Civic holidays are an important tradition in the United States and essential to the health of our republic. With their passing each year, we reject those shameless dissidents who would portray American history as nothing more than a narrative of oppression, slavery and patriarchy. We reaffirm our pride in those virtues of liberty and equality before the law, both of which remain distinctly American.

Prominent in this tradition is, of course, the 4th of July. It has a companion, however, which is all too commonly ignored: Constitution Day. Honoring our Constitution and those brilliant men who produced it is just as important as celebrating the Declaration of Independence. If we celebrate the American vision on the 4th of July, then on Sept. 17 we celebrate the American character. And this we must do, today more than ever. Our constitutional order, as ordained by that extraordinary document introduced in 1787, has been under assault for decades.

Politicians have treated the Constitution as a marginal document; not as the governing charter of our republic, but as an arcane treatise of a past era. This disrespect has polluted Republican and Democrat administrations alike. President Obama’s administration has been almost entirely extra-constitutional, with the executive branch assuming control of industry and unilaterally installing czars with minimal legislative oversight. President George W. Bush, while promising to execute his office with loyalty to our governing charter, ignored its explicit constraints in passing massive entitlement programs and cynically treating it as a campaign prop in the gay-marriage debate of the 2004 election cycle.

The unfortunate truth is that, in the modern American political culture, the Constitution is at best ignored and at worst rejected. “What works” and “what the federal government should do,” as opportunistically determined by the government itself, have long superseded the more fundamental concern of what the government is permitted to do.

Since Marbury v. Madison vested the Supreme Court with the power to interpret the Constitution and outline its constraints on government, the federal judiciary has completely abdicated its solemn duty. By instituting itself as a super-legislature, it has forcefully assumed the duties of Congress and the prerogatives of the people. Indeed, the task of the judiciary is to make decisions that the people at large would not, and to limit the excesses of democracy.

This is why judges are insulated with life tenure, nomination by the president and consent by the aristocratic Senate. The limitations imposed by the judiciary, however, are meant to be based on the dictates of the Constitution – and nothing else. By limiting the will of the people armed not with the Constitution but with personal beliefs, activist federal judges have overstepped their bounds in a way that would appall our Publius and vindicate Brutus.

Due process, originally adopted as a procedural guarantee against arbitrary state power over the individual, has become a judicial vessel through which judges have masked their own personal beliefs in the prestige of the Constitution. The concept of penumbras inherent in our Bill of Rights has allowed judges to capriciously insert rights into the Constitution and limits on the government that have never been approved by the people. The court has relied on ambiguous standards and tests, fashioned so as to maximize discretion on the part of the judge and minimize reliance on the text of the Constitution.

School children across the country are taught that the Constitution is a “living document.” In fact, it is not. It is a fixed document, which objectively established certain parameters for the operation of the government. Any constitution that evolves with the whims of a self-righteous federal judge – any constitution that is readily open to complete transformation by means of loose interpretation – is not really a constitution at all. To the extent that our Constitution must change, the Founding Fathers allowed for amendments that would come from the people. To the extent that circumstances evolve, we conform our understanding of those circumstances to the timeless principles of the Constitution, not the other way around. By indoctrinating children with the belief that the Constitution lives, we allow for complacency in the face of a government which rewrites the rules it is supposed to abide by.

As the famous story runs, when Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, he was asked by a curious woman what the delegates had given their country. He replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” The Founders understood that our republic would remain strong and free only if our government was confined within the boundaries imparted by the document under which we all agreed to order society.

Fidelity to the Constitution is what this country needed at its conception and what it still needs today. But fidelity to the Constitution requires that we reject the notion that our governing document means whatever judges happen to say it means. Fidelity to the Constitution means that we reject the notion that whenever the government wants to act – and believes it should act – that it may act, with or without a constitutional stamp of approval. Fidelity to the Constitution means that we reject a living constitution which functions by the arbitrary dictates of man, and instead embrace once again a firm constitution that functions through a fixed rule of law.

Jeffrey Long is a junior in the College. He can be reached at longthehoya.com. Conscience of a Conservative appears every other Tuesday.

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