The first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be on September 10 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, an institution designed to “disseminate information about the U.S. Constitution on a nonpartisan basis to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.” Jeffrey Rosen, the center’s president and CEO, called presidential debates a “meaningful opportunity for all Americans to learn more about the principles that define American democracy, embodied in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the American idea.”
I suspect Trump and Harris will each note the location during the debate and accuse the other of not being sufficiently loyal to the framers’ creation. Both have already attempted to undermine their opponent’s constitutional bona fides. “Kamala went full communist,” Trump claimed at a rally in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Harris asserted, “Someone who suggests that we should terminate the Constitution of the United States of America should never again stand behind the seal of the president of the United States.”
It will surely be riveting stuff. But before the two candidates try to out-Constitute each other on a national stage, it’s worth understanding the context in which the Constitution Center was created, challenging its supposed neutrality, and most important, asking if the Constitution deserves the title bestowed upon it by the center as “the greatest vision of human freedom in history.”
In The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them, law professor Aziz Rana explains that by the end of the 1980s, “Americans had moved far from the politics of national self-examination that existed in the 1960s and early 1970s.” As the Constitution’s bicentennial approached, a “conservative political ascendancy” fortified an “even more self-congratulatory climate, which praised American…
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Auteur: Luke Pickrell
