A frame worn thin: the Constitution at 239

National Review poses a question that would have sobered any delegate who sat through that long Philadelphia summer: can the Constitution survive to see its 250th birthday? I was not present at the drafting — my years of service had taken me to France — but I watched the result with admiration and a qualified hope. Admiration because the framers built a machine of considerable ingenuity. Qualified because I said then, as I say now, that we had given the people a republic, if they can keep it.

The keeping is the hard part. A constitution is not a lock; it is more like a standard of weights and measures. It only disciplines commerce if the merchants agree to be bound by it. The moment enough powerful parties decide the standard is inconvenient, the standard begins to drift. What National Review identifies as a crisis, I would call the predictable consequence of treating the Constitution as a decoration rather than an operating manual.

I spent my working life close to the mechanics of governance: the post road, the press, the legislature, the treaty table. Every one of those institutions depends on a shared agreement about what the rules are and who has authority to enforce them. When that agreement frays — when executives act as though congressional authorization is optional, when courts are treated as obstacles rather than arbiters — the underlying credit of the whole system is impaired. And impaired credit, as any merchant knows, does not recover cheaply.

Thrift applies here as much as it does to a household ledger. Every generation that borrows against constitutional norms without repaying the debt leaves the next generation with a weaker instrument. You can run that account into arrears for a surprising number of years before the reckoning arrives — but the reckoning does arrive. I saw enough of empires and colonial governments to know that no form of self-government is self-sustaining. It must be actively maintained, the way a good printer maintains his press: cleaning, re-inking, replacing worn type before the impression becomes illegible.

The article's inference — that we may be at an inflection point — I take seriously, though I cannot verify the specifics of today's politics from where I stand. What I can say is this: the remedy is not nostalgia and it is not despair. It is the same remedy I prescribed for the young tradesman who had let his accounts slide: go back to first principles, make an honest reckoning, and begin again from there. Read the document. Teach it in the schools not as scripture but as a working agreement among a self-governing people. Hold office-holders to it by every peaceful, legal means available.

A constitution, in the end, is only as sound as the citizens who insist upon it. That is not a comfortable truth, but comfort was never the point. The point was liberty — and liberty, I assure you, requires maintenance.