I'm King of the World!

As always, if you want to follow along, the full text of the US Constitution is available here, from the National Archives

A huge part of Article II is hyperlinked in the NARA transcript, which means it was amended later. Which is good, because having the runner-up be Vice President was not the wisest plan the founders ever had. Imagine a Bush/Gore administration. (Also, can I just say that I love that "choose" used to be spelled "chuse"? Because I do, it cracks me up).

So, to be president, you have to be a) at least 35, and b) born in the US (or be a citizen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, but if people think McCain's old...) The youngest man ever to serve as president was Teddy Roosevelt, who became president at the age of 42, after the death of President McKinely. The youngest man ever elected president was JFK, who was 43 when he took his oath of office. (Fewer than 10 presidents total have been under 50: the aforementioned Roosevelt and Kennedy; Bill Clinton and US Grant were both 46; Grover Cleveland 47; Franklin Pierce 48; James K. Polk and James Garfield both 49. No one under 40 has ever served as president of the USA. I'll stop now before I make a spreadsheet and do graphs and statistical distributions)
There's no other requirement, other than that you have to live here (and have lived here for 14 years). As long as you get enough votes, you can be a Rhodes Scholar or a high-school dropout and serve. Oh, and you have to say this:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." (So, President Bush, how're you at upholding your vows?)

And if you die, your Vice President takes over. If there is no VP, the 25th Amendment kicks in (as fans of The West Wing may recall). Originally, Congress got to decide who took over if the VP wasn't an option, but they decided to formalize it. Good call.

So, now, what is it that the President does, other than kiss babies, host the World Series champs and start stupid wars (or serve hot dogs to the King and Queen of England)? Well, Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces, for one. And he has the power to make treaties, with the consent of the Senate. He also appoints ambassadors, judges and suchlike government officials, again with the "advice and consent" of the Senate. And, "from time to time", he gives the State of the Union address. Sounds like a pretty cushy job, actually. Article II's a lot shorter than Article I, but there are a lot fewer people in the White House than the Capitol, and it's a pretty broad job. And since, the President is both Head of Government and Head of State, there's a lot of ceremonial duties too. (And I'm suddenly seeing a mental replay of the episode where President Bartlett has to practice throwing a ball in his bullet-proof vest.) But I gotta hand it to the founders, it's pretty concise description for such a big job.

I'm just a Bill

(As always, if you want to follow along, the full text of the US Constitution is available here, from the National Archives)

Today, we take a crack at Article I, which is the article of the Constitution that sets up the legislative branch of the government.
Let's start with the whole "separation of powers" concept. Very clever. Checks and balances and other staples of civics class. The founders were really worried that someone was going to get too powerful, and having just fought a revolution I'm sure they weren't too eager to fight another. Anyway, onto the text.
The basics of Article I are as follows:
There's a Congress, which consists of a House of Representatives and a Senate (lower and upper houses, hooray bicameral legislature!). In order to serve in the House, you've got to be 25 (hmm, wonder if I could get elected...); 30 to be a Senator. And you have to be a US citizen and live in the state that elects you. Representatives serve for two-year terms, Senators six, with one-third of the Senate standing for election every two years.

And then we start to get technical. First we start with how things are divided. Part of why we have a bicameral legislature is because all states were not created equal. Some are big, some are small, some rural, some urban, some heavily populated, some kinda lonely. So, the states with the smaller populations wanted everyone to have the same number of legislators. The states with big populations thought we should have proportional representation, so that smaller populations wouldn't have a disproportionate voice. Thus, a compromise. The Senate has two senators per state. The House has one representative for every 30,000 people, but at least one per state (so if you only have 15,000, you still get a vote in the House). But! Despite the Declaration of Independence saying that all men are created equal, great inequality existed during the early days of our Republic (and, to be honest, still does). So, the Southern states were torn. On the one hand, they want as many representatives as they're entitled to. But if they insist on counting slaves as people for purposes of government representation, then shouldn't said slaves be treated like people? Thus, another compromise: slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for purposes of Congressional representation. Good times (NB, the constitution doesn't actually say "slaves". It says "free persons" and "all other persons". Classy)
And, next time you cast your ballot for Senate, you should know that you couldn't always do that (even if you were a white, land-owning man who could vote at all). Originally, Senators weren't chosen by the people. They were chosen by the State legislatures of each state (which were elected by the "people"). Can't have the riff-raff having too much say in who makes the laws!
Then we start to get into what powers, specifically, Congress as a whole and its different branches have. This is the reason most Social Studies teachers don't make you read the whole thing. It's a long list. One of the things I love are all the bits about what happens immediately- how many Representatives each State gets, the staggering of elections for Senate, a bunch of other things. Including: "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person." (I:9) In other words, they left the thorny question of the slave trade to Future!Congress, rather than dealing with it themselves. 1808 was 21 years away when that paragraph was written, plenty of time for the slave trade to die a natural death, if that's what it was going to do. Which of course, is what they hoped, and what didn't happen. No one could figure out how to deal with this problem, because slavery was a driving force of the US economy but a horribly immoral practice. And the inability of these privileged white men to deal with it carries forward to our contemporary issues of racism and people not wanting to talk about it or deal with it (especially privileged white men).

One of the parts that affects me personally is this: "To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings". (I:8) Also this: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;" (I:8) So right there we have my Taxation without Representation. Course, the Founders never thought that anyone would actually live in the District. And if that thought that Philadelphia summer that they spent drafting the Constitution was bad, they should see DC in August (or maybe that's why they didn't think anyone would live here).

Ironically, in the same section where the slave trade is allowed to continue until 1808, the Writ of Habeas Corpus is enshrined. This is one of the rights that got into the first draft, rather than waiting until the Bill of Rights. Additionally, we are told that no "Title of Nobility" (I:9) shall be granted, nor shall there be kings or anything of the sort. Nor is Congress allowed to just take money out of the Treasury willy-nilly, they have to do it via an appropriations bill. Which doesn't really seem to stop them.

So that's Article I. A perfect encapsulation of the various compromises and conflicts that the founders were wrestling with. Were we a rural nation or an urban one? How much power should go directly into the hands of the people? How do we make sure everyone gets a voice? How do we make many into one? (by forbidding the states to make their own money and treaties, see section 10) And what do we do about slavery?
These questions and more to be answered in the next three centuries of: The United States of America.

We the People...

Inspired by David Plotz’s Blogging the Bible series on Slate, I thought it would be interesting to see what happens when a person goes back and re-reads (or reads for the first time) other foundational documents of the civilization in which we live. I could have tackled the New Testament, but I’d already read pretty much all of it for a great class called “Birth of the Christian Tradition” and Paul tends to make me a little-heavy handed with the snarkiness (and I have the margin notes to prove it). Not to mention that I figured it was a task better left to an actual Christian, since I wasn’t actually raised on the Bible.

But I was raised with the Constitution. The first time I actually read the Constitution and could understand it I was 16 and in AP US History. Which is also the last time I took a class in American History. Yes, it had been in the back of every American History textbook I’d ever had, but no one had ever made us read more than the preamble. But, after the AP exam was over, as we prepped for the US History and Government Regents Exam (thanks New York!), our teacher thought it would be good for us to be familiar with the contents of this revered document. So she assigned us the task of mind-mapping each of the articles. And it worked, at least enough to give me an appreciation of the elegance of the document and some idea of how it was structured.

But then, for Constitution Day in 2007, I thought, “hey, it’s been a while since I read it, so I’ll retype the Constitution in my blog in honor of the day.” Which I did. It took hours. The Constitution is a lot longer than I remember it being, a lot longer than it looks in those fancy cases at the National Archives. When I told my best friend that I’d typed the whole thing, he asked “couldn’t you just have copied and pasted it?” Which, of course, I could have, and ctrl-C, ctrl-V certainly would have been a lot fewer keystrokes. But I wouldn’t have read the whole thing, and since I am sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, I figured it would be good for me to know what it actually says, especially in a time where it would seem that certain members of the administration prefer that I not.

Reading the Constitution gives one an appreciation of the hard work done by those fabulous gentlemen back in the day (I have a bit of a collective crush on the Founding Fathers). The attention to detail is remarkable, as is their willingness to accept that the country and thus, the document, wouldn’t stay the same forever. There’s stuff in there you never learned in civics class.

So, for the next few months, I'll be reading part of the Constitution every week and responding to it here. It starts with the Preamble today, May 14, the day the Framers met in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, and ends September 17, now celebrated as Constitution Day. To read the Constitution yourself, the full text is available via the National Archives (where you can also see it live and person).

The Preamble

This is the part we all learn in school. "We the People" and all that jazz. In fact, it's actually a beautiful statement:

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

That's a great way to start a document. Who's writing it, and why. What is it. And what hope those men in that hot Philadelphia summer had for the future! Justice, peace, liberty, for everyone, down the generations. The foundational rules of a government, written down by the people from whom that government derives its power. The Constitution wasn't handed down on a mountain, it wasn't revealed in visions, it wasn't handed down by the ruling classes. Well, ok, on that last one, it kinda was. The men who wrote our Constitution weren't average Joes, but they were creating a document that would rule even the most ambitious of them, rather than declaring themselves to be a new noble class. Which, considering that it was 1787 and no one had ever done this before, was pretty darn impressive.

And don't forget that this wasn't our first constitution. The Articles of Confederation hadn't succeeded in making one nation out of many states, since the weak central government had had little power. So now we were trying again, and this time, all that hard work brought forth something that lasted well into a future that those great men could never have imagined, both for good and for ill.