Americans who have never lived elsewhere may take for granted the constitutional protections we enjoy.

But on this Constitution Day, Americans should understand that the U.S. Constitution is more than a list of rights like freedom of speech and due process. The Constitution framed and established a government that could be “administered by men over men” without an inherent tendency toward tyranny.

The Constitution vested the three branches with the necessary legislative, executive, and judicial powers for an effective government. But at the same time, it obliged the government to control itself, as James Madison discussed in Federalist 51. The founders embedded ideas like checks and balances, separation of powers, and federalism into the Constitution.

The drafters of the Constitution met at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, just over a decade after America first declared its independence from Britain. The purpose of the new Constitution would be to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

The document was masterfully conceived, remarkable given that kings, emperors, and other monarchs ruled nearly every nation in the world at the time.

The founders didn’t exactly have a clear model of an ideal government to follow. But providentially, the right people came together at the right time to conceive a constitutional republic such as ours.

The Constitution was written by men with long experience in self-government, having lived in colonies an ocean away from the seat of the British government.

These were men who feared tyranny, having only recently won independence from an overreaching king and Parliament. These were men who had grappled with the role of government and the relationship between the states and the national government, having languished for nearly a decade under the inadequate Articles of Confederation.  

And while no human document is perfect, the U.S. Constitution has stood the test of time—protecting Americans’ liberty and helping secure justice for nearly 240 years.

Today, though, America’s adherence to the Constitution has waned. Misguided lawmakers, activist judges, and presidents—like Woodrow Wilson and FDR—have empowered unelected bureaucrats in a bloated administrative state to regulate Americans in ways never envisioned by the founders. Today, far too much power is concentrated in Washington, D.C.

But even with such backsliding, the blessings of liberty remain far more abundant in America than in the rest of the world. The rule of law scarcely exists in countries like Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, or Venezuela. In authoritarian countries like China and Iran, laws can be made or bent at the whims of dictators and oligarchs.

In some countries, government derives authority not from a constitutional system but from force and violence. In other countries, constitutions empower the government at the expense of the people. Still others have constitutions that describe lofty principles, proclaim rights they fail to honor, or invent “human rights” that no government can guarantee without violating others’ more basic rights. Such constitutions aren’t worth the paper on which they’re written.

Or take even the United Kingdom.

The birthplace of the Magna Carta doesn’t have a single written constitution. Instead, it has a system of laws, conventions, and institutions developed over centuries. But a simple majority in the two houses of Parliament can overturn or replace any law—making the U.K.’s liberty and justice dependent on having the right government in place.

Sadly, the current British government, elected with only around a third of the vote, has no qualms about arresting people for engaging in speech it deems offensive, or for silently praying too close to an abortion clinic.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, of course, guarantees that Congress cannot pass laws that limit Americans’ rights of free speech and free exercise of religion—a guarantee that has since been extended to the states. Laws and regulations that violate this core constitutional principle have generally proven short-lived, as courts routinely overturn them as unconstitutional.

And as Madison explained, the primary control on the government is its dependence on the people. Americans prize their First Amendment rights, so violating the First Amendment is a bad electoral strategy.

But many Americans’ knowledge of the Constitution extends only to a handful of amendments in the Bill of Rights.

Most Americans—57%—have never read the Constitution (one of the shortest written constitutions in the world), let alone developed an understanding of its full scope. This limited civic knowledge puts 21st century Americans in a poor position to hold government officials accountable for overstepping the Constitution in less obvious ways.

The ten amendments that became the Bill of Rights were added three years after the Constitution was originally ratified. James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” who championed the Bill of Rights in the first session of Congress, had once been skeptical of the value of including a list of rights in the Constitution. He feared that including such a list might imply that any individual rights not listed were assigned to the federal government—a reversal of how Madison understood the Constitution.

In Madison’s view, the Constitution assigned specific and necessary powers to the federal government. Any powers it did not delegate to the federal government were reserved to the states or the people.

And so, the Ninth Amendment clarified that enumerating certain rights should not be construed as denying other rights, and the Tenth Amendment clarified that powers not delegated by the Constitution were reserved to the states and to the people. These last two amendments assuaged concerns that the Bill of Rights might be misconstrued as an exhaustive list.

But Americans must read and study the Constitution to understand the limits to the federal government’s powers and to effectively hold the government accountable.

For lawmakers and students of the Constitution, The Heritage Guide to the Constitution is an outstanding resource that includes explanations of each clause of the Constitution as envisioned by the Framers and applications in contemporary law. The new revised third edition is available for pre-order now.

They say knowledge is power, but in our constitutional republic, the people’s knowledge is essential to keeping centralized power in check.

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