I could hardly be a bigger fan of the United States Constitution, but I disagree with one of the most frequently repeated responses to the Mount Vernon Statement: that the Constitution is the only statement of conservative principles that we need.
This was started by Michelle Malkin on February 16, and she clearly had the right idea, at least. Specifically, she wrote, "if the signers of all these new documents support political candidates who brazenly undermine the grand principles they put forth, what's the point? Anyway, isn’t the [Constitution] the only statement of guiding principles we need..."
Her premise that the Constitution is excellent and indispensable is absolutely correct, and she is right to point out that these words are meaningless unless they ultimately influence our actions. However, I do regret that her last sentence has been adopted by so many other people as their own reaction to the Mount Vernon Statement. After all, the Constitution is not a statement of principles at all -- it is the "Supreme Law of the Land." The Constitution is rich in valuable principles and wisdom, but it does not discuss, explain, or even reference the philosophy or reasoning behind it. Instead, it states what "we, the people" have decided to enact as an entrenched, binding body of law. As we work to return the Constitution to its proper place, we will need the support of other Americans. Wouldn't it help us to be able to make arguments for it based on justice, freedom, efficiency, or effectiveness? Also, where the Constitution actually does grant power to the federal government, it does (to an extent) leave the use of that power to the discretion of the appropriate federal branches. The Constitution does not offer instructions on the use of this discretion. However, don't we, as conservatives, nevertheless have principles that guide us on its use? The Constitution says very little about policy on the state and local levels, but don't we, as conservatives, have principles to guide us there as well? Finally, as great as the Constitution is, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had little time to rewrite and edit it to ensure that it would be respected or correctly interpreted by future generations of Americans. The delegates did not have the opportunity to correct the misunderstandings and unconstitutional traditions that developed in the 222 years following the convention. The delegates certainly were in no position to insist that the Constitution is still relevant as of the year 2010 or to insist that by the will and consent of the American people of 2010, the Constitution remains the Supreme Law of the Land. They couldn't have made the Constitution so complete that it stated everything that would ever need to be said. They couldn't have written a constitution so complete that it would have relieved us of our responsibilities.
In summary, the Constitution is a body of law, not a statement of principles. It is our responsibility to uphold and defend it. To do this, we need to communicate with each other and with all Americans. To do this properly, the content of those communications should not be limited to quotations from the text of the Constitution itself; instead, they should include brief documents such as the Mount Vernon Statement and the Twelve Points, along with longer documents (in the form of a book or books). We will need to be prepared to talk about ideas that are not written out in that text. The ideas that we can find in the Constitution are not the maximum of what we can be expected to know -- they are the minimum of what we, as conservatives, can rightly expect ourselves to know.
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