With
the 2016 election cycle having kicked into first-gear already, any
American who hasn’t inured themselves to the monotonous (and often
ultimately meaningless) repetition of the word “Constitution” is advised
to get to self-desensitizing — and quick.
Sens.
Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have already made a fetishized version of the
U.S.’s supreme governing document central to their campaign rhetoric;
and even politicians less beloved by the supposedly Constitution-crazy
Tea Party, like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, are likely to soon follow
suit. That’s how American politics functions now, in the era of the NSA,
Guantanamo Bay, lethal drone strikes and endless war.
But as that
list of questionable policies suggests, there’s an unanswered question
lurking behind so much of our happy talk about the Constitution —
namely, do we even understand it? As dozens of polls and public surveys
will attest, the answer is,
.
And that’s one of the reasons that Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed
Amar has decided to write about the rulebook so many Americans love but
so few seem to understand. “The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of our
Constitutional Republic,” released earlier this month, is that project’s
latest addition.
Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Amar
about the Constitution, his books, and why he sees Abraham Lincoln as
perhaps the United State’s
founding father. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.
The third book in this project is
a geographical slicing of the story; ours is a vast republic of massive
diversity, and the Constitution looks a little different in different
states and regions. I try to show all of that that through 12 stories …
each of which says something general about the United States
Constitution but does so through the window of a particular state. It
discusses a person or an idea or a case or an event particularly
associated with that region that also casts light, more generally, on
our Constitutional project.
So how did what you call “brute geography” influence the way we understand the Constitution today?
The
very breadth of the American landmass and its distance from the old
world were huge elements in the American founding and in the Civil War
experience. The idea of creating an indivisible union in the 1780s, the
idea of forming a more perfect union, was an idea powerfully influenced
by these two geographic factors: a wide moat between the Old World and
the New World (known as the Atlantic Ocean) would be able to protect
Americans from Old World tyranny in the same way the English Channel
protected Britain from much of the militarism of the European Continent…
But
in 1787, as Americans looked around the world, they saw that Britain
was free, and Britain was free because England and Scotland had merged,
had formed an indivisible, perfect union that would protect liberty
because they had gotten rid of land borders on the island and only
needed a navy to protect themselves. That worked for England and that
would work for America even better, because we’d have an English Channel
times 50.
This will become manifest destiny and
the Monroe Doctrine; we’ll control our hemisphere and we’ll be protected
from Europe … Our Constitution largely succeeds because there’s no
major standing army in peacetime for most of American history, and that
fact is created by some brute geographic realities.
I’m
speaking to you now right around the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s
assassination. He looms very large in your book; you describe him in
some ways as almost prophetic. What made Lincoln’s understanding of the
country and the Constitution so profound?
We
live in Lincoln’s house. The Framers’ house was divided against itself;
and, because of slavery, it fell. That failure is called the Civil War,
and Lincoln rebuilt [the country] on a solid anti-slavery foundation, a
foundation that would be strengthened after his death by the
ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished slavery
everywhere, irrevocably), the Fourteenth Amendment (which promised
racial equality) and the Fifteenth Amendment (which promised equal
voting rights).
I begin the book with Lincoln
because he transformed the Union. He saved it and transformed it and …
his story was very much influenced by, literally, where he came from. He
has a vision of the Constitution that’s very much influenced by
Illinois, in particular, and by the Midwest more generally. He comes
from a part of the country that was the Northwest Territory, that was
always free soil even before the Constitution, and he has a very
free-soil vision.
How so?
The
language of the 13th Amendment is borrowed, word-for-word, from the
language of the Northwest Ordinance. Lincoln thinks that the nation created the states, which, of course, Robert E. Lee … could never buy into. Robert E. Lee would say that the states created the Union; but
the Midwest [perspective] would say … before Illinois was a state, it
was a territory; the Union created these new states out of nothing.
That’s a very Midwestern perspective on the Constitution.
Lincoln
is, far and away, the most important constitutional decision-maker of
the last two centuries; and arguably the most important constitutional
decision-maker and interpreter ever.
But Lincoln was never a judge nor a constitutional scholar. He was a politician.
Most
people are taught in high school that the most important constitutional
decision is Marbury v. Madison, but that’s not even the most important
constitutional decision of 1803. The Louisiana Purchase was far more
important than Marbury v. Madison, because it doubled the landmass of
America and made sure that the country would survive. When you
understand that, you understand that many important constitutional decisions are made not by judges but by presidents.
The
two most important constitutional decisions ever are Lincoln’s decision
to resist [the South's] unilateral secession, and Lincoln’s decision to
issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which would lead to an end of
slavery — that is transformative, and Lincoln made those
decisions unilaterally as president. Had these issues reached the U.S.
Supreme Court, controlled as it was [during Lincoln's time] by Roger
Taney, a fierce opponent of Lincoln, the Court might very well have
tried to invalidate Lincoln’s projects.
We live in
a Constitution utterly transformed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th
amendments, and we would have none of those but for Lincoln.
Lincoln
aside, though, you also argue that geography has played a big role in
the Supreme Court — which, of course, is supposed to be the chief
interpreter of the Constitution. How did geography influence the Court’s
history?
Let’s take the most infamous
judicial ruling of all time, the Dred Scott decision of 1857. It emerges
from a Supreme Court that’s profoundly malapportioned: five of the nine
justices on the Dred Scott court come from the slave-holding South,
even though only a third of the population lives in that region.
Part
of that is because entire antebellum system is skewed towards the South
because of the three-fifths clause, which gives slave states extra
clout in the House of Representatives and therefore the Electoral
College. Presidents are picking justices, and the presidency tilts
towards the South because of the three-fifths clause; almost all your
early presidents are either slave-holding Southerners or “Northern men
of Southern sympathies” — that is, pro-slavery Northerners.
If
we view the Constitution and American history with more of a focus on
the role played by geography, what are some the implications for U.S.
politics today and in the near-future?
One
of the things I’m trying to tell you in this book is how we can see
presidential elections and our political polarization in new ways if
we’re attentive to states and regions.
Our parties
are polarized geographically; that this is not the first time that’s so
(early on, it was the South against the North; Jefferson against
Adams). The geographic alignment is remarkably similar to the geographic
alignment in Lincoln’s time with this interesting twist: the Democrats
have become the party of the North and the coasts and the Republicans
have become the party of the former Confederacy. The parties have
basically flipped, but it’s the same basic alignment…
One
of the other big things I want you to see is how regions and states are
hugely important in, for example, presidential politics. I talk about
the significance in this book, in particular, of Ohio and Florida in the
Electoral College and also of Texas. Is it a coincidence that Marco
Rubio comes from Florida? That Jeb Bush is the governor of Florida who
was born in Texas and whose father and brother had their political bases
in Texas? That Rand Paul was born in Texas and his father ran for
president from Texas? That Ted Cruz is from Texas? That Rick Perry is a
former governor of Texas?
Tea
Party activist William Temple listens as Newt Gingrich addresses the
Conservative Political Action Conference, February 27, 2015. (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith.
No comments:
Post a Comment