Quotes About Constitution

At the end of the day, I think you're on high moral ground when you respect Montana and you respect the Constitution and you do your duty as a Senator. We need to put Americans' and Montanans' interests in the front seat and politics in the back.

In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.

To write our constitution is for the past, the present, and the future to come together all at once in one single motion, in one single heave, one single cry. For we correct the errors of the past and chart a new course for the future, based on the experience of the present.

should also be noted that the Constitution's distinction in counting people for representation in Congress was between slave and free, not black and white. Free blacks were counted the same as whites—and free blacks existed before the Constitution existed.

The Constitution's foundation is the Declaration of Independence, and as slavery's defenders were increasingly forced to reject its principles, and to defend racial inequality and hierarchy as good things, they found it increasingly difficult to maintain allegiance to the Constitution.

What we call laws or rights are just arbitrary preferences enforced by violence, in just the same way that "a dog will fight for his bone."69 A constitution is simply an effort to render that process less violent by subjecting the inevitable clashes to majority vote instead of battle. But in the end, politics is just war by other means.

According to the social compact tradition articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, government is legitimate because the people consent to it, thus agreeing in some sense to respect its determinations. But people can consent only because they have a basic right to decide whether or not to consent, a right that is not a mere privilege from the government.

This way of seeing things makes it impossible to distinguish free states from tyrannies, just rulers from unjust rulers, or healthy regimes from abusive regimes. In practice, it would mean that whatever political group happens to wield power, by arms or by propaganda, is, ipso facto, legitimate. Yet the whole point of the Declaration and the Constitution was to found a government on something more than accident and force.

Yet another proof that the drafters of the Constitution had made one simple but far-reaching error. They'd assumed that the people selected by The People to manage the nation would be as honest and honorable as they'd been. One could almost hear the "Oops!" emanating from all those old graves.

Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion," the preamble began, "WE, CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES, AND THE OPPRESSED PEOPLE … ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH FOR OURSELVES, THE FOLLOWING PROVISIONAL CONSTITUTION." Brown's

Uncompensated emancipation suggests not that the Founders' Constitution is being changed but that it is being repudiated—claims based on slavery are as invalid as claims based on rebel debt. Uncompensated emancipation is of course also a feature of the Emancipation Proclamation—and the Takings Clause issue is one of several reasons to think that the Emancipation Proclamation is unconstitutional under the Founders' Constitution.

Indeed, when people talk about how the Constitution is designed to implement the principles of the Declaration, they almost always point to the Fourteenth Amendment—sometimes without noticing that this means they are not talking about the Founders' Constitution. In part due to Supreme Court decisions, however, the federal government ended up protecting individuals primarily from states and secondarily, if at all, from other individuals.

It is a sign of how thoroughly the Reconstruction Constitution has displaced the Founders' Constitution that these are the cases that define our constitutional order. We are not Founding America, and we are not the heirs of that first Republic, either. We are the heirs of the people who destroyed it. We are Reconstruction America.

THE ORIGINAL PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, much like the Constitution itself, did not acknowledge the existence of God. Its author, Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister from Rome, New York, was a decidedly religious man, but when he wrote the pledge in the 1890s he described himself as something that would seem an oxymoron in Eisenhower's America: a "Christian socialist.

The so-called conservative right that now dominates the Republican Party is, in fact, extreme, radical, and deeply at odds with the American political tradition; it poses a profound threat to the American republic. The assault on liberalism by the right targets not only the New Deal state, but the Constitution and the American political system as well.

Without sense of contradiction, for example, once can today consider a dissolution of the Reichstag 'strictly legal,' even though it is, in fact, a coup d'etat, and, vice versa, a parliamentary dissolution might substantively conform to the spirit of the constitution, and yet not be legal. Such antitheses document the breakdown of a system of legality, which ends in a formalism and functionalism without substance or reference points.

In December 1952, Marshall argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth as well as the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Senator Walter George (D-GA) was proud of how states like his beloved Georgia were able to legally disfranchise millions of voters. "Why apologize or evade?" he asked. "We have been very careful to obey the letter of the Federal Constitution—but we have been very diligent in violating the spirit of such amendments and such statutes as would have a Negro to believe himself the equal of a white man."117

South Dakota's new constitution forbade the appropriation of public money to provide relief.

The only way to ensure equality for women is to clearly declare it in our Constitution.

The first paragraph of The Federalist, No. 1 offers the following contrast: "It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.

Experience is the surest standard by which to test the real tendency of the existing Constitution of a country

The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.