Is the Constitution Alive or Dead?

As Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection states, organisms must adapt to survive or else they will perish. The Constitution has survived for more than 200 years because of several necessary modifications. To this day, the Constitution is very much alive because it continues to shape the country’s changing needs and circumstances.

Some constitutional issues, such as a suitable balance of authority between the state and federal governments, remain as unsettled as they were when the Constitution was originally written. Today’s government must also adapt and interpret the Constitution to confront issues never anticipated by the founding fathers.

Sometimes political problems develop that seem impossible to tackle without constitutional change. These political issues, such as the campaign finance reform, are not easily resolved and remain continuing sources of controversy.

When presidents appoint new members to the Supreme Court, the change in structure of the Court sometimes leads to a dramatic turn in constitutional interpretation. For more than a century, the Court consistently maintained the supremacy of the federal government over the states. However in recent cases, the federal government’s authority has been limited to powers directly granted in the Constitution. The states hold powers assigned to them as well as any powers not mentioned in the Constitution, except those directly prohibited. This may ultimately lead to a new definition of federalism.

In A Lasting Document from 1988 Collier’s Year Book, political science professor Richard H. Leach discusses how the Constitution remains a living document more than 200 years later and shows no signs yet of being replaced.

As Donald Lutz, a scholar of the Constitution, points out, the document drafted in 1787 was no more than ‘an incomplete text.’ The status of blacks, the situation of native Americans, uncertainty about illegal aliens and about the rights of the accused, the role of religion in politics—the failures to address these and other controversial issues, says Lutz, are ‘reflections of the Constitution's incompleteness.’

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. [Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court] similarly stated, “When we are dealing with … a constituent act, like the Constitution of the United States, we must realize that [the framers] … called into life as being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them … to hope that they had created an organism [that would survive and develop].”

The Constitution was only to be “the foundation of the more perfect union it sought to establish.” The signing and ratification of the document did not—and were not intended to—end the writing of it. The Constitution’s development has continued since 1787 and will continue to be modified and enforced in the future.

Leach makes a good point by mentioning that the very nature of the document helped give the Constitution strength and vitality. The framers managed to use general wording instead of specifics, which would have “stapled the Constitution firmly to the 18th century.”

Leach believes that it has been through the agencies of interpretation and amplification that the “breath of new life” has continually been given to the Constitution. Today, as a result of agents of change, the Constitution is quite different from what it was under the framers. To this day, the process of change still goes on.

Finally, Leach makes it clear that the framers, while leaving the Constitution they drafted incomplete, did not want to make the process of alteration too easy.

“How an instrument drafted to meet the needs and concerns of an agrarian country in crisis at the end of the 18th century can be adapted to undergird solutions to the problems of today's urban and technological society remains a difficult question.”


Works Cited:
A Lasting Document by Richard H. Leach
Source: 1988 Collier’s Year Book.

Lieberman, Jethro K. "Constitution of the United States." Microsoft® Student 2009. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008.