America’s Constitution is greatly admired but poorly understood. Because of this, people say things about it that aren’t true. They say, for example, that certain rights or principles are “enshrined” in the Constitution. “Enshrined” is an odd choice of words. A shrine is a religious building devoted to the perpetual worship of a dead saint. The Constitution is a legal document describing the limits of an evolving government in a living nation.

That word is sometimes applied to principles that are not mentioned in the Constitution at all. An example is “federalism,” which is alleged here and here and here and here to be “enshrined” even though the word doesn’t appear anywhere in the document. The Constitution clearly makes the national government superior and state and local governments subordinate. It allows the states to do only what the national government does not prohibited. Clearly, the word “enshrined” signals the commenters’ strong feelings about states’ rights. By saying the idea is enshrined in the Constitution, they are just hinting at what they wish were true.

Another case of wrong information is the widespread notion that the Constitution creates civil rights for citizens, or that it protects or guarantees those rights. Wrong again. Constitutional scholars agree that the founders assumed basic human rights already existed. They did not presume to create them in the Constitution. Human rights are natural. Citizens possess rights because they are human and alive. The idea of natural rights is discussed here and here. Rightly considered, citizens have no Constitutional rights.

What the Constitution does is prohibit Congress from infringing citizens’ rights. That has value, but it is not absolute. It would amount to a genuine protection if congressional action were the only possible source of danger. But that is not the case. The First Amendment requires Congress to leave the press alone, but does not protect journalists from presidential persecution, corporate manipulation, police aggression or criminal violence. So long as those remain possible, the Freedom of the Press is tenuous.

The Constitutional protection of the press from hostile acts of Congress wasn’t even very effective in protecting the press from hostile acts of Congress. The Alien and Sedition Acts — passed in 1798 by a Congress with several of the founding fathers in it — authorized President John Adams to prosecute and shut down newspapers that criticized him.

Here is a list of things that some citizens assume are in the Constitution, but aren’t. Sometimes, when people say wrong things about the Constitution, they are wrong because they hold too high an opinion of the Constitution as an American institution. They suppose that every good thing must be contained there. They can go on holding this mistaken notion for life, because they will never read the document.

For those who want to know the truth and to do what’s right, it helps to remember that the Constitution means different things to different people. There are at least five different and distinct meanings that citizens have in mind when they say “the Constitution.”

The American Ideal

Sometimes when citizens talk about the Constitution they are thinking of America in terms of its finest, unrealized potential. It is an example of the literary device called synecdoche — in which one part of a thing is used to describe it all: America is a great and hopeful nation, ergo the Constitution contains all the best hopes of mankind. This passage from the Bill of Rights Institution expresses those high and noble aspirations: 

The United States was established on a set of principles and ideals that have guided and shaped the public life of the country since the Founding. The American people continue to strive to realize more fully these principles and ideals. Drawn from an examination of human nature and the purposes of government, these principles and virtues form the framework of the American republican government of ordered liberty. Together with essential civic virtues, they help form the conscience of the nation against which Americans judge the justice of their laws. These civic virtues bind a self-governing people together in communities that facilitate a healthy civil society. As Americans we believe it is essential to understand and implement these fundamental or founding principles and civic virtues.

 That is a beautiful statement. But it isn’t a realistic description of the actual Constitution. Nowhere in Article I through Article VII or in any of the 27 amendments can you find that the nation will “continue to strive” for “essential civic virtues” that “facilitate a healthy civil society.” The only part of the Constitution that jibes with the national aspiration to be great and good is the preamble to the Constitution, which is beautiful and cannot be recited often enough:

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.

 The preamble is great. But it is only a goal statement. Wishing for domestic tranquility is not the same as achieving it. If the aspirations are never accomplished, they might as well never have been expressed at all. And it can be quite a decadent sin to expect citizens who are denied justice or welfare to be content with the pretty promise. The notion of Constitution-as-aspiration is sweet and inspiring. It is a positive good and should be encouraged. But it should never be enough.

The Physical Object

The second meaning of “the Constitution” is the physical object that exists under a protective glass case in the National Archives Building in Washington DC. It consists of four pieces of treated animal skin. No one seems to know whether it is goat or calf or sheepskin. Each piece measures 28 3/4 inches high by 23 5/8 inches wide. The four pages contain 4,345 words written by a man named Jacob Shallus, plus the signatures of George Washington and 38 other men. This, in the truest and most literal sense, is the Constitution.

This Constitution is a relic that gets a lot of attention. Thousands of citizens file through the large rotunda of the Archives Building each day, each spending a few seconds looking at the document. The old ink is faded and Shallus’s penmanship is strange to modern eyes. So it isn’t possible to do more than give the document a quick, appreciative glance. Still, America has created expensive climate-controlled and burglar-proof display cases to preserve these original pages. They are a unique national treasure.

The words

The one and only original, actual, physical document we call the Constitution is, as mentioned above, preserved and displayed at the National Archives. But facsimiles and plain text reproductions of the document have been reprinted millions of times. A Philadelphia printer named John Dunlap ran off hundreds of paper copies within a few days of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. I have 20 or more copies of the Constitution in the appendices of various books in my house, plus a download on my phone and on my Kindle.

A google search turns up hundreds of sites that present the text of the Constitution for free. But you can pay money for a copy, if you want to. You can get one for $3.95 – or cheaper in large quantities. Or you can get a realistic presentation copy of all four pages for $19.95 from the National Archives store.

Despite the historic value of the original, citizens widely accept that any paper or electronic copy is also “the Constitution.” When Khizr Khan famously taunted Donald Trump about reading the Constitution, he waved a cheap copy in the air.

 The fuller body of national law

The Constitution as it was written in 1787, and as it exists under that glass protection in the Archives, is a small part of national law. The Constitution has been amended 27 times. Several of the later changes supersede or contradict the original. The 12th Amendment overrules much of Article II. The parts that are superseded (because they didn’t work) are still contained in the original document and still printed in the reproductions. The 18th Amendment (banning the manufacture, transportation, or sales of alcohol) is contradicted by the 21st amendment. The 18th Amendment (which has no force anymore) is still listed among the full body of national law, even though it has been dead for a century.

The original Constitution says some people (slaves) should count as three-fifths of a person, and some people (Indians) should not count at all. The 14th Amendment says every citizen should count the same. The 13th Amendment (1865) says black people are citizens. The Snyder Act of 1924 said Indians are citizens.

The original Constitution says senators should be chosen by state legislatures. The 17th Amendment says senators should be chosen by popular vote.

In addition to the amendments to the Constitution, the national law has been modified by interpretation in hundreds of Supreme Court and thousands of federal circuit courts decisions. It has been extended by millions and millions of words of congressional legislation and bureaucratic regulation. All of that regulation and legislation and adjudication is “law,” as surely as the Constitution. In comparison to the massive body of national law, the original Constitution is small. So citizens often speak of the whole body of current law as “the Constitution.”

The unwritten constitution

The fifth sense of the Constitution is the unwritten little-c constitution of the nation, consisting of all the political and governmental practices that exist. These go even farther that the full body of national law. Many of the elements of the little-c constitution conflict with the Constitution. And whenever the Constitution and the constitution conflict, it is the constitution that prevails. As I’ve written here, America’s unwritten little-c constitution is the real power of the land.

The Constitution says the states will oversee elections unless Congress chooses to take control in one or more states. The Constitution does not say that the states should give control of elections to two self-serving special interest clubs — the major political parties. But the states have all chosen to do that and the national government permits it. America is ruled by a ”two-party system” - a thing that is not mentioned in the Constitution and was deplored by several of the founders as a great danger to American liberty.

These five ways of looking at the Constitution result in confused public discourse. Someone may refer to the Constitution and give a literal and accurate quotation from the document. Another person may declare they have a constitutional right to something they just made up. Someone can say the Constitution does or doesn’t do or say something, and they can justify their statement by pointing to a court decision. People define the Constitution as broadly and vaguely as is convenient for their purposes.

So what should a well-informed citizen do?

He or she ought to hold on strongly to the first sense of the Constitution listed above. Keep faith in the promise of the nation and keep working to attain the highest of those ideals.

You can still be a good citizen even if you never make a pilgrimage to the National Archives to look for a moment at the original pages of the Constitution. You can still be a good citizen even if you don’t compulsively carry a facsimile of the Constitution in your pocket. So don’t put a lot of effort into the second and third definitions of the word.

It becomes impossible to comprehend the Constitution in its final two senses. There’s just too much. But a good citizen will abide by every fair law and regulation, work by necessary means to change unfair laws, and respect the life and dignity of others without exception.

Think:

• Before reading this article, how many different constitutions were you aware of?

• Which of the five versions do you thing is most important?