{"id":15708,"date":"2015-09-17T13:11:07","date_gmt":"2015-09-17T17:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15708"},"modified":"2015-09-17T13:15:40","modified_gmt":"2015-09-17T17:15:40","slug":"qa-for-constitution-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15708","title":{"rendered":"Q&#038;A for Constitution Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s Constitution Day. Thanks to an amendment included at the behest of the late Robert Byrd in 2004, every educational institution that\u00a0receives federal money&#8211;from a kindergarten to a graduate school&#8211;must offer\u00a0programs on this day that\u00a0concern\u00a0the Constitution. Eight years ago, I <a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5526\">posed<\/a> some gently subversive questions that could be the basis of a discussion on Constitution Day. Here are my\u00a0questions again, with&#8211;for what they&#8217;re worth&#8211;my answers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>How, under our Constitution, can legislation be passed on the sole prerogative of one US Senator?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The\u00a0Constitution leaves it up to each house of\u00a0Congress to organize its\u00a0own procedures. (Article 1, sec. 2: &#8220;Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings.&#8221;) The Senate can basically construct\u00a0bills\u00a0any way it wants.<\/p>\n<p>There is no ideal way to legislate.\u00a0Any parliamentary\u00a0body faces a severe challenge in aggregating the opinions of its many members on the many topics that come before it. No legislature\u00a0can discuss and separately vote on everything. Still, the Senate&#8217;s rules give\u00a0an awful lot of power to individual members to insert provisions. I suspect the reason lies with\u00a0the Senate&#8217;s\u00a0filibuster rules, which make the passage of legislation extraordinarily difficult. To prevent even more filibusters than we actually have, Senators are allowed\u00a0to slip in special provisions they especially care about.<\/p>\n<p>Legislating this way is not &#8220;unconstitutional&#8221; in the sense of violating the text of the document. But\u00a0we could say that in the broader meaning of the\u00a0phrase &#8220;constitutional system,&#8221; our system\u00a0includes the rules of the US Senate, which are very problematic.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>How can Congress pass legislation without hearings or debate?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>See above. But this\u00a0second\u00a0question underlines a particular\u00a0disadvantage of the Senate&#8217;s rules: many decisions get no deliberation whatsoever. No teachers were asked to testify about the pros and cons of a Constitution Day mandate. Again, no\u00a0process\u00a0is prefect, but the Senate&#8217;s procedures seem to neglect\u00a0the deliberative\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.constitution.org\/fed\/federa42.htm\">value<\/a>\u00a0that our constitutional order was meant to uphold:\u00a0&#8220;the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest.&#8221;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Is it a constructive and appropriate use of federal power to determine the content and timing of educational instruction?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Strong conservative constitutionalists will say that\u00a0Congress has no business in education at all, because education\u00a0is not among the enumerated powers of Article 1, Section 8. Students should learn and consider that argument. For my part, I think we long ago rightly settled that the Congress may raise taxes and spend the money on education and may put certain conditions on the funding. I would especially argue for a federal role in supporting education <em>for republican self-government<\/em>, on the ground that this is &#8220;necessary and proper&#8221; for the survival of our system.<\/p>\n<p>But that doesn&#8217;t mean that micromanagement from\u00a0Washington is wise. To pick a day&#8211;right at the beginning of the conventional academic year&#8211;when every school (k-20) must teach the Constitution is\u00a0a good example of\u00a0meddling. It&#8217;s unlikely to yield positive results. Conservatives make a valid point that needn&#8217;t be rooted in\u00a0an originalist reading of the Constitution: Congress\u00a0should generally avoid micromanaging, especially in an ad hoc way, because it is too distant from local concerns, too likely to make one size fit all, and too remote from accountability. Characteristically, when the\u00a0Senate passed a Constitution Day mandate, no one even dreamed of\u00a0empirically evaluating the impact&#8211;whereas a school district that tried such an\u00a0experiment might have to show that it was cost-effective and a &#8220;research-based best practice.&#8221; Congressional\u00a0micromanagement violates the spirit of the Constitution, even when\u00a0it passes legal muster.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I do think some good comes from\u00a0the Constitution Day mandate. It gives an annual boost to the wonderful organizations that provide materials, lesson plans, and professional development for civics, and it yields an annual crop of articles and social media about civic education.\u00a0Still, if I had to teach a lesson on\u00a0Constitution Day, it might be about how the legislation that launched it is <em>constitutional yet\u00a0also problematic<\/em>&#8211;so maybe we need some reform.<\/p>\n<p>See also\u00a0<a title=\"Permalink to liberals, conservatives, and love of the Constitution\" href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15563\" rel=\"bookmark\">liberals, conservatives, and love of the Constitution<\/a>;\u00a0<a title=\"Permalink to is our constitutional order doomed?\" href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14959\" rel=\"bookmark\">is our constitutional order doomed?<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a title=\"Permalink to constitutional piety\" href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=6115\" rel=\"bookmark\">constitutional piety<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s Constitution Day. Thanks to an amendment included at the behest of the late Robert Byrd in 2004, every educational institution that\u00a0receives federal money&#8211;from a kindergarten to a graduate school&#8211;must offer\u00a0programs on this day that\u00a0concern\u00a0the Constitution. Eight years ago, I posed some gently subversive questions that could be the basis of a discussion on Constitution [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15708"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15718,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15708\/revisions\/15718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}