Constitution Day Research Paper
Why Celebrate Constitution Day?
Few people know what today is. That is a shame, because it is the anniversary of a remarkable event in history: the signing of the United States Constitution.
On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, held in the summer heat of Philadelphia for four long months, signed the document for which they had labored so hard to produce. During both the drafting of the Constitution and the ensuing debates over its ratification, the struggle to procure the new system of government was not an easy one. But in the end, America came down in support of what has endured as the oldest working constitution in the world today.
Thus the U.S. Constitution has a long history behind it—it is part of our American tradition, and we should be proud of it. But we should not respect the Constitution simply because it is tradition. There are, after all, bad traditions. Rather, as American citizens we have a duty to understand the Constitution as fully as possible—which means understanding the principles upon which it was built.
Today there are two competing schools of interpreting the meaning of the …show more content…
Here, most proponents of "original intent" have not a clue. Our current Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, for example, has written that the liberty and rights of individual human beings have no "intrinsic worth." And Justice Scalia said in a 1997 speech that under the Constitution, minorities have rights "only because the majority determines that there are certain minority positions that deserve protection," implying that if the majority so chooses, the minorities forfeit any or all their protections. This is to assert no more than might as the measure of right. Whatever can be said of such arguments, they certainly bear no resemblance to the arguments made by the Framers of the
Few people know what today is. That is a shame, because it is the anniversary of a remarkable event in history: the signing of the United States Constitution.
On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, held in the summer heat of Philadelphia for four long months, signed the document for which they had labored so hard to produce. During both the drafting of the Constitution and the ensuing debates over its ratification, the struggle to procure the new system of government was not an easy one. But in the end, America came down in support of what has endured as the oldest working constitution in the world today.
Thus the U.S. Constitution has a long history behind it—it is part of our American tradition, and we should be proud of it. But we should not respect the Constitution simply because it is tradition. There are, after all, bad traditions. Rather, as American citizens we have a duty to understand the Constitution as fully as possible—which means understanding the principles upon which it was built.
Today there are two competing schools of interpreting the meaning of the …show more content…
Here, most proponents of "original intent" have not a clue. Our current Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, for example, has written that the liberty and rights of individual human beings have no "intrinsic worth." And Justice Scalia said in a 1997 speech that under the Constitution, minorities have rights "only because the majority determines that there are certain minority positions that deserve protection," implying that if the majority so chooses, the minorities forfeit any or all their protections. This is to assert no more than might as the measure of right. Whatever can be said of such arguments, they certainly bear no resemblance to the arguments made by the Framers of the