Constitution Day 2020: 5 Things To Know About Guiding Principles

ACROSS AMERICA — Constitution Day is Thursday. This annual observance celebrates the signing of the United States Constitution — a 4,400-word compact outlining our nation’s guiding principles.

Over the long summer of 1787, delegates from 12 states met in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention to frame the new government against a backdrop of questions about representation and whether power should rest with the people or the states.

The Constitution was adopted 233 years ago, on Sept. 17, 1787.

Its preamble states:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, 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.”

Here are five more things to know about the U.S. Constitution:

1. The First Amendment may not say what you may think it does.

The rights Americans hold dear are packed in 45 words in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Among the most common misconceptions is that freedom of speech is absolute. It isn’t. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1919, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

Other types of speech may not be protected: hate speech; speech that incites violence; speech that supports terrorism; public employee speech; defamatory speech; and published speech that violates intellectual property laws, including copyright infringements and confidential trade secrets.

The First Amendment also isn’t a free pass for people to say whatever they want on Twitter and other social media platforms, which have the right to remove content and censor users for violation of the group rules. It also doesn’t guarantee that people can’t be fired from their jobs or lose a professional license over their free expressions.

What the amendment does guarantee is that the government can’t censor or arrest citizens who criticize the government.

2. The Electoral College wasn’t a shoo-in.

It took 60 ballots before the delegates to the Constitutional Convention settled on the Electoral College as a means of electing the president. The indirect method of electing the president has remained intact through 500 attempts to remove it.

On five occasions, most recently in 2016 when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s popular vote tally exceeded President Donald J. Trump’s by more than 3 million votes, the candidate who won the popular vote lost in the Electoral College. Other presidents who didn’t win the popular vote include but won the election were John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and George W. Bush in 2000.

James Wilson, who represented Pennsylvania and was one of the most influential delegates to the Continental Congress, proposed the idea of electing the president by popular vote. Some who favor abolishing the Electoral College today see a forward-thinking kindred spirit in Wilson, but historians differ over how passionate he was.

He was driven by two primary goals: The president should be able to act independently of Congress, and the president should have the support of the majority of the citizens.

Wilson rejected separate proposals that would have given power to Congress or to the state governors to choose the president. He said he was “at least in theory” in favor of letting the citizens of the new union decide who their president should be, though others rejected the idea as impractical.

The proposal Wilson put forward didn’t call for a direct election. Rather, it called for voters in fixed districts to choose electors, who would then choose the president. It wasn’t inconsistent, according to constitutional scholar Rob Natelson, who wrote The Epoch Times:

“Wilson considered both direct and indirect election as forms of “election by the people.” As he phrased it in remarks on July 19, "he perceived with pleasure that the idea was gaining ground, of an election immediately [indirectly] or immediately [directly] by the people.”

In the end, an 11-member committee of the most distinguished delegates recommended the president be elected by presidential electors chosen by the states.

That recommendation made the Senate the arbiter of runoff elections in the event that no candidate received a majority of electoral votes. Wilson, though, regarded members of the Senate as aristocratic, and he wanted the runoffs to be decided by Congress as a whole. Under a compromise measure, the convention delegates voted to move runoff elections to the House of Representatives.

3. The Great Compromise kept the Constitutional Convention, and possibly the new union, from falling apart.

Written by Connecticut delegates Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, the Great Compromise is sometimes called the Connecticut Compromise. It provided for a dual system of congressional representation — in the House of Representatives, where seats are assigned proportionate to population, and in the Senate, where each state is assigned one representative (this was later changed to two).

Larger states argued in favor of more representation, saying they contributed more to the nation’s financial and defense resources and, therefore, have proportionately greater representation in both chambers. Small states, including Connecticut, argued that states should be granted equal representation regardless of size.

When the delegates from Connecticut proposed their compromise, Benjamin Franklin agreed states should have equal representation in the Senate on all matters, except those involving money.

The Great Compromise plan was adopted by a thin, one-vote margin. Without it, historians have noted, the convention likely would have adjourned without a Constitution.

4. The framers enshrined the institution of slavery in the Constitution.

The framers took care to avoid using the words “slave” and “slavery,” which didn’t appear in the Constitution until the 1865 ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. The original Constitution enshrined slavery in three places.

• The Three-Fifths Clause: This clause allowed slave-owning states to count the enslaved population as three-fifths of the overall population for the purposes of representative government and taxation. One common misconception is that the term “three-fifths” corresponds to the value that slave-owning states placed on Black lives. In fact, delegates from slave-owning states argued that slaves be counted fully so they could have more power in Congress, have a greater voice in the selection of Supreme Court justices and, ultimately, the continuation of slavery.

• The Importation Clause: Under this clause, the new government pledged not to interfere with the importation of slaves for at least 20 years but imposed a tax of $10 per slave. Among those ardently objecting to the clause were delegates from Virginia, but their motives were far from altruistic. With the largest enslaved population of any of the states, Virginia stood to gain from a domestic slave trade market that had no competition from newly enslaved Africans.

• The Fugitive Slave Clause: Constitutional scholars generally agree this was the most abhorrent of the three clauses concerning persons “held to service of labour.” It provided that even states that abolished slavery had to abide by the laws of slave states and return to their owners any slaves who crossed into free states. In other words, slavery was the default and abolition was the outlier. Only two states, Massachusetts and Vermont, had banned slavery at the time, so the clause passed with little dissension.

5. It isn’t easy to amend the Constitution.

In 233 years, the Constitution has only been amended 27 times — the first time with the Bill of Rights, which wasn’t ratified until 1791, four years after the Constitution was adopted.

The 27th Amendment languished in Congress for a couple of centuries before it was finally ratified by enough states to become the law of the land. Proposed by James Madison, known as the “father of the Constitution,” the amendment provides that any pay raises members of Congress vote for themselves can’t take effect until after the next election.

Amendments can be proposed in a couple of different ways under Article 5:

Amendments can be proposed in Congress with the agreement of two-thirds of both the House and Senate. They can also be proposed by the states when two-thirds of state legislatures call conventions for that purpose.

In either case, three-fourths of the states must ratify proposed amendments before they become part of the Constitution.