The Constitution as Mutual Defense Pact

The US constitution, I think, is better understood as a mutual defense and cooperation pact made by the original colonies, with some rules about rights bolted on, rather than a statement of the organizing principles of a democratic republic. I don't denigrate mutual defense pacts; as recent events in Europe remind us, they are still necessary, but neither do I believe that mutual defense pacts are the whole of the needed documents to organize a democratic republic. It was intended that the states provide those elements.

This was not as unreasonable as it now seems. The original colonies were widely separated, and in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified, rail transport was only beginning to emerge, and the electric telegraph was not even dreamt of. Local governance was, for most places, the only governance. In practice, of course, what this meant was that slave states stayed slave states (and were protected by constitutional provisions) and every state had its own idiosyncratic laws, bound only by the few restrictions of the original constitution. There was Article IV, Section IV, which said that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” but the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, he of the Dred Scot decision, deferred to the deadlocked slaveholder-dominated antebellum Congress, and this precedent has stood.

Where are we now? By 1850, the United States east of the Mississippi was covered by a thin but comprehensive rail network. By 1869, the golden spike was driven and the rail network extended to the west coast of North America. In 1844, Congress funded the construction of the first electrical telegraph. By 1869 (again!) it reached San Francisco. By 1877 the Bell Telephone Company was founded. In the 21^st century, the USA, indeed the world, is bound together by networks of telecommunications and fast transportation. (“For I can travel half the world / and return in half a day / And I fear that only death remains / to take me far away.” – Jordin Kare. It is not entirely a welcome change.)

The old distance is gone, and it is past time to consider national organization of a democratic republic. The first steps towards this new order were taken with the Reconstruction Amendments, but progress was then stopped by the Compromise of 1877. In desperation, the New Deal was passed, though not without strenuous objection, in the 1930s. Again, forward motion began in the 1960s, and stopped by 1980. All these steps, though, were buried in complex laws. A second part of the constitution, something short, simple, and straightforward, but more specific than the Bill of Rights, is needed. Something that addresses the organization of the republic of the United States of America, something more than the general promises of the Bill of Rights. What exactly it ought to say we are probably going to be a generation determining. But we should get started.