First
Principles
It
is the People who are inherently invested with all authority and
legislative power to create and alter governments, constitutions,
charters, and laws. Thus it is the People who are the primary
Constituent Power of every polity---the governing political element of
society. In line with this, constitutions and governments are
inherently derivative. This
state of affairs is known as the First Principles of every
organized society.
Accordingly,
recognition and use of First Principles is the first step to be
taken whenever People come together to establish or reestablish a
society. Its use by the citizens of this nation became
visible during the British colonization of North America. It
found expression in the Mayflower
Compact
of November 11, 1620, the Virginia
Declaration of Rights
of June 12, 1776, the Declaration
of Independence
of July 4, 1776 and the U.S.
Constitution
of September 17, 1787. The founding generations of Americans thus
practiced firsthand the power to create and alter their governments,
constitutions, and laws.
James
Madison pointed to the primacy of First Principles on August
31, 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia--in response
to delegate Mr. Daniel Carroll of Maryland, who had asserted there was
no way to amend the Maryland Constitution other than by what was
contained therein. Madison clarified:
"The
difficulty in Maryland was no greater than in other States, where no
mode of change was pointed out by the Constitution, and all officers
were under oath to support it. The People were in fact, the fountain
of all power, and by resorting to them, all difficulties were got
over. They could alter constitutions as they pleased. It was a
principle in the Bills of rights, that first principles might be
resorted to." 1
Earlier,
on June 6th, at the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson,
second only to Madison in fashioning the Constitution, described the
context of our republican structure:
"The
Legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole
society. Representation is made necessary only because it is
impossible for the People to act collectively." 2
Wilson
was acknowledging the obvious impossibility of assembling great numbers
of People from distant geographic areas to operate a polity. These
physical limitations dictated the structure of our government in
1787.
The
Framers specified reliance on First Principles in Article VII
which called for the use of the People’s constituent power to be
expressed in state ratification conventions to create our government.
Given that technology was lacking to overcome the great distances of
Colonial America in assembling the growing numbers of People, they had
no choice but to build a representative structure as the sole
legislative branch of the government. To have designed a
constitutional procedure whereby the People could amend, establish
policy or make laws directly at that time was simply not on the horizon.
Nevertheless,
today, as at our founding, the Constitution can be amended two ways: as
specified by Article V by elected representatives and as clearly implied
in its Preamble by the People directly. The language of Article V
is tailored to potential use by the defined federal and state
governments, for their use alone in amending the
Constitution. That structural specification has no effect on the
sovereign constituent power of the People -- the Constituent Power to
create or amend the Constitution today as in 1787.
It
is self evident although not obvious in conventional thinking that the
Constitution does not and cannot limit the powers of its creator –-the
People. It would be ludicrous to suggest that the creator is
subject to its creation, i.e. the officialdom of government. The
People can at any time exercise First Principles to amend the
Constitution and enact a law establishing legislative procedures to
legislate in an orderly fashion.
The views of James Wilson at the time of our
founding are instructive in this regard:
"All power is originally in the People and should be
exercised by them in person, if that could be done with convenience,
or even with little difficulty.” 3
Today, modern technology permits the People to exercise their
legislative powers “in person…[and]…with convenience.”
First
Principles is the political heart of the voluntary
supra-governmental election now being conducted by the nonprofit
corporation Philadelphia
II
on behalf of the People permitting citizens, if they so choose, to amend
the Constitution by ratifying the Democracy
Amendment and
to enact the Democracy
Act as
a federal statute. Should a sufficient number of citizens voting
agree to these actions, the People will establish, for the first time,
legislative procedures and legislative elections with which they can
continue to exercise their legislative powers in an orderly,
deliberative and statutory manner.
It
is important to realize that it is the People rather than the Congress,
who will have enacted the Democracy Amendment and the Democracy
Act. In doing so they will have again followed the good
advice articulated by James Madison at the Philadelphia
Convention on June 5, 1787:
"For
these reasons as well as others he [Madison] thought it indispensable
that the new Constitution should be ratified in the most
unexceptionable form, and by the supreme authority of the People
themselves." 4
and on July 23, 1787:
"These
changes would make essential inroads on State Constitutions …and in
the case of these a ratification must of necessity be obtained from
the People." 5
ENDNOTES
1.
Farrand, Max, Ed. The Records
of the Federal Convention of 1787, (New Haven, Yale. Univ.
Press, 1966), Vol. II, p. 476
2.
Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 132-133
3.
McCloskey, Robt. Green, Ed. The
Works of James Wilson, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1967)
Vol. I., p .405.
4.
Farrand, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 123.
5.
Ibid., Vol. I, p. 92
6.
Meiklejohn,
Alexander, Political Freedom - The
Constitutional Powers of the People (New York: Harper,
1960), p. 18
 |
“In
those words [the preamble of the Constitution] it is agreed, and
with every passing moment it is reagreed, that the people of the
United States shall be self-governed. To that fundamental
enactment all other provisions of the Constitution, all
statutes, all administrative decrees, are subsidiary and
dependent. All other purposes, whether individual or social, can
find their legitimate scope and meaning only as they conform to
the one basic purpose that the citizens of this nation shall
make and shall obey their own laws, shall be at once their own
subjects and their own masters.” 6
Alexander Meiklejohn, 1960 |
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