A Document to Celebrate

The National Endowment for the Humanities has honored Prof. Forrest McDonald of the University of Alabama as its Jefferson lecturer for 1987, an honor that also carries a $10,000 prize. McDonald, a constitutional scholar, is a man worth listening to.

The calling of a new federal constitutional convention would be a catastrophe, McDonald said during an interview while preparing for his lecture in Washington last week. “Certainly it would be a runaway,” he added, although he doubted that the required number of states ever would ratify changes proposed by such a convention.

The greatest pressure in recent years has been to call a convention to draft a balanced-budget amendment, which Congress consistently and properly has rejected. But all of the attention given to the Constitution this bicentennial year has spawned a variety of proposed changes. There also has been considerable talk about the relative perfection or imperfection of the Constitution as well as the “original intent” of the Framers vis-a-vis the Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court.

On the very day McDonald gave his address, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall questioned the document by noting that the Constitution granted most Americans a number of freedoms, but allowed slavery to continue. Asked about that, McDonald said that abolition of slavery “had simply not crossed many people’s intellectual or moral horizons” by 1787.

McDonald scoffed at the notion that modern Americans are more sophisticated and knowledgeable than their 18th-Century counterparts and could improve on the Constitution.

“To put it bluntly, it would be impossible in America today to assemble a group with anything near the combined experience, learning and wisdom that the 55 authors of the Constitution took with them to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787,” he said.

The Framers knew their work might have to be altered to fit changing times and they thus provided a means for amendment that has served the country well. The marvel is that the amendment process has been needed only 16 times since the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791, and one of the 16 was used to repeal one of the other 15, the Prohibition amendment.

Americans should celebrate the Constitution on this 200th anniversary, and learn more about it. The more they learn, the more likely they will appreciate the fact that tinkering with the Constitution will not solve whatever ails the nation in 1987.