Preamble: United States Constitution Essay

The introduce was placed in the constitution more or less as an afterthought. It was not proposed or discussed on the floor of the Constitutional Convention. Rather, Gouverneur Morris, a delegate from Pennsylvania who as a member of the Committee of Style actually drafted the near-final text of the Constitution, composed it at the last moment. It was Morris who gave the considered purposes of the Constitution coherent shape, and the premise was the capst unitary of his expository gift. The Preamble did not, in itself, have any substantive legal meaning. The understanding at the time was that preambles are merely declaratory and are not to be read as granting or limiting powera stare sustained by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905).Nevertheless, the Preamble has considerable potency by virtue of its specification of the purposes for which the Constitution exists. It distills the central values that moved the Framers during their long debates in Philadelphia. As Justice Joseph stratum put it in his celebrated Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, its accepted attainice is to expound the nature and extent and application of the powers actually conferred by the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist No. 84, went so far as to invoke that the words secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity were a better credit entry of popular rights, than volumes of those aphorisms, which make the principal figure in several of our bow bills of rights.An appreciation of the Preamble begins with a comparison of it to its counterpart in the twinge the Constitution replaced, the Articles of Confederation. There, the states joined in a firm league of friendship, for their commons defence, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare and bound themselves to assist one another against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignt y, trade, or any other pretence whatever. The bargain was among states, not people, and the military protection and the liberties to be secured were of the states as such.The very inception words of the Constitution mark a radical departure We the community of the United States. That language was at striking variance with the norm, for in foregoing documents, including the 1778 treaty of alliance with France, the Articles of Confederation, and the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognizing American independence, the word spate was not used, and the phrase the United States was followed immediately by a inclination of the states (viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and so on down to Georgia).The spick-and-span phraseology was necessary, given the circumstances. The Constitutional Convention had provided that whenever the popularly elected ratifying conventions of gild states approved the Constitution, it would go into effect for those nine, irrespective of whether any of the remaining states ratified. In as much as no one could know which states would and which would not ratify, the Convention could not list all thirteen. Moreover, names could scarcely be added to the Preamble retroactively as they were admitted. Even so, the phrase set off howls of protest from a number of opponents of ratification, notably Patrick Henry.Henry charged that the adversity to follow the usual form indicated an intention to create a amalgamated national government instead of the system that James Madison describe in The Federalist No. 39 as being neither a national nor a federal constitution but a motif of both. Henrys assertion was made in the Virginia ratifying convention and was like a shot and devastatingly rebutted by Governor Edmund Randolph The government is for the people and the misfortune was, that the people had no agency in the government before.If the government is to be ski binding on the people, are not the people the proper persons to examine its merits or defects?