You see what just happened? The sovereign power of the people to launch the country and create The Constitution flowed right into Congress and then you get in Article One, Section Eight, comprehensive vast powers that all of you know so well. Then right after that first sentence, the mission statement for America in the Constitution, what happens? Article One: the Congress is created, All legislative power herein are reserved to the Congress of the United States. Think about the Preamble, those first three words pregnant with such meaning: “We the People” and then all of the purposes of our government put into that one action-packed sentence: “We the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and preserve to ourselves and our posterity, the blessings of liberty” do hereby ordain and Establish. Tom Paine said “an asylum for humanity” where people would come. However flawed the Founders were as men in their times, they inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution all the beautiful principles that we needed to open America up to successive waves of political struggle and constitutional change and transformation in the country so we really would become something much more like Lincoln’s beautiful vision of government of the people, by the people and for the people–the world’s greatest multiracial, multi-religious, multi-ethnic constitutional democracy, the envy of the world. Lincoln knew that but he was struggling to make the country better. When Lincoln said government of the people, by the people, and for the people and he harkened back to The Declaration of Independence when he said four score, seven years ago, he knew that wasn’t how we started. We were founded on the extraordinary principles of the inalienable rights of the people and the consent of the governed and the fundamental equality of all of us. For most of the history of the world, and that’s why America is such a miracle. He was speaking not long after the Republic was created, and he was trying to prove that point, that we would not allow it to perish from the Earth.įor most of history, the norm has been dictators, autocrats, bullies, despots, tyrants, cowards who take over our governments. Abraham Lincoln knew that when he spoke from the battlefield and vowed that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth. I wanted to start simply by saying that in the history of humanity, democracy is an extremely rare and fragile and transitory thing.

House impeachment manager raskin