How relevant is our 237-year-old Constitution, really?

Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge, separated only by Warren G. Harding’s brief administration, could not have posited more opposing views of the nation’s founding document.

“The chief instrumentality by which the law of the Constitution has been extended to cover the facts of national development has of course been judicial interpretation, – the decisions of the courts,” Wilson professed. “The process of formal amendment of the Constitution was made so difficult by provisions of the Constitution itself that it has seldom been feasible to use it; and the difficulty of formal amendment has undoubtedly made the courts more liberal, not to say lax, in their interpretation than they would otherwise have been. The whole business of adaptation has been theirs," he added, "and they have undertaken it with open minds, sometimes even with boldness and a touch of audacity...”

That quote has been more damaging to American politics than one might imagine. Wilson scorned the Constitution as an antiquated obstacle in the way of progress. However, he could not simply alter the plain, fixed meaning of the text. Therefore, he turned to an unelected judiciary to boldly, even audaciously, “reinterpret” the document to his liking. This corrupt, flagrantly unconstitutional process continues to this day.

“All that progressives” — of whom the 28th president was chief — “ask or desire is permission—in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle,” he proudly pronounced.

In other words, the Founders’ original body of work was insufficient, unsophisticated, and primitive. Americans, Wilson believed, had evolved. We were too advanced, too complex, to submit to a document written in 1787. Boasting that the “President is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can,” Wilson unilaterally determined how to “fix” the Constitution — by which he meant, in effect, throw it away and disregard its limitations on federal power. Only then, he said, could we solve the problem of the document’s crippling outdatedness. Of course, while it is true that America had, in certain ways, evolved between the late 1700s and early 1900s, we must see through the articulate ruse of Wilson’s appeals to progress and human development: the president couched his breaking of the supreme law of the land in educated jargon and alluring promises. Wilson — to borrow a phrase of contemporary note — lived above the law and did so openly.

That such a presidency preceded Calvin Coolidge’s tenure by a mere two years is almost unthinkable. “Silent Cal,” who spurned Wilson’s claims about the president becoming “as big a man as he can,” revered the Constitution and sought to follow it religiously, sensitive to its every constraint on his power as chief executive.

“For some reason I was attracted to civil government and took that,” Coolidge described a boyhood memory of his education. “This was my first introduction to the Constitution of the United States. Although I was but thirteen years old the subject interested me exceedingly. The study of it which I then began has never ceased, and the more I study it the more I have come to admire it, realizing that no other document devised by the hand of man ever brought so much progress and happiness to humanity.”

The 30th president rejected the notion that this blessed document, which the Founders viewed as “little short of a miracle,” had fallen out of fashion. As far as he was concerned, the Constitution — save future amendments procured via the proper constitutional processes — was closed, its meaning unalterable.

“It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776,” he stated about the Constitution’s sister document, the Declaration of Independence, “that we have had new thoughts and experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”

Today, as we celebrate (and others bemoan) the Constitution’s 237th birthday, the century-old Wilson-Coolidge debate still wages across America. Now, more than ever, the Constitution faces accusations of irrelevance and ineptitude. Has our national charter finally run its course? 

Looking to Silent Cal, we answer with a resounding, “NO!”

Far from an obstacle to overcome, the United States Constitution is a blessing — a steadfast guide that has served us faithfully for nearly two and a half centuries. Men like Wilson will ever seek to skirt its influence, for, by the Founders’ design, it stands in the way of their total command of power. But to millions of Americans — those who live in the liberty it preserves — the Constitution will always be a treasure, “the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.”