“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Preamble to the United States Constitution, 1787

The United States Constitution consists of VII Articles which structure the three branches of the government and enumerate their powers and duties. It is a document shaped by its times and the challenges and compromises necessary when trying to connect a group of colonies with diverse and divergent economies and religions, each jealously protecting its perceived power and autonomy. At the same time, it reflects the social mores of its era, for better and for worse. This resulted in the now reviled three-fifths compromise [Article I, Section 2, paragraph 3] and a prohibition of laws forbidding the importation of persons into a state for 20 years. [Article I, Section 9] The most familiarly and frequently cited rights of citizens and residents and limitations on the government are not in the body of the original document, but are in the Bill of Rights, consisting of the first ten Amendments. [No more citations -- take the plunge and find them yourself.]

Initially nowhere does it directly give citizens the right to vote, allowing the states to follow their own rules on who could vote, resulting in wide variation, and the use of race, property-ownership and gender, among other rules, to limit the composition of the electorate for many years.

But imperfect as it is, it has been a remarkably durable and noble foundation for this nation. Could you or I write have written a better one?

Take your time. Read a section and take as much time as needed to digest it, analyzing the potentially archaic language or sentence structure, as needed. Then pat yourself on the back and note -- I thought that was in there, or huh, didn’t know that was in there, before moving on to the next section.

You’ll find all sorts of phrases you may have heard bandied about, “Full faith and credit”, “privileges and immunities”, [Okay, one more --Article IV] and also see that it was necessary as part of the merging of colonies to state specifically things which we take for granted today -- that the states/colonies must respect each other’s laws and citizens now that they were bound into one nation and that the federal government would protect each state from invasion.

In 1987 a survey was done by Hearst looking at what Americans knew about the Constitution. Ten points if you caught that this was the 200th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention. That survey revealed, among many other misconceptions, that nearly half of the respondents believed that the phrase “From each according to ability; to each according to need” was in our Constitution. It isn’t.

We need to understand our Constitution. We need to protect it. We need to give serious thought to whether/how it could be improved. It is not perfect, but consider the alternatives…