When I give presentations like the one I recently posted, addressing deficits in civic literacy and the extent of American ignorance of our constitutional system, I often include a statistic from a 2011 survey: only 36% of Americans can name the three branches of government. Audiences tend to gasp. Only 36%! How awful!
The annual Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey finds that:
More than half of Americans (53 percent) incorrectly think it is accurate to say that immigrants who are here illegally do not have any rights under the U.S. Constitution;
More than a third of those surveyed (37 percent) can’t name any of the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment;
Only a quarter of Americans (26 percent) can name all three branches of government.
When asked about rights protected by the First Amendment, most of those who could name at least one right connected the Amendment to Freedom of Speech. But naming a right obviously isn’t the same thing as understanding it: 39% of those respondents said they support allowing Congress to stop the news media from reporting on “any issue of national security” without government approval.
I’m sure Donald Trump believes that any reporting critical of him is an “issue of national security.” Definitions can be so pesky….
I know I sound like a broken record, but civic ignorance matters. It’s one thing to have different policy preferences and to engage in debates about the relative merits of those preferences; such debates can be illuminating and productive. Most of us have been in situations where we are “schooled” by a person arguing for a different approach to an issue; sometimes, we’re introduced to information we didn’t have, other times to arguments we haven’t considered. Even if we don’t change our own preferences, we appreciate where others are coming from.
However, when one party to a political argument is clearly ignorant of the most basic premises of American government, we don’t consider that person’s point of view legitimate. Those who know better will discount the person, and any organization he or she might represent, in the future.
The problem is, too few of us know better; as a result, we can often be persuaded by arguments that a civically-literate person would recognize as specious.
When Americans don’t know squat about their government, democracy doesn’t work. Voters don’t have the tools to evaluate candidates’ platforms or assess their fitness for office. They can’t hold public officials accountable, because they don’t know what those officials are supposed to be accountable to.
Activists, candidates and office holders who don’t know what they’re talking about ought to be marginalized for that reason– but as we have seen, when Americans dismiss knowledge and expertise as “elitist,” even profound and obvious ignorance is no longer an electoral handicap. Today, too many Americans don’t vote for the person they consider most knowledgable and thoughtful; they vote for the demagogue who is most closely channeling their bigotries.
We are about to discover that the old adage was wrong: what you don’t know can hurt you.
This year, I was asked to give a Constitution Day lecture at Xavier University. This is what I said. (Warning: this is long, and I’ve said a lot of it before…)
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Does Civic Ignorance Really Matter?
The title of this talk is a question: does civic ignorance matter? It will not come as a surprise to you that I think it does—that I believe the consequences of living in a system you don’t understand are negative not just for the health and stability of America’s democratic institutions, but for individuals. After all, if you don’t know how your government works, or who does what, you are at a decided disadvantage when you need to negotiate the system. (If you take your zoning problem to your Congressman, or your Social Security problem to your Mayor, you’re going to waste a lot of time.)
Today, however, I want to focus on the ways in which low civic literacy harms the nation, and talk a bit about what you need to know in order to be an informed voter or even better, an involved civic activist.
Let me begin with an observation. What we call “political culture”–including the public conversations that citizens have with each other about the rules we live by– is the most toxic it has been in my lifetime. And in case you didn’t notice, I’m old. There are lots of theories about what has led us to this rather unfortunate place—from partisan gerrymandering and residential sorting to increasing tribalism to fear generated by rapid social change—and during Q and A, we can talk about the different ways those elements and others contribute to the political nastiness we see all around us. But I want to begin our conversation by considering a different villain.
I want to suggest that our current inability to engage in productive civic conversation is largely an outgrowth of declining trust in our social and political institutions—primarily, although certainly not exclusively, our government. Restoring that trust is critically important if we are to make our democracy work—but in order to trust government, we have to understand what it is and isn’t supposed to do—we have to understand how the people we elect are supposed to behave. We need a common, basic understanding of what our particular Constitutional system requires.
Think about it: if I say this podium is a table, and you say no, it’s a chair, we aren’t going to have a very productive discussion about its use—for that matter, we’re each likely to think the other person is nuts. We’re certainly not going to trust his or her other observations.
Now, let me be clear: there are plenty of gray areas in constitutional law—plenty of situations where informed people of good will can come to different conclusions about what the Constitution requires. But by and large, those aren’t the things Americans are arguing about, and they aren’t the things I’ll be talking about today.
I study how Constitutional values apply within our increasingly diverse culture, the ways in which constitutional principles connect people who have very different backgrounds and beliefs and make us all Americans. That research has convinced me that widespread civic literacy—by which I mean an accurate, basic understanding of the history and philosophy of our country—is absolutely critical to our continued ability to talk to each other and to our ability to function as Americans, rather than as members of disconnected tribes competing for power and advantage. My research has also convinced me that the civic knowledge we need is in very short supply.
Let me share a story that may illustrate my concern. When I teach Law and Public Affairs, I begin with the structure—the architecture–of our particular legal framework, how that framework limits what laws we can pass, and how “original intent” guides the application of Constitutional principles to current conflicts. I usually ask students something like “What do you suppose James Madison thought about porn on the internet?” Usually, they’ll laugh and then we discuss how the Founders’ beliefs about freedom of expression should guide today’s courts when they are faced with efforts to censor communication mediums the founders could never have imagined. But a few years ago, when I asked a college junior that question, she looked at me blankly and asked “Who’s James Madison?”
Now, it’s tempting to dismiss this as anecdotal, to consider that student an outlier–but let me share with you just a tiny fraction of available research. For several years, around Constitution Day, the Annenberg Center has conducted surveys measuring what the public knows about the Constitution. This year, more than a third of those surveyed (37 percent) couldn’t name a single one of the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, and only 26 percent could name all three branches of government. That is actually down from 2011, when a still-pathetic 36% could name them.
A few years ago, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs asked high school students in that state some basic questions about American government. Here are just a few of those questions, and the percentages of students who answered them correctly:
What is the supreme law of the land? 28%
What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution? 26%
What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress? 27%
How many justices are there on the Supreme Court? 10%
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? 14%
What are the two major political parties in the United States? 43%
Who was the first President of the United States? 23%
Other research tells us that fewer than half of 12th graders can describe the meaning of federalism. Only 35% of teenagers can correctly identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. It goes on and on–there’s much more data, all depressing.
And it matters.
If you think about it, the choices originally made in the design of our Constitution have shaped America’s culture. Those choices have shaped our beliefs about personal liberty, and our conceptions of human rights. They have framed the way we allocate social duties among governmental, nonprofit and private actors. In short, those initial Constitutional choices created a distinctively American worldview. We don’t have to agree with all of those choices, but if we don’t understand what they were, or why they were made, or how they make America distinctive, we can’t fully understand the world we live in.
Constitutions are expressions of political theory, efforts to address the most basic question of any society—how should people live together? What should the rules be, how should they be made, who should get to make them and how should they be enforced?
In America, for the first time, citizenship wasn’t based upon geography, ethnicity or conquest, but on an Idea, a theory of social organization, what Enlightenment philosopher John Locke called a “social contract” and journalist Todd Gitlin has called a “covenant.” The most revolutionary element of the American Idea was that it based citizenship on behavior rather than identity—on how you act rather than who you are.
That American Idea reflected certain assumptions about human nature and accordingly, privileged certain values—values that need to be more explicitly recognized, discussed and understood, because they provide the common ground for our citizenship and they define our public morality.
Now, obviously, the founders of this nation didn’t all speak with one voice, or embrace a single worldview. All of our governing documents were the result of passionate argument, negotiation and eventual compromise. And as remarkable as the founders’ achievement was, as enduring as the bulk of their work has proven to be, we all recognize that the system they established wasn’t perfect, nor was it sufficient for all time.
Take that issue of “original intent.” There are those who believe that the role of the courts is to look only at the world the founders inhabited in order to understand what they intended, and to apply the rules as they would have been applied in that world. Such a view of the judicial function arguably misreads both history and the founders’ expressed intent. In any event, it’s impossible. We can’t think like people who lived in 1787. And whose “original intent” are we supposed to apply? John Marshall’s? Thomas Jefferson’s? James Madison’s?
More to the point, constitutions are by definition statements of basic principles to be applied to fact situations which may or may not be foreseeable at the time the principles are endorsed. Our inquiry, properly understood, must be to identify the principle or value the founders wanted to protect, and protect it to the best of our abilities in a rapidly changing world. The question isn’t: What did James Madison say about pornography on the internet? The question is: how do we apply this principle James Madison enunciated –the importance of protecting citizens’ communication from government censorship—to forms of communication Madison could never have imagined?
The great debates between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists were about the proper role of government. We are still having that debate. We have enlarged our notion of citizenship since the constitutional convention to include women, former slaves and non-landowners, but the framework remains the same. The overarching issue is where to strike the balance between government power and individual liberty.
The issue, in other words, is: who decides? Who decides what book you read, what prayer you say, who you marry, whether you procreate, how you use your property? Who decides when the state may justifiably deprive you of liberty? How do we balance government’s duty to exercise authority and enforce order against the individual’s right to be secure in his person and free in his conscience? The founders answered that question by carving out, in the Bill of Rights, things the government was forbidden to do.
As I tell my students, the Bill of Rights does not give us rights. The founders believed we have “natural rights” by virtue of being human; the Bill of Rights was meant to keep government—not your boss or your mother– from infringing upon those natural rights.
Today, we have groups on the political right who “know best” what books we should read, what prayers we should say, and who we should be permitted to love. We see groups on the political left shutting down speech with which they disagree, and advocating censorship of materials they find offensive. Both groups want to use the power of government to impose “goodness” on the rest of us. The problem is, they want to be the ones who get to define goodness. If they had even a rudimentary civic education, they would know that the Constitution absolutely prohibits them from doing so. In our system, individuals have the right to make their own political and moral decisions, even when lots of other people believe those decisions are wrong.
The definition of individual liberty that emerged from the philosophical and scientific period we call the Enlightenment—the definition that was embraced by America’s Founders– is sometimes called the Libertarian Principle: it’s the principle that individuals have the right to make their own moral and personal choices—the right to “do their own thing”—until and unless they harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as they are willing to give an equal liberty to others.
Now, we can argue about what constitutes harm, and when the majority, acting through government, is entitled to step in and keep people from doing something. But we can’t take the position that “Freedom is for me, but not for you.”
When people are ignorant of constitutional history, when they fail to understand that the central constitutional issue is the use and abuse of the power of government, they confuse support for constitutional rights with support for unpopular uses of those rights. The issue is who decides what books you read—not the merits of the books you choose. You get to decide what God you worship, or whether you worship at all; government doesn’t get to make that decision for you.
The central issue for civil libertarians is the power of government—or popular majorities working through government—to compel individual behaviors or infringe personal liberties. When people don’t understand that, when they don’t understand when government can properly impose rules and when it can’t, when they don’t understand the most basic premises of our legal system, our public discourse is impoverished and ultimately unproductive. We’re back to arguing whether this podium is a table or a chair.
Governments are human enterprises, and like all human enterprises, they will have their ups and downs. In the United States, however, the consequences of the “down” periods are potentially more serious than in more homogeneous nations, precisely because this is a country based upon covenant, upon an idea. Americans do not share a single ethnicity, religion or race. Culture warriors to the contrary, we never have. We don’t share a comprehensive worldview. What we do share is a set of values, a set of democratic institutions and cultural norms, a legal system that emphasizes the importance of fair processes–and when we don’t trust that our elected officials are obeying those norms, when we suspect that they are distorting and undermining the underlying mechanics of democratic decision-making, our government doesn’t function properly. Right now, America is facing some very troubling attacks on essential democratic institutions, and those attacks are undermining public trust in government.
Let’s begin with the assault on the most basic premise of self-government in democratic systems: the value of your vote. There are a number of ways politicians in both parties suppress voter turnout, but the single greatest threat to the value of your vote is gerrymandering.
Today, thanks to partisan redistricting, what we call gerrymandering, only one out of twenty Americans lives in a genuinely competitive Congressional District.
Think about that for a minute.
America has become a country where—as Common Cause puts it—legislators are choosing their voters rather than the other way around.
You probably know how gerrymandering works; after each census, state legislatures draw new legislative and Congressional districts to “even up” the number of voters in each district. The party that controls the legislature gets to control the process, and its goal is to draw as many “safe” seats as possible–more for the party in power, of course, but also for the minority party, because in order to keep control, the winners need to cram as many of the losers into as few districts as possible, and those districts are also safe. Legislators of both parties have engaged in this effort since the time of Vice-President Gerry, for whom the process is named –and he signed the Declaration of Independence! —but it was pretty hit or miss until computers came along to make the process far, far more precise.
Neighborhoods, cities, towns–even precincts–are evaluated solely on the basis of voting history, and then broken up to meet the political needs of mapmakers. Numbers are what drive the results–not compactness of districts, not communities of interest, and certainly not democratic competitiveness. (I will point out that the numbers used for these calculations are previous votes—if we could get a significant number of people who haven’t been voting to the polls, there would be far fewer safe seats.)
Some of the results of this partisan process are obvious:
Safe districts create unresponsive legislators. If you are guaranteed victory every election, it is hard to be motivated and interested, easy to become lazy and arrogant. Safe seats allow politicians to scuttle popular measures without fear of retribution.
These are a few of the more obvious effects of gerrymandering, and they are all worrisome. But there are two other consequences that deserve special attention, because they undermine government legitimacy and are inconsistent with democratic self-government.
First of all, lack of competitiveness breeds voter apathy and reduced political participation. Why get involved when the result is foreordained? Why donate to a sure loser? For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence for some reason, why donate to a sure winner? Why volunteer or vote?
It isn’t only voters who lack incentives for participation: it is very difficult to recruit credible candidates to run on the ticket of the “sure loser” party. As a result, in many of these races, even when there are competing candidates on the general election ballot, the reality is usually a “choice” between a heavily favored incumbent and a marginal candidate or sacrificial lamb who offers no genuine challenge. And in increasing numbers of statehouse districts, the incumbent or his chosen successor is unopposed even by a token candidate. Of the 100 seats in the Indiana House last November, all of which were on the ballot, 32 candidates ran unopposed.
We hear a lot about voter apathy, as if it were a moral deficiency. Allow me to suggest that it may be a highly rational response to noncompetitive politics. Watch those same “apathetic” folks at a local zoning hearing when a liquor store wants to move in down the street! Rational people save their efforts for places where those efforts can actually make a difference, and thanks to the increasing lack of electoral competitiveness, those places often do not include the voting booth.
Second, and even more pernicious, gerrymandering has contributed to the polarization of American politics, and our current toxic political discourse. When a district is safe for one party, the only realistic way to oppose an incumbent is in the primary–and that almost always means that the challenge will come from the “flank” or extreme. When the primary is effectively the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, who also tend to be the most ideological voters. So Republican incumbents will be challenged by the Right and Democratic incumbents will be attacked from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they leave a powerful incentive for the incumbent to toe the line– to placate the most extreme elements of the party. Instead of the system working as intended, with both parties nominating folks they think will be most likely to attract support from a broad constituency, we get nominees who have been chosen by the most extreme voters on each side. Then we wonder why they can’t compromise and get the people’s business done!
Until and unless we eliminate gerrymandering, whoever we send to Washington will be stymied by the gridlock that is an inevitable consequence of the current system. And–perhaps even worse– reduced voter participation has significant implications for the legitimacy of government action. Is a Representative truly representative when he/she is elected by 10% or 20% of the eligible voters in the district?
This year, the United States Supreme Court will hear an enormously important case: Gill v.Whitford. The Court has previously ruled racial gerrymandering—districts purposely drawn to disenfranchise members of minority groups—unconstitutional, but it has yet to strike down partisan gerrymandering, because the Justices haven’t had a test, a formula that they could rely on to show that districts were intentionally drawn to disadvantage the other party. A couple of professors have developed such a test, and in a Wisconsin case, a three-judge federal panel applied that test, ruled that the maps were an unconstitutional gerrymander, and ordered the Wisconsin Legislature to redraw them.
If the Supreme Court agrees with that three-judge panel, we may finally have a tool to force State Legislatures to reform their redistricting practices. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that it will be easy; elected officials aren’t going to cheerfully relinquish the tools that have given them power. It will take civic pressure, political will and probably additional litigation. But eventually, we might live in a country where more than one in twenty Americans has an actual legislative choice at the ballot box.
Gerrymandering is what we call a systemic issue, and we Americans aren’t very good at recognizing the importance of systems. We’ve recently become more aware of the way the Electoral College works, but only because in two of the last four elections, the person who won the Presidency lost the popular vote. In the wake of Citizens United, people are beginning to understand how special interests with lots of money can undermine democracy. And in the wake of Charlottesville, we can see what happens when we fail to address and reject the systemic racism that too many people have accommodated for too many years.
In a country that celebrates individual rights and respects individual liberty, there will always be dissent, differences of opinion, and struggles for power. But there are different kinds of discord, and different kinds of power struggles, and they aren’t all equal. When we argue from within a common understanding of what I call the constitutional culture—when we argue about the proper application of the American Idea to new situations or to previously marginalized populations—we strengthen our bonds as Americans, and learn how to bridge our differences. When we allow powerful partisans to rewrite our history, pervert our basic institutions, and distort the rule of law, we undermine the American Idea and erode the trust needed to make our democratic institutions work.
So—to answer the question I asked at the beginning of this talk, civic ignorance matters. When we don’t understand how our systems are supposed to work, we don’t recognize when they have become corrupted, and we can’t fix our problems. Without that shared ground—without that common understanding of our nation’s foundations and commitments– we can have no dialogue, reach no agreement. Without it, we can’t repair our broken government.
My generation has failed yours. It will be up to you and your peers to reclaim, revitalize and restore the American Idea—to make this the country we like to believe it is: one nation, with liberty and equal justice for everyone.
We Americans are a cantankerous and argumentative lot. We hold vastly different political philosophies and policy preferences, and we increasingly inhabit alternate realities. Partisans routinely attack elected officials—especially Presidents—who don’t share their preferences or otherwise meet their expectations.
Politics as usual. Unpleasant and often unfair, but—hysteria and hyperbole notwithstanding– usually not a threat to the future of the republic. Usually.
We are beginning to understand that Donald Trump does pose such a threat.
In the wake of Trump’s moral equivocations following Charlottesville, critics on both the left and right characterized his refusal to distinguish between the “fine people” among the Nazis and KKK and the “fine people” among the protestors as an assault on core American values. His subsequent, stunning decision to pardon rogue sheriff Joe Arpaio has been described, accurately, as an assault on the rule of law.
It’s worth considering what, exactly, is at stake.
Whatever our beliefs about “American exceptionalism,” the founding of this country was genuinely exceptional—defined as dramatically different from what had gone before—in one incredibly important respect: for the first time, citizenship was made dependent upon behavior rather than identity. In the Old World, countries had been created by conquest, or as expressions of ethnic or religious solidarity. As a result, the rights of individuals were dependent upon their identities, the status of their particular “tribes” in the relevant order. (Jews, for example, rarely enjoyed the same rights as Christians, even in countries that refrained from oppressing them.)
Your rights vis a vis your government depended upon who you were—your religion, your social class, your status as conqueror or conquered.
The new United States took a different approach to citizenship. Whatever the social realities, whatever the disabilities imposed by the laws of the various states, anyone (okay, any white male) born or naturalized here was equally a citizen. We look back now at the exclusion of blacks and women and our treatment of Native Americans as shameful departures from that approach, and they were, but we sometimes fail to appreciate how novel the approach itself was at that time in history.
All of our core American values—individual rights, civic equality, due process of law—flow from the principle that government must not facilitate tribalism, must not treat people differently based upon their ethnicity or religion or other marker of identity. Eventually (and for many people, reluctantly) we extended that principle to gender, skin color and sexual orientation.
Racism is a rejection of that civic equality. Signaling that government officials will not be punished for flagrantly violating that foundational principle so long as the disobedience advances the interests of the President, fatally undermines it.
Admittedly, America’s history is filled with disgraceful episodes in which we have failed to live up to the principles we profess. In many parts of the country, communities still grapple with bitter divisions based upon tribal affiliations—race, religion and increasingly, partisanship.
When our leaders have understood the foundations of American citizenship, when they have reminded us that what makes us Americans is allegiance to core American values—not the color of our skin, not the prayers we say, not who we love—we emerge stronger from these periods of unrest. When they speak to the “better angels of our nature,” most of those “better angels” respond.
When our leaders are morally bankrupt, all bets are off. We’re not all Americans any more, we’re just a collection of warring tribes, some favored by those in power, some not.
As the old saying goes: elections have consequences.
There are multiple reasons to be horrified by Trump’s pre-emptive pardon of the despicable Joe Arpaio.
There’s his usual display of legal and constitutional ignorance: By disdaining the process for determining the propriety of issuing a Presidential pardon and by displaying, once again, contempt for the Separation of Powers that is a foundation of our legal system, Trump has again illustrated that he is the perfect Dunning-Krueger model–an ignoramus who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
Traditionally, Presidential pardons are issued after a person has served some part of his sentence and shown remorse, or alternatively, to correct a miscarriage of justice. There’s a thorough vetting process by the justice department to assess these factors. Trump, of course, ignored these criteria.
If that were the extent of the damage, this typically Trumpian fit of pique would simply be another entry in the extensive list of “reasons we shouldn’t elect people who don’t know what government is or does.” But it’s actually the least significant of the issues involved.
To understand those issues, you need to know some things about Arpaio. From the Guardian, we learn
Arpaio, the self-styled “toughest sheriff” in America, systematically abused his powers during his two decades in office before being voted out last November. Most notoriously, Arpaio commanded his police to detain people solely on the suspicion that they were illegal immigrants, even in cases where the “suspects” had violated no state law. This amounted to a blanket invitation to terrorize the domestic population through egregious practices of racial-profiling.
In 2011, a federal district court judge, a Republican appointee, ordered Arpaio to stop a practice that constituted a flagrant violation of constitutional rights. Rather than submit to the federal court order, Arpaio acted in open defiance, placing himself above the federal judiciary and the rule of law. Last month, he was properly convicted of criminal contempt for his defiance. He faced a maximum of six months in jail, but all that is now moot thanks to the president’s pardon.
From the Boston Globe, we learn this behavior was nothing new.
In 1997, a few years after Arpaio assumed office, the US Department of Justice sued him after an investigation found rampant mistreatment of inmates in his jails and a pattern of excessive force by the sheriff’s staff. Officers hog-tied inmates and used stun guns on them while they were handcuffed or in restraining chairs. The lawsuit was dismissed in a settlement, but Arpaio’s methods of abuse didn’t change at all.
As a result, many prisoners died at an alarming rate without explanation. According to the Phoenix New Times, taxpayers in Maricopa have paid more than $140 million to litigate and settle countless claims of brutality while Arpaio was sheriff.
By the mid-2000s, Arpaio had found another target to terrorize and criminalize: unauthorized immigrants (much like Trump did during the presidential campaign.) Arpaio became obsessed with enforcing federal immigration law, conducting workplace raids and immigration patrols where his staff stopped people who looked Hispanic and arrested those who were illegally in the country.
This history is well known, both to the populations Arpaio targeted and to the White Supremacists, neo-Nazis and Klan members who supported his behaviors. Trump’s pardon sent a clear message to both groups– especially to the bigots in his base who might have worried about Trump’s continued commitment to their “cause” in the wake of Bannon’s departure from the White House.
This pardon goes well beyond the “dog whistles” and “winks” employed by many Republicans to let bigots know they remain welcome in the Grand Old Party. It is a flat-out endorsement of racism, and I’m sure it comforted Trump’s White Nationalist supporters.
The spectacle of a United States President openly siding with enemies of everything America purports to stand for is nauseating, but even that is not the worst implication of this pardon.
Allow me to explain.
The Bill of Rights protects individual rights against government infringement. When a government agent–that is, someone acting on behalf of the government–violates the constitutional rights of an individual, both that agent and the government are answerable for that infringement. Our legal system punishes people who misuse the power of the state.
This pardon voids that guarantee of accountability. It guts the rule of law that anchors our constitutional system. It is telling government officials who abuse their authority that this President has their back, that they won’t be held to account for their misconduct–so long as their misconduct is consistent with the President’s own “priorities” and interests.
That’s how a constitutional democracy becomes an autocracy.
If this isn’t a constitutional crisis, I don’t know what is.
I was asked to speak to participants in the local OASIS program about the interaction of the Constitution with municipal government, and about my experiences during the Hudnut administration. I decided to share it, both as a needed vacation from Trumpism and as a reminder that there used to be decent politicians in both parties…
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When constitutional issues arise, most of us think of the federal government, and especially the Supreme Court. But the Constitution and the Bill of Rights apply to all levels of government, and are enforced by both state and federal courts—it’s what we mean when we talk about “the law of the land.”
There are differences in jurisdiction, of course—we have a federalist system, which means that some areas of the law are left to state and local governments—but those areas have to be consistent with the national Constitution. I am constantly amazed at how many people don’t know anything about federalism—that division of authority between the federal government and state and local governments—or about Separation of Powers or other basic aspects of America’s legal structure.
I really encountered this lack of “civic literacy” when I was at the ACLU. The ACLU defends the Bill of Rights, which is essentially a list of things that government can’t do. The Bill of Rights answers the question: who decides? Who decides what prayer you say, what political beliefs you hold, what books you read? In the United States, citizens get to make those sorts of decisions for ourselves, free of government interference.
Since the Bill of Rights only limits what government can do, the ACLU only sues government. Not only did I discover that a lot of people don’t know that the Bill of Rights only restrains government, I also discovered that a lot of people don’t know what government is.
Originally, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. It wasn’t until passage of the 14th Amendment that states were required to extend the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship to their own residents. After the 14th Amendment was ratified, there was a series of decisions in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights also limited the authority of state and local government officials.
Evidently, a lot of people haven’t encountered the 14th Amendment: When I was Corporation Counsel, I issued an opinion that the 1st Amendment prohibited the City from doing something—I no longer recall what—and someone wrote an angry letter to the editor that began, “I read the First Amendment, and it says Congress shall make no law…” That’s an excellent example of why just reading the text of the Constitution—especially the text of only one amendment—won’t give you the whole story.
Speaking of stories…I was asked to share some of the highlights—and low points—of my three- year stint as Corporation Counsel (chief lawyer) of the City of Indianapolis, with a focus on how the Constitution and Bill of Rights affect municipal governments.
I was appointed Corporation Counsel by Mayor Bill Hudnut in 1977. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first woman to hold that position in a major metropolitan area, and my first encounter with a constitutional issue was a lesson in both sexism and freedom of the press: Indianapolis still had two newspapers then, and the evening News featured a “Gossip” box on the front page. When my appointment was announced, the Gossip box “item” was something along the lines of: a high-ranking official has appointed his most recent honey to an important position in City Hall. No names, but it wasn’t hard to figure out who they were talking about. (After all, as one newspaper had described me, I was a “divorcee.” We don’t hear that word much these days, fortunately…sounds pretty racy.)
On my second day on the job, I got a call from the U.S. Justice Department. At the time, the City was being sued for a history of race and gender discrimination in the police and fire departments; we ultimately entered into a consent decree, because Mayor Hudnut recognized that history and wanted to correct it. But the suit had just been filed a few months before the call from the Justice Department lawyer. He asked for Dave Frick, my predecessor, who had become Deputy Mayor. Dave’s Secretary explained that he was no longer Corporation Counsel and asked him if he would like to be transferred to the new Corporation Counsel. He said yes—and I picked up the phone and said “May I help you?” He said, “Yes, I’m holding for the new Corporation Counsel.” This was 1977, and there weren’t many women lawyers then; he clearly thought he was talking to a secretary. After a pause, I said “This is the new Corporation Counsel.” He was suitably embarrassed. (On the other hand, he was really easy to deal with after that.)
Within my first couple of months on the job, I confronted a pretty classic First Amendment Religious Liberty issue. (The First Amendment has two religion clauses: the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause; together, they mandate governmental neutrality in matters of religion). For many years, the City had erected a Nativity scene on Monument Circle at Christmas. Monument Circle was—and is—publicly owned. Erecting a religious display on government property is a violation of the Establishment Clause; it is an endorsement of religion—in this case, the Christian religion. The jurisprudence was very clear, and when the City was threatened with a lawsuit, I advised Hudnut that we would lose such a suit if it were to be brought.
Unlike so many of today’s politicians, Hudnut did not use the conflict as an excuse to grandstand. He could have made points with people who didn’t understand the Constitution by “defending” the display; instead, he used the incident as an opportunity to educate. We sold the nativity scene to the Episcopal Church across the street and they displayed it, still on the Circle, where it was equally prominent and totally Constitutional.
Mayor Hudnut—who had been a Presbyterian Minister before he was elected—took all kinds of heat for “attacking Christianity.”
I think this incident was the first time I realized that some people want their religious symbols on public property because they want government to endorse their particular beliefs. It didn’t matter to these folks that the nativity scene was still on the Circle, still easily viewed: they wanted the City to send a message that their beliefs were favored, that their religion made them “real Americans,” and that people who hold different beliefs should be considered second-class citizens. That message, of course, is precisely what the Establishment Clause forbids.
One of the things that the City’s legal department does is advise committees of the City-County Council when legal questions arise. I still vividly remember being asked to testify about a proposed ordinance to ban Rock concerts from City parks. A local Reverend had persuaded his City-County Counselor to introduce the ordinance, which as I recall was pretty explicit about the reason, which was to protect Indianapolis’ citizens from immoral lyrics. It wasn’t concerns about traffic or noise or other issues that are entirely appropriate for City government to consider.
This minister had brought a busload of his church members with him to this particular committee meeting, and they sat in the public hearing room waving small American flags. It was surreal.
I testified that the ordinance as written would violate the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause. Freedom of speech requires government to be what lawyers call “content neutral:” government can restrict the time, place and manner of communications, to a degree, but it can’t pick and choose what messages get exchanged. I explained to the Committee (and the audience) that there were a number of things the City could constitutionally control—traffic, noise, sanitation—but that the Constitution would not allow censorship of certain kinds of music based upon disapproval of the messages being conveyed by the lyrics.
When I completed my testimony and turned to leave, the Pastor rose from his seat and yelled at me, “My bible is more important than your Constitution.” (I thought it was interesting that the bible was his and the Constitution was mine…)
Most of the Constitutional issues I dealt with at the City were (fortunately) a lot less “exciting” than that encounter. For example, during my three years in City Hall, City Legal defended a number of what lawyers call Section 1983 cases. Section 1983 is a provision of federal law that allows people to recover attorney’s fees if they win a lawsuit alleging that someone acting on behalf of City government violated their constitutional rights. It’s a very important safeguard, because many—probably most—people whose rights have been violated can’t afford a lawyer. If lawyers know that they will be paid by the city if they are successful, in other words, if they can prove that the City really did violate their clients’ rights, they are more likely to take meritorious cases—and more likely to decline sure losers.
As I noted previously, Mayor Bill, as we called him, was a minister, and sometimes his minister side pressured his Mayor side. For example, he really wanted to close down bookstores that sold sexually explicit books and magazines, and periodically he would suggest some creative—but constitutionally dubious—ways of doing that. I like to think I kept him constitutionally compliant while I was there, but after I left, the City passed a truly bizarre ordinance that tried to sidestep the Free Speech provisions of the First Amendment by defining “pornography” as sex discrimination.
The most depressing thing I learned at the city and in my subsequent positions at ACLU and as a Professor of Law and Policy is how little people know about even the most basic provisions of America’s founding documents, our law and history. Some of you may have seen the story from this year’s 4th of July, when NPR tweeted out the Declaration of Independence, and got hundreds of angry emails from people who thought it was an attack on the President, or “communist propaganda.”
I don’t want to belabor this lack of civic literacy, but I do want to share some statistics that should concern all of us. A few years ago, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs asked high school seniors in that state some simple questions about government. Let me share a few of those questions and the percentages of students who answered them correctly:
What is the supreme law of the land? 28%
What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution? 26%
What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress? 27%
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? 14%
What are the two major political parties in the United States? 43%
We elect a U.S. senator for how many years? 11%
Who was the first President of the United States? 23%
Only 36 percent of Americans can name the three branches of government. Fewer than half of 12th graders can describe federalism. Only 35% can identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. Only five percent of high school seniors can identify or explain checks on presidential power.
America is the most diverse country on earth. What we have in common—what makes us Americans—is allegiance to a particular concept of law, a particular approach to self-government. When we don’t know what that approach is, or why our Founders crafted the system we have, we lose what holds us together, what makes us one nation.
To borrow a phrase from the Tweeter-in-Chief: that’s sad.
