A Brilliant Solution

What good is an Electoral College? Why were Senators originally appointed by the States? How much power is the president really supposed to have?

As Americans celebrate Independence Day this weekend, few will stop to give much thought to the remarkable document that's guided and governed our people for over two centuries. And that's a shame. The Constitution only came about and perservered through considerable hard work. Children used to learn about the document, and the amazing debates and compromises that framed it, as part of their schooling. Not anymore -- public schools have more important subjects like self-esteem and sex ed to deal with. But we neglect our Constitutional heritage at peril of the freedoms we take for granted. When we hear calls to abolish the Electoral College, for instance, we should at least pause to ask why it was put there in the first place. After all, no surgeon amputates part of the body without first understanding its function.

I'm currently reading A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, by Carol Berkin. Though I haven't finished it, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in how we achieved the world's oldest still-in-use governing document. It presents the debates--and the participants--in all their all-too-human context, making their achievement all the more remarkable. It also shows how many of the issues and controversies that have endured throughout our history were present from the very beginning. Their genius, as Charlie Reese once put it, was in understanding that "human beings are basically no good, and can never truly be trusted with power." From that worldview flowed a system of constraints that, despite our nation's slide from its origins, has so far spared us from a host of abuses commonplace in the rest of the world.

For two centuries, men and women have pledged their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" to defend the most successful republican system in the history of the world. It's not too much to ask that we occasionally stop and marvel at what they accomplished--often in spite of themselves.