Today is Constitution Day. And every year on this day, we tell ourselves a comforting story. The Constitution has survived a civil war, segregation, two world wars, depressions, assassinations, and more than one president who thought the law didn’t apply to him. It survived all of that, the story goes, so it’ll survive this too.
The truth is, I think that story, amidst the direct threats facing our country today, is dangerous. And if we hang our hats on that comforting, patriotic catechism, it may be one of the reasons the pro-democracy movement loses.
Because the Constitution has never once saved this country.
It’s a piece of parchment behind glass in a building in Washington. It has no army. It cannot enforce itself nor can it punish anyone who violates it.
Every time in our history that the Constitution appeared to save us, what actually happened is that ordinary Americans saved us, and the ideals of the Constitution were what they were fighting for.
The Document Is Only as Strong as Its Defenders
I swore an oath to the Constitution twice. Once when I joined the Air Force, and again when I entered Congress. Both oaths were to the document, not to a president or a party.
And here’s what nobody tells you when you raise your hand. Just like the piece of paper we call the Constitution, the oath doesn’t do anything on its own. It’s just words until a person decides to act on them, often at real cost, usually when it would be far easier not to.
Think about the moments we hold up as proof the Constitution works:
The Constitution didn’t march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. People did, and got beaten bloody for it, and forced the country to honor promises the parchment had made a century earlier and never kept.
The Constitution didn’t give women the right to vote. For 130 years it sat there silent while half the country was locked out of its own democracy. Women marched, picketed the White House, went to jail, and refused to stop for seventy years until they dragged the Nineteenth Amendment into being.
The Constitution didn’t hold the country together in 1861. The words “more perfect Union” were just ink while eleven states seceded. What held the Union together was 360,000 Union soldiers who didn’t come home, ordinary men who bled into the ground at Antietam and Gettysburg so the document would still mean something on the other side of the war.
Every single time the system has held, it held because individual human beings chose to make it hold when they could have taken an easier road somewhere else.
That’s the part the comforting story leaves out. The Constitution is not a force of nature that reliably reasserts itself. It is exactly as strong as the number of people willing to defend it in any given moment, and no stronger. When those people are brave, it looks invincible. When they go quiet, it turns out to be very thin paper indeed.
Right Now, Too Many Are Going Quiet
Here is what worries me on this Constitution Day.
Every member of Congress swore the same oath I did. And a great many of them are watching that Constitution get tested right now, its plain guarantees treated as suggestions, and they are saying nothing.
In private, plenty of them will admit exactly what’s happening. But in public, they’re going quiet because speaking up is dangerous. Because it might draw a primary challenger. Because loyalty to a man has so obviously replaced loyalty to the Constitution as the real test of belonging in their party.
I know exactly how that pressure feels. When I voted to impeach and spent a year investigating January 6th, I watched colleagues who knew better (and would say so in private) decide that the safer play was silence.
And I understand the temptation, I do. But an oath that you only keep when it’s safe is just a photo op.
It Was Always Supposed to Be Us
So no, the Constitution is not going to ride in and rescue us. That was never its job.
Its job was to give us the tools, the structure, the rights, the elections, the courts, the free press, the peaceful means of correcting our own mistakes. Our job, every generation of us, is to actually pick those tools up and go to work building our more perfect union.
The founders assumed people in power would be fallible and self-interested, and they gave the rest of us the means to check them. But means are not the same as guarantees. A tool in a drawer never built anything.
The stark reality is that this struggle we are in cuts both ways. If the Constitution can’t save us, then it also can’t be killed by one man alone.
Trump cannot terminate it. But a country that shrugs and assumes a document will handle things can absolutely let it wither. It dies not with a single dramatic blow but with ten thousand small surrenders, each person deciding the fight belongs to somebody else.
The good news, and there is good news, is that the reverse is just as true. The document has no power, but we have enormous power, more than we act like we believe.
Your vote is a defense of the Constitution.
Your voice is.
Your insistence that the same rules apply when your side loses as when it wins is.
Your willingness to defend the rights of someone whose politics you can’t stand, all of it is the oath, lived out by people who never raised their right hand at all.
So, this Constitution Day, don’t take comfort in the idea that the document will save us. It won’t. Take responsibility and take action instead, because that’s the only thing that ever has really made a difference.
The Constitution is a promise that has never once kept itself. Though it waits, every generation, to find out whether the people living under it will.
It’s our turn to answer. And I refuse to believe we’re going to be the generation that went quiet.
— Adam
I have always said this the constitution is only as strong as the people that uphold it. And for about 248 years, people have done a pretty good job on both sides until this administration. They’ve stomped all over it. I would even go so far as to say they shit on it. Pardon my analogy.
Well, Adam, you've done it again. Each of the last three times I've read your essays I've thought, Wow! This is the best one yet. And now I'm thinking that about this one.
The fact that it's *people* defending the Constitution that saves us each time is so clearly true, and yet I'd never thought of it quite like that, and this switch in perspective is really illuminating. Thank you.