“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The preamble of the U.S. Constitution clearly sets the intentions of our Founding Fathers and the purpose of what follows in the supreme law of the land. The longest written constitution of any country in the world with 146,385 words was designed for us, We the People. To establish a national government but provide us with a system of checks and balances. To preserve our individual liberties. To defend us. To sustain us.
The Constitution, even in this world that generally throws away the old for something new, has endured. Some 250 years later, Americans hold it in high esteem and often point to it as a beacon in this storm of political warfare that has fractured the country.
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But, there’s a problem. It’s been gnawing at us for weeks.
“Americans revere it — even though they don’t know much about it,” David Adler told us during an October visit in Twin Falls.
There are few among us who know our country’s highest law better than Adler, president of The Alturas Institute, an Idaho-based nonprofit organization that works to promote the Constitution, along with gender equality and civic education.
It’s why he shudders at much of what he sees in today’s America. Many of us do.
What’s frightening is not all of us do.
Our general lack of knowledge and understanding of the Constitution, undoubtedly, is part of the disconnect. The other part: Politics has become something of a religion for too many.
The combination of those two pieces is the only logical explanation as to why roughly half the country stands with Donald Trump in his quest to regain presidential power. The front-running 2024 Republican nominee, despite being hit this year with four criminal indictments totaling 91 felony charges, once called for “the termination of all rules ... even those found in the Constitution” as he rambled falsehoods about the 2020 election on social media.
“That’s scary, because there is no precedent for any president, sitting or former, to have such power,” Adler said. “It’s poppycock, of course, but it’s not anything to laugh about because he’s deadly serious.”
A few days later, Trump attempted to shift the blame (what else?) to the “Fake News,” and that was apparently good enough for the millions of Americans who plan to vote for him again — and, at least in some cases, whether he’s in jail or not. He’s the “law and order” candidate, after all, they’ll tell you.
What? How?
It must only make sense in the mind of one who has entered into the Church of MAGA Republican. (To be fair, there’s also the Church of Liberal Democrat, which has millions of members in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and other spiraling metropolitan cities who don’t seem interested in holding their elected leaders accountable for rampant crime, rising homelessness and an out-of-control cost of living.)
In a 2021 podcast, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a commonsense Republican, succinctly explained the phenomenon: “We may not have any real friends, and we may not know our neighbors, but at least we can hate the same people on Facebook. And that’s bringing people together in this new type of religion.”
Those are the folks who get what they crave from Trump — not the Constitution: The stoking of fear, the belittling of others, the rehashing of grievances to stir anger, the profanities. It’s theatrics. They don’t want to be bored by our Founding Fathers, they’re just here for the show.
Grabbing women by the … That was deemed OK years ago by half the country, of course. Why? Because Trump is their religion and they were entertained by it.
Why else would we be OK with a Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who not only embraced Trump’s election delusions but blatantly attempted to overturn the 2020 results by taking the lead in a lawsuit that was almost immediately dismissed by the Supreme Court of the United States for lack of evidence?
Johnson, who will be tasked with certifying the winner of the next presidential election (assuming far-right GOP legislators don’t tire of him, too), voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s victory over Trump — even after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
But “MAGA Mike” is one of us, a patriot standing up for country, they’ll tell you.
Is that how we now describe constitutional attorneys who bring cases in opposition to the Constitution without sufficient evidence?
We’ve seen it closer to home, too. More than 101,000 Idahoans voted for Ammon Bundy, a man with zero qualifications and full disregard for the law, in the 2022 gubernatorial election. But Bundy carries a pocket Constitution, so he must be one of the good guys, right?
The Constitution can’t be used as a prop if the electorate knows enough about it. We don’t. It can’t be cherry-picked for personal gain if the electorate is wise to it. We aren’t.
“In a democracy, education should cure our ills,” Adler said. “Truth, evidence and facts should govern reasonable conversation … but too many people don’t show interest in facts and evidence and the truth. How do we deal with that? That’s a big problem.
“Somehow, we have to teach facts,” he added. “If you don’t defend democracy at a time when it needs defense, once it’s lost, how would you ever regain it?”
A sobering question.
It will take courage and candor to keep what we have, as imperfect as it is. The alternative is, what, another civil war?
At some point near the end of the Civil War of the 1860s, President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward is credited with this quote: “There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.”
How much do we have to spare now?
