I think it's WAY too late to reverse the direction we're heading, and
there's a lot more that can be said here, but it's important for you
to know the facts before you lose what you had.
Please ... read on.
How Tyranny Came to America
======================================================
One of the great goals of education is to initiate the young into the
conversation of their ancestors; to enable them to understand the
language of that conversation, in all its subtlety, and maybe even, in
their maturity, to add to it some wisdom of their own.
The modern American educational system no longer teaches us the
political language of our ancestors. In fact our schooling helps widen
the gulf of time between our ancestors and ourselves, because much of
what we are taught in the name of civics, political science, or
American history is really modern liberal propaganda.
Sometimes this is deliberate. Worse yet, sometimes it isn't. Our
ancestral voices have come to sound alien to us, and therefore our own
moral and political language is impoverished. It's as if the people of
England could no longer understand Shakespeare, or Germans couldn't
comprehend Mozart and Beethoven.
So to most Americans, even those who feel oppressed by what they call
tense, that tyranny "came" to America. After all, we have a
constitution, don't we?
We've abolished slavery and segregation. We won two world wars and the
Cold War. We still congratulate ourselves before every ballgame on
being the Land of the Free. And we aren't ruled by some fanatic with a
funny mustache who likes big parades with thousands of soldiers
goose-stepping past huge pictures of himself.
For all that, we no longer fully have what our ancestors, who framed
division of power that prevents power from becoming concentrated and
unlimited.
rough synonym for fascist. And the words they used for any excessive
They would consider the modern "liberal" state tyrannical in
principle; they would see in it not the opposite of the fascist,
communist, and socialist states, but their sister.
If Washington and Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton could come back,
the first thing they'd notice would be that the federal government now
These were the words they used, and it's a good idea for us to learn
their language.
They would say that we no longer live under the Constitution they
under the Constitution they inherited and amended.
sometimes put it, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our
form of government.
What's worse is that our constitutional illiteracy cuts us off from
our own national heritage. And so our politics degenerates into
increasingly bitter and unprincipled quarrels about who is going to
bear the burdens of war and welfare.
I don't want to sound like an oracle on this subject. As a typical
victim of modern public education and a disinformed citizen of this
It was like studying geometry in old age, and discovering how simple
the basic principles of space really are. It was the old story: In
order to learn, first I had to unlearn.
Most of what I'd been taught and told about the Constitution was
misguided or even false. And I'd never been told some of the most
elementary things, which would have saved me a tremendous amount of
confusion.
The Constitution does two things.
First, it delegates certain enumerated powers to the federal
government. Second, it separates those powers among the three
branches.
Most people understand the secondary principle of the separation of
powers. But they don't grasp the primary idea of delegated and
enumerated powers.
Consider this. We have recently had a big national debate over
national health care. Advocates and opponents argued long and loud
over whether it could work, what was fair, how to pay for it, and so
forth.
But almost nobody raised the basic issue: Where does the federal
government get the power to legislate in this area? The answer is:
NOWHERE.
The Constitution lists 18 specific legislative powers of Congress, and
not a one of them covers national health care.
Medicaid, or Medicare, or federal aid to education, or most of what
are now miscalled "civil rights," or countless public works projects,
or equally countless regulations of business, large and small, or the
space program, or farm subsidies, or research grants, or subsidies to
the arts and humanities, or ... well, you name it, chances are, it's
unconstitutional.
Even the most cynical opponents of the Constitution would be
dumbfounded to learn that the federal government now tells us where we
can smoke. We are less free, more heavily taxed, and worse governed
than our ancestors under British rule. Sometimes this government makes
me wonder: Was George III really all that bad?
Let's be clear about one thing.
approval and disapproval. A bad law may be perfectly constitutional. A
wise and humane law may be unconstitutional. But what is almost
certainly bad is a constant disposition to thwart or disregard the
Constitution.
It's not just a matter of what is sometimes called the "original
intent" of the authors of the Constitution. What really matters is the
common, explicit, unchallenged understanding of the Constitution, on
all sides, over several generations. There was no mystery about it.
The logic of the Constitution was so elegantly simple that a foreign
observer could explain it to his countrymen in two sentences.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that "the attributes of the federal
government were carefully defined [in the Constitution], and all that
was not included among them was declared to remain to the governments
of the individual states. Thus the government of the states remained
the rule, and that of the federal government the exception".
The Declaration of Independence, which underlies the Constitution,
holds that the rights of the people come from God, and that the powers
of the government come from the people.
Let me repeat that: According to the Declaration of Independence, the
rights of the people come from God, and the powers of the government
come from the people. Unless you grasp this basic order of things,
you'll have a hard time understanding the Constitution.
The Constitution was the instrument by which the American people
granted, or delegated, certain specific powers to the federal
government. Any power not delegated was withheld, or "reserved".
As we'll see later, these principles are expressed particularly in the
Ninth and Tenth Amendments, two crucial but neglected provisions of
the Constitution. Let me say it yet again: The rights of the people
come from God. The powers of government come from the people.
The American people delegated the specific powers they wanted the
federal government to have through the Constitution. Any additional
powers they wanted to grant were supposed to be added by amendment.
It's largely because we've forgotten these simple principles that the
country is in so much trouble. The powers of the federal government
have multiplied madly, with only the vaguest justifications and on the
most slippery pretexts.
Its chief business now is not defending our rights but taking and
redistributing our wealth. It has even created its own economy, the
tax economy, which is parasitical on the basic and productive
voluntary economy.
Even much of what passes for "national defense" is a kind of hidden
entitlement program, as was illustrated when President George Bush
warned some states during the 1992 campaign that Bill Clinton would
destroy jobs by closing down military bases.
Well, if those bases aren't necessary for our defense, they should be
closed down.
Now of course nobody in American politics, not even the most fanatical
liberal, will admit openly that he doesn't care what the Constitution
says and isn't going to let it interfere with his agenda.
problem. The U.S. Constitution serves the same function as the British
royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition and
continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system of
power.
So the people who mean to do without the Constitution have come up
with a slogan to keep up appearances: they say the Constitution is a
"living document", which sounds like a compliment.
They say it has "evolved" in response to "changing circumstances,"
etc. They sneer at the idea that such a mystic document could still
have the same meanings it had two centuries ago, or even, I guess,
sixty years ago, just before the evolutionary process started
accelerating with fantastic velocity.
These people, who tend with suspicious consistency to be liberals,
have discovered that the Constitution, whatever it may have meant in
suits their present convenience.
Do liberals want big federal entitlement programs? Lo, the Interstate
Commerce Clause turns out to mean that the big federal programs are
constitutional!
Do liberals oppose capital punishment? Lo, the ban on "cruel and
unusual punishment" turns out to mean that capital punishment is
unconstitutional!
Do liberals want abortion on demand? Lo, the Ninth and Fourteenth
Amendments, plus their emanations and penumbras, turn out to mean that
abortion is nothing less than a woman's constitutional right!
Can all this be blind evolution? If liberals were more religious, they
might suspect the hand of Providence behind it! This marvelous "living
document" never seems to impede the liberal agenda in any way.
On the contrary: it always seems to demand, by a wonderful
coincidence, just what liberals are prescribing on other grounds.
Take abortion. Set aside your own views and feelings about it. Is it
really possible that, as the Supreme Court in effect said, all the
Not only that, but no previous Court, no justice on any Court in all
doubting the constitutionality of those laws. Everyone had always
taken it for granted that the states had every right to enact them.
Are we supposed to believe, in all seriousness, that the Court's
the discernment of a meaning that had eluded all its predecessors,
rather than an enactment of the current liberal agenda? Come now.
And notice that the parts of this "living document" don't develop
equally or consistently. The Court has expanded the meaning of some of
liberalism's pet rights, such as freedom of speech, to absurd lengths;
but it has neglected or even contracted other rights, such as property
rights, which liberalism is hostile to.
In order to appreciate what has happened, you have to stand back from
all the details and look at the outline. What follows is a thumbnail
history of the Constitution.
In the beginning the states were independent and sovereign. That is
why they were called "states": a state was not yet thought of as a
mere subdivision of a larger unit, as is the case now.
The universal understanding was that in ratifying the Constitution,
the 13 states yielded a very little of their sovereignty, but kept
most of it.
Those who were reluctant to ratify generally didn't object to the
powers the Constitution delegated to the federal government. But they
were suspicious: they wanted assurance that if those few powers were
granted, other powers, never granted, wouldn't be seized too.
under the proposed distribution of power the federal government would
never be able to "usurp", as they put it, those other powers.
Madison wrote soothingly in Federalist No. 45 that the powers of the
federal government would be "few and defined," relating mostly to war
and foreign policy, while those remaining with the states would be
"numerous and indefinite", and would have to do with the everyday
domestic life of the country.
debates, reflecting the chief anxiety the champions of the
Constitution had to allay. And as a final assurance, the Tenth
Amendment stipulated that the powers not "delegated" to the federal
government were "reserved" to the separate states and to the people.
But this wasn't enough to satisfy everyone.
Well-grounded fears persisted. And during the first half of the
nineteenth century, nearly every president, in his inaugural message,
felt it appropriate to renew the promise that the powers of the
federal government would not be exceeded, nor the reserved powers of
the states transgressed.
The federal government was to remain truly federal, with only a few
specified powers, rather than "consolidated" with unlimited powers.
The Civil War, or the War Between the States if you like, resulted
from the suspicion that the North meant to use the power of the Union
to destroy the sovereignty of the Southern states.
Whether or not that suspicion was justified, the war itself produced
that very result. The South was subjugated and occupied like a
conquered country. Its institutions were profoundly remade by the
federal government; the United States of America was taking on the
character of an extensive, and highly centralized, empire.
Similar processes were under way in Europe, as small states were
consolidated into large ones, setting the stage for the tyrannies and
gigantic wars of the twentieth century.
Even so, the three constitutional amendments ratified after the war
contain a significant clause: "Congress shall have power to enforce
this article by appropriate legislation".
Why is this significant? Because it shows that even the conquerors
still understood that a new power of Congress required a
constitutional amendment. It couldn't just be taken by majority vote,
as it would be today.
If the Congress then had wanted a national health plan, it would have
begun by asking the people for an amendment to the Constitution
authorizing it to legislate in the area of health care.
The immediate purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to provide a
constitutional basis for a proposed civil rights act. But the Supreme
Court soon found other uses for the Fourteenth Amendment. It began
striking down state laws as unconstitutional.
This was an important new twist in American constitutional law.
Hamilton, in arguing for judicial review in Federalist No. 78, had
envisioned the Court as a check on Congress, resisting the illicit
consolidation or centralization of power.
And our civics books still describe the function of checks and
balances in terms of the three branches of the federal government
mutually controlling each other.
But in fact, the Court was now countermanding the state legislatures,
where the principle of checks and balances had no meaning, since those
state legislatures had no reciprocal control on the Court. This
development eventually set the stage for the convulsive Supreme Court
rulings of the late twentieth century, from Brown v. Board of
The big thing to recognize here is that the Court had become the very
opposite of the institution Hamilton and others had had in mind.
Instead of blocking the centralization of power in the federal
government, the Court was assisting it.
The original point of the federal system was that the federal
government would have very little to say about the internal affairs of
the states. But the result of the Civil War was that the federal
as well as Southern states.
Note that this trend toward centralization was occurring largely under
Republican presidents.
The Democrat Grover Cleveland was one of the last great spokesmen for
federalism. He once vetoed a modest $10,000 federal grant for drought
relief on grounds that there was no constitutional power to do it.
If that sounds archaic, remember that the federal principle remained
strong long enough that during the 1950s, the federal highway program
had to be called a "defense" measure in order to win approval, and
federal loans to college students in the 1960s were absurdly called
"defense" loans for the same reason.
The Tenth Amendment is a refined taste, but it has always had a few
devotees. But federalism suffered some serious wounds during the
presidency of Woodrow Wilson.
First came the income tax, its constitutionality established by the
Sixteenth Amendment; this meant that every U.S. citizen was now, for
the first time, directly accountable to the federal government.
Then the Seventeenth Amendment required that senators be elected by
popular vote rather than chosen by state legislators; this meant that
the states no longer had their own representation in Congress, so that
they now lost their remaining control over the federal government.
The Eighteenth Amendment, establishing Prohibition, gave the federal
government even greater powers over the country's internal affairs.
All these amendments were ominous signs that federalism was losing its
traditional place in the hearts, and perhaps the minds, of Americans.
But again, notice that these expansions of federal power were at least
achieved by amending the Constitution, as the Constitution itself
requires. The Constitution doesn't claim to be a "living document". It
is written on paper, not rubber.
In fact, the radicals of the early twentieth century despaired of
achieving socialism or communism as long as the Constitution remained.
They regarded it as the critical obstacle to their plans, and thought
a revolution would be necessary to remove it. As The New Republic
wrote: "To have a socialist society we must have a new Constitution."
That's laying it on the line!
Unfortunately, the next generation of collectivists would be less
candid in their contempt for the federal system. Once they learned to
feign devotion to the Constitution they secretly regarded as obsolete,
the laborious formality of amendment would no longer be necessary.
They could merely pretend that the Constitution was on their side.
After Franklin Roosevelt restaffed the Supreme Court with his
compliant cronies, the federal government would be free to make up its
own powers as it went along, thanks to the notion that the
Constitution was a malleable "living document" whose central meaning
could be changed, and even reversed, by ingenious interpretation.
Roosevelt's New Deal brought fascist-style central planning to America
conflict with the Court, which found several of his chief measures
unconstitutional.
Early in his second term, Roosevelt retaliated by trying to "pack" the
Court by increasing the number of seats. This power play alienated
even many of his allies, but it turned out not to be necessary.
After 1937, the Court began seeing things Roosevelt's way. It voted as
he wished; several members obligingly retired; and soon he had
appointed a majority of the justices. The country virtually got a new
Constitution.
Roosevelt's Court soon decided that the Tenth Amendment was a "truism"
of no real force. This meant that almost any federal act was ipso
facto constitutional, and the powers "reserved" to the states and the
people were just leftovers the federal government didn't want, like
the meal left for the jackals by the satisfied lion.
There was almost no limit, now, on what the federal government could
do. In effect, the powers of the federal government no longer had to
come from the people by constitutional delegation: they could be
created by simple political power.
Roosevelt also set the baneful precedent of using entitlement
programs, such as Social Security, to buy some people's votes with
other people's money. It was both a fatal corruption of democracy and
the realization of the Servile State in America. The class of voting
parasites has been swelling ever since.
So the New Deal didn't just expand the power of the federal
government; that had been done before. The New Deal did much deeper
mischief: it struck at the whole principle of constitutional
resistance to federal expansion.
Congress didn't need any constitutional amendment to increase its
powers; it could increase its own powers ad hoc, at any time, by
simple majority vote. All this, of course, would have seemed monstrous
to our ancestors.
Even Alexander Hamilton, who favored a relatively strong central
government in his time, never dreamed of a government so powerful.
The Court suffered a bloody defeat at Roosevelt's hands, and since his
time it has never found a major act of Congress unconstitutional.
This has allowed the power of the federal government to grow without
restraint. At the federal level, "checks and balances" has ceased to
include judicial review.
This is a startling fact, flying as it does in the face of the
familiar conservative complaints about the Court's "activism". When it
comes to Congress, the Court has been absolutely passive.
As if to compensate for its habit of capitulation to Congress, the
Court's post-World War II "activism" has been directed entirely
against the states, whose laws it has struck down in areas that used
to be considered their settled and exclusive provinces.
Time after time, it has found "unconstitutional" laws whose legitimacy
had stood unquestioned throughout the history of the Republic.
Notice how total the reversal of the Court's role has been. It began
with the duty, according to Hamilton, of striking down new seizures of
power by Congress. Now it finds constitutional virtually everything
Congress chooses to do.
The federal government has assumed myriads of new powers nowhere
mentioned or implied in the Constitution, yet the Court has never
seriously impeded this expansion, or rather explosion, of novel claims
of power. What it finds unconstitutional are the traditional powers of
the states.
The postwar Court has done pioneering work in one notable area: the
separation of church and state. I said "pioneering", not praiseworthy.
The Court has consistently imposed an understanding of the First
notoriously in its 1962 ruling that prayer in public schools amounts
to an "establishment of religion".
This interpretation of the Establishment Clause has always been to the
disadvantage of Christianity and of any law with roots in Christian
morality. And it's impossible to doubt that the justices who voted for
this interpretation were voting their predilections.
Maybe that's the point. I've never heard it put quite this way, but
the Court's boldest rulings showed something less innocent than a
series of honest mistakes.
Studying these cases and others of the Court's liberal heyday, one
never gets the sense that the majority was suppressing its own
preferences; it was clearly enacting them.
Those rulings can be described as wishful thinking run amok, and
touched with more than a little arrogance. All in all, the Court
displayed the opposite of the restrained and impartial temperament one
expects even of a traffic-court judge, let alone a Supreme Court.
It's ironic to recall Hamilton's assurance that the Supreme Court
would be "the least dangerous" of the three branches of the federal
government.
But Hamilton did give us a shrewd warning about what would happen if
the Court were ever corrupted: in Federalist No. 78, he wrote that
"liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would
have everything to fear from its union with either of the other
[branches]."
Since Franklin Roosevelt, as I've said, the judiciary has in effect
formed a union with the other two branches to aggrandize the power of
the federal government at the expense of the states and the people.
This, in outline, is the constitutional history of the United States.
You won't find it in the textbooks, which are required to be
optimistic, to present degeneration as development, and to treat the
successive pronouncements of the Supreme Court as so many oracular
revelations of constitutional meaning.
A leading liberal scholar, Leonard Levy (a jew), has gone so far as to
say that what matters is not what the Constitution says, but what the
Court has said about the Constitution in more than 400 volumes of
commentary.
This can only mean that the commentary has displaced the original
text, and that "We the People" have been supplanted by "We the
Lawyers."
We the People can't read and understand our own Constitution. We have
to have it explained to us by the professionals. Moreover, if the
Court enjoys oracular status, it can't really be criticized, because
it can do no wrong.
We may dislike its results, but future rulings will have to be derived
from them as precedents, rather than from the text and logic of the
Constitution.
And notice that the "conservative" justices appointed by Republican
presidents have by and large upheld not the original Constitution, but
subject of abortion, which I'll return to in a minute.
To sum up this little constitutional history.
The history of the Constitution is the story of its inversion. The
original understanding of the Constitution has been reversed.
The Constitution creates a presumption against any power not plainly
delegated to the federal government and a corresponding presumption in
favor of the rights and powers of the states and the people. But we
now have a sloppy presumption in favor of federal power.
Most people assume the federal government can do anything it isn't
plainly forbidden to do.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were adopted to make the principle of
the Constitution as clear as possible.
Hamilton argued against adding a Bill of Rights, on grounds that it
would be redundant and confusing. He thought it would seem to imply
that the federal government had more powers than it had been given.
Why say, he asked, that the freedom of the press shall not be
infringed, when the federal government would have no power by which it
could be infringed?
And you can even make the case that he was exactly right. He
understood, at any rate, that our freedom is safer if we think of the
Constitution as a list of powers rather than as a list of rights. Be
that as it may, the Bill of Rights was adopted, but it was designed to
meet his objection.
The Ninth Amendment says: "The enumeration in the Constitution of
certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others
retained by the people."
The Tenth says: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the
States respectively, or to the people."
Now what these two provisions mean is pretty simple. The Ninth means
that the list of the people's rights in the Constitution is not meant
right to travel or to marry, which may deserve just as much respect as
the right not to have soldiers quartered in one's home in peacetime.
The Tenth, on the other hand, means that the list of powers
powers the government assumed would be, in the Framers' habitual word,
"usurped".
As I said earlier, the Founders believed that our rights come from
God, and the government's powers come from us. So the Constitution
can't list all our rights, but it can and does list all the federal
government's powers.
You can think of the Constitution as a sort of antitrust act for
government, with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments at its core. It's
remarkable that the same liberals who think business monopolies are
sinister think monopolies of political power are progressive.
When they can't pass their programs because of the constitutional
miss the whole point of the enumeration and separation of powers.
Well, I don't have to tell you that this way of thinking is absolutely
alien to that of today's politicians and pundits.
Can you imagine John Kerry, George Bush, Al Gore, Dan Rostenkowski, or
even Tom Brokaw having a conversation about political principles with
any of the Founding Fathers? If you can, you must have a vivid fantasy
life. And the result of the loss of our original political idiom has
been, as I say, to invert the original presumptions.
The average American, whether he has had high-school civics or a
degree in political science, is apt to assume that the Constitution
somehow empowers the government to do nearly anything, while
implicitly limiting our rights by listing them.
Not that anyone would say it this way, but it's as if the Bill of
Rights had said that the enumeration of the federal government's
powers in the Constitution is not meant to deny or disparage any other
powers it may choose to claim, while the rights not given to the
people in the Constitution are reserved to the federal government to
give or withhold, and the states may be progressively stripped of
their original powers.
What it comes down to is that we don't really have an operative
Constitution anymore. The federal government defines its own powers
day by day. It's limited not by the list of its powers in the
Constitution, but by whatever it can get away with politically.
Just as the president can now send troops abroad to fight without a
declaration of war, Congress can pass a national health care program
without a constitutional delegation of power. The only restraint left
is political opposition.
If you suspect I'm overstating the change from our original
principles, I give you the late Justice Hugo Black. In a 1965 case
called Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court struck down a law forbidding
the sale of contraceptives on grounds that it violated a right of
"privacy." (This supposed right, of course, became the basis for the
another story.)
"I like my privacy as well as the next [man]," he wrote, "but I am
nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade
it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision."
relation between the individual and the state: government has a right
to invade our privacy, unless prohibited by the Constitution.
You don't have to share the Court's twisted view of the right of
privacy in order to be shocked that one of its members takes this view
of the "right" of government to invade privacy.
It gets crazier. In 1993 the Court handed down one of the most bizarre
decisions of all time.
For two decades, enemies of legal abortion had been supporting
Republican candidates in the hope of filling the Court with appointees
who would review Roe v. Wade.
with eight Republican appointees on the Court, the result was not what
the conservatives had hoped for. The Court reaffirmed Roe.
But it held that the paramount consideration was that the Court be
consistent, and not appear to be yielding to public pressure, lest it
stand.
Among many things that might be said about this ruling, the most basic
is this: The Court in effect declared itself a third party to the
controversy, and then, setting aside the merits of the two principals'
claims, ruled in its own interest!
It was as if the referee in a prizefight had declared himself the
winner. Cynics had always suspected that the Court did not forget its
self-interest in its decisions, but they never expected to hear it say
so.
The three justices who signed that opinion evidently didn't realize
what they were saying. A distinguished veteran Court-watcher (who
it.
The Court was actually telling us that it put its own welfare ahead of
the merits of the arguments before it. In its confusion, it was
blurting out the truth.
But by then, very few Americans could even remember the original
constitutional plan. The original plan was as Madison and Tocqueville
described it: State government was to be the rule, federal government
the exception.
The states' powers were to be "numerous and indefinite", federal
powers "few and defined." This is a matter not only of history, but of
iron logic: the Constitution doesn't make sense when read any other
way. As Madison asked, why bother listing particular federal powers
unless unlisted powers are withheld?
The unchecked federal government has not only overflowed its banks; it
has even created its own economy.
Thanks to its exercise of a myriad of unwarranted powers, it can claim
tens of millions of dependents, at least part of whose income is due
to the abuse of the taxing and spending powers for their benefit:
government employees, retirees, farmers, contractors, teachers,
artists, even soldiers.
Large numbers of these people are paid much more than their market
value because the taxpayer is forced to subsidize them.
By the same token, most taxpayers would instantly be better off if the
to its constitutional functions.
Can we restore the Constitution and recover our freedom? I have no
doubt that we can. Like all great reforms, it will take an
intelligent, determined effort by many people. I don't want to sow
false optimism.
But the time is ripe for a constitutional counterrevolution.
Discontent with the ruling system, as the 1992 Perot vote showed, is
deep and widespread among several classes of people: Christians,
conservatives, gun owners, taxpayers, and simple believers in honest
government all have their reasons. The rulers lack legitimacy and
don't believe in their own power strongly enough to defend it.
The beauty of it is that the people don't have to invent a new system
of government in order to get rid of this one. They only have to
government already professes to be upholding. Taken seriously, the
Constitution would pose a serious threat to our form of government.
And for just that reason, the ruling parties will be finished as soon
as the American people rediscover and awaken their dormant
Constitution.
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