Donald Trump has called for an end to the Constitution

[ad_1]

David Adler

As the whole world knows by now, former President Donald Trump, the presumptive leader of the Republican Party, has called for the end of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election. Trumps landmark demand, if implemented, will throw out the Constitution, democracy of America and the rule of law.

Aside from Civil War-era calls from Confederate leaders for the overthrow of the Constitution and the Union, no high-ranking American official, past or present, has ever sought to end the Constitution. No delegate to the Constitutional Convention pushed for the termination of the Constitution. No previous president has called for it. Certainly, no Supreme Court Justice has ordered this. In the annals of American legal history, Confederate officers and former President Trump are the only occupants of this platform.

President Trump’s declaration represents a landmark of a different order than the major judicial decisions usually analyzed in this space. But the potential legal significance of Trumps clarion call is as great, if not greater, than any ruling handed down by a court of law. Because of this, it requires attention. As a matter of law, readers may ask, is there a mechanism for terminating the Constitution?

People are also reading…

President Abraham Lincoln, a better judge of the founders’ intent to create the Constitution than his successors, addressed the issue in his remarkable First Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 1861. Seven southern states seceded from the Union at the time he took the Oath of office. Lincoln rejected the claim that the states could secede from the Union constitutionally, because the act itself would violate the premise and promise of the Preamble that the Constitution was created to create a more perfect Union.

Lincoln justly said: It is safe to assert that no proper government has ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. The 16th president added: Continue to enforce all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will remain forever, impossible to destroy except by some act not provided for in the instrument itself.

For Lincoln, secession, whether by one or several states, represented the dissolution of the Union, and thus was illegal. The Union, he said, was less than perfect, having lost the essential element of the eternal.

In this reasoning, Lincoln closely followed the significant words of Chief Justice John Marshall, set forth in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819): The Constitution was intended to endure for a long time.

The Supreme Court agreed, in Texas v. White (1869). Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, appointed to the Court by Lincoln, said: When these Articles (of Confederation) were found inadequate to the needs of the nation, the Constitution was appointed to form a more perfect one. Union. It is difficult to convey the idea of ​​indissoluble unity more clearly than these words. What might be indissoluble if an eternal Union were made more perfect, is not. The Constitution, writes Chase, is indestructible.

Although the Constitution is inviolable, it is still subject to change. The framers of the Constitution, aware of the limitations of their work, potential errors, as described by James Madison in Federalist Number 43, sought protection for the people in the form of Article V, the Amendatory Clause. This provision left successive generations of Americans the opportunity to improve the Constitution in the name of creating a more perfect Union.

The framers created the Amendatory Clause as a means for correcting errors in the original Constitution. They have not been given emergency powers to overturn presidential elections, despite President Trump’s wishes. And they did not, as Lincoln concluded, put into the Constitution a mechanism or power for its own termination.

Consequently, there are no legal grounds or principles within the architecture of the Constitution for abrogating, destroying or terminating the supreme law of the land, despite the desperate motives harbored by desperate people. In 1796, President George Washington, who embraced the principles of American Constitutionalism, reminded the people of the importance of scrupulous adherence to constitutional principles.

The first president of the nations said: If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of powers in the constitution is in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the manner prescribed by the Constitution. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though it may at one time be the instrument of good, it is the habitual weapon by which free governments are destroyed.

David Adler, Ph.D., is a renowned author who lectures nationally and internationally on the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Presidential powers. His scholarly writings have been cited by the US Supreme Court and lower courts by both Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress. Adler’s column is supported in part by a grant from the Wyoming Humanities funded “Why It Matters: Civic and Electoral Participation” initiative, administered by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Adler can be reached at [email protected].

Stay tuned for the latest in Opinion

Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent straight to your inbox every week!

[ad_2]