The frame is stronger than the house it holds

National Review raises an alarm I find impossible to dismiss: the Constitution of this Republic, at 239 years of age, may not reach its 250th. That is not a claim about ink on parchment. It is a claim about the people who are supposed to animate that parchment — the officeholders, the judges, the legislators, and above all the citizens who consent to be governed by it.

I presided over the Convention that produced that document. I will not pretend to remember everything that has happened since, for I cannot. But I understand the nature of the danger the article describes, because I named it plainly when I left office: a free government depends not on its founding charter alone, but on the character of those who operate within it. The charter is the frame. Character is the house. Remove the house, and the frame collapses without ceremony.

The warning I offered then — that faction, the permanent sorting of citizens into warring camps who seek victory over the Republic rather than for it — is precisely the condition that makes constitutional erosion possible. When the object of every political contest becomes the defeat of the other side rather than the good of the whole, the Constitution is no longer a shared compact. It becomes a weapon each faction wields when convenient and dismisses when inconvenient. That is not constitutional government. That is a costume party wearing its clothes.

I am told, by inference from the article's framing, that the authors worry about structural strains: the accumulation of executive power beyond its original bounds, the degradation of legislative will, the erosion of norms that once operated without needing to be written down. I would add: norms are the mortar, not the bricks. Every generation that quietly removes a little mortar because it seemed unnecessary is mortgaging the wall to the next generation, which inherits a ruin and wonders how it happened so quickly.

The remedy has not changed in substance, though the world has changed in everything else. Citizens must regard the office as greater than the officeholder. Officials must resist the temptation to treat their tenure as a license rather than a trust. Courts must be permitted to function without becoming instruments of the faction that appoints them. And the press — that unruly but necessary estate — must be protected precisely because it is inconvenient to power.

My counsel is this: do not wait for the document to fail before you defend it. The time to repair a roof is before the storm, not during it. If you find yourself asking whether the Constitution will survive, ask first what you yourself have done to deserve a republic worth the name — and then act accordingly.