy life.

No, strike that. It is tragic. It’s tragic because her final two years, which should have been filled with family and friends and good times, were isolated and lonely. She had the bad luck, you see, of nearing the end of her natural life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before vaccines were available, my siblings and I mostly stayed away from Mom for fear of infecting her. My sister (God bless her) bore the burden of caregiving virtually alone. Even after we were all fully vaccinated, we had to be extra cautious. We could still have been carrying deadly viral loads. None of us wanted to be the disease vector that killed her.

So she has spent the last years of her life stuck at home, mostly by herself. That’s tough for anyone, but especially, I think, for my mother. She has never liked being alone. She is happiest in a crowded house, talking and arguing and playing Scrabble, or cards, or Trivial Pursuit. She could never understand why my late father would occasionally carve out a few hours of solitude. When Dad would go to his basement study and close the door, she would follow him, interrupt him, pester him with trivialities. She would complain to me: “Your father is down there again, counting his money.” Well, Dad was a CPA. He probably was counting his money, at least sometimes. And thank God for it. He did very well by her, by all of us. But that was beside the point. How could anyone want to be alone? To Mom, life is about relationships, about people, about company.

Earlier this year, she, and I, and millions of Americans, got our shots and rejoiced at the imminent return of normal life. Soon, we could hug one another without fear. Life would be good again.

We did not anticipate that millions of our fellow citizens would decline the opportunity to be vaccinated.

And so the pandemic rages on. The Delta variant kills tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands more Americans, day by day, week by week, especially in states that refuse to recognize the seriousness of the pandemic, that actually prohibit commonsense measures to protect their own citizens. And COVID kills untold millions overseas.

But wait, why am I writing about my mother and COVID? This column is supposed to be about the Constitution, right? Fair enough. So let’s look at the Constitution, especially its first three words: “We the People.”1

Full stop. That’s what the government of our country is. It’s we. It’s the people. What does that mean? Well, as George Washington noted rather forcefully during the Whiskey Rebellion, it means that we govern ourselves, and you can’t ignore a law created by your own elected representatives just because you disagree with it.2 If you’re an American who professes to love the Constitution, you can’t hate the government the Constitution created. It makes no sense. It’s like loving Mother’s Day and hating children.

And what does our Constitution aim to do? Well, it tells us, quite explicitly:

We the People of the United States, in Order 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, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.3

We’re the “Posterity” the Founders were talking about. We’re their progeny, their heirs. And how fortunate we are. Thank you, George—and Alexander, and James, and the thousands of common people who ratified the document more than two hundred years ago. You had your own problems, your hopes and dreams, but you thought of us. Take particular note of that statement, “promote the general Welfare.” It’s a part of our fundamental law that often gets overlooked. But there it is, right in the Constitution itself, right in the first paragraph. Which brings us back to 2021. Many of our fellow citizens—not most, but far too many—question our ability to act as a community, as a People, to come together and defend ourselves against a deadly pandemic. They deny the role of government—the very government created by the Constitution—as an agent of good. They are wrong. We the People have endured for 234 years. We will defeat this pandemic, just as we defeated polio and smallpox and Confederates and Nazis. But not as soon as we should have. Too many people, including my mother, have paid too high a price for partisan division. That’s not what our Founders intended. They provided us with a marvelous framework for self-government. But it’s up to us to us to live up to their ideals, to deserve the blessings they bestowed upon their posterity. To come together and act like one People.

1 U.S. Const., preamble. 2 Chernow, Washington: A Life, 719-21. 3 U.S. Const., preamble.

Stewart Harris is the host of Your Weekly Constitutional, available for streaming and downloading on iTunes and Spotify.