Constitution Popular Sovereignty Quotes

demonstrates a belief in popular sovereignty, something commonly held at the time of the U.S. Constitution’s adoption. This view of the legitimacy of government asserts that sovereignty did not reside in the federal or state governments, but ultimately in the people themselves.65 The people can delegate their sovereignty however they wish, either through enumerated powers (à la the federal government) or general powers (à la the states). They could also, presumably, delegate no powers to any government and live in complete anarchy.

For Croly, the entire process of popular sovereignty exercised through representative republicanism, which led to the drafting, adoption, and ratification of the United States Constitution, was illegitimate, since it lacked direct popular voting. “In theory the fundamental Law should have been more completely the people’s law . 

A culture is much more than politics. It is a national identity encompassing education, fine and popular arts and entertainment, science, physical and mental health, leisure activities, friend and family relationships, values, ambitions. . .everything that constitutes the basic shared core values of any country. In our case, the core value of individualism has been the common denominator linking all other aspects of our cultural distinctiveness; it is what makes The United States “America.” Viable only where Liberty reigns, valuing the sovereignty of individuals is precisely what makes America exceptional; therefore, it is the culture that warrants attention because the actual, underlying disease invading the mental health of our country has arisen not from the government directly but from the injection of deleterious ideas into our entire individualistic social-economic system. Proposals

Every effort to extend equality into the heart of American citizenship, to erase the race line drawn by Chief Justice Taney, and to enlarge the "we" who belong to the American project continues the work of overturning Dred Scott. Also implicated is the extent to which these questions can be left to democratic majorities or even empowered pluralities. Indeed, the doctrine of popular sovereignty would have left these questions to a vote. But true equality cannot be left to the whims of an electorate--it is the predicate for democracy and the vote, not their product. This, too, is a lesson from the period of the late 1850s: that a constitution or declaration constitutes the "we," and that this act of constituting structures all other distributive decisions and identity itself. Thus, who we are, and who belongs, is the most fundamental question that we have ever asked or can ever ask. We are still struggling to get the answer to this question right. We are still coming up short.

Samuel Huntington identified the “Tudor” character of American politics.1 According to Huntington, the Englishmen who settled North America in the seventeenth century brought with them many of the political practices of Tudor, or late medieval, England. On American soil these old institutions became entrenched and were eventually written into the American Constitution, a fragment of the old society frozen in time.2 Those Tudor characteristics included the Common Law as a source of authority, one higher than that of the executive, with a correspondingly strong role for courts in governance; a tradition of local self-rule; sovereignty divided among a host of bodies, rather than being concentrated in a centralized state; government with divided powers instead of divided functions, such that, for example, the judiciary exercised not just judicial but also quasi-legislative functions; and reliance on a popular militia rather than a standing army.

The most notable amendment is the alteration to Article 200, which describes the constitutional role of the military. This amendment extends the military’s duties to include the ‘protection of the constitution, democracy, the state and its secular nature, and personal freedoms.’ This phrase has radical implications, the most notable of which is that it paves the way for continued military intervention in politics, if and when it deems that the secular nature of that state, democracy or personal freedoms are threatened by an elected civilian government. This is very cynical, considering that the military autocracy has been the main violator of the freedoms mentioned in the amendment. In fact, this is the military’s option of last resort, in the event that popular pressure forces a free election and that a civilian government is elected. This is a very similar argument to the one made by the Algerian military on the eve of the coup in 1992, when elections won by F.I.S. were voided, triggering a bloody civil war that lasted the better part of a decade (Evans and John, 2007). Hidden in the language of the amendment is a very dangerous ideological imperative, which identifies the military with the ‘state’ rather than with the elected government of the day. It assumes that since the military is serving the ‘state’, then the military—and only the military—is able to defend the ‘state’ against the incompetence of civilians. In other words, the amendment assumes that the military’s supremacy over civilians is the natural order of things. This assumption is deeply rooted in the regime’s ideological construct, where the ‘state’ is imagined as an almost mythical entity that has to be protected against the folly of civilian politicians and the demands for democratization. In essence, the amendment turns the concept of popular sovereignty on its head, with the source of sovereignty transferred from the popular will to the military, as the ultimate guardian of the ‘state’. This entrenches a paternalistic attitude towards the citizenry, as incompetent simpletons who, in a moment of folly, might elect a government that could destroy the ‘state’. Finer identifies acceptance of civilian supremacy as one of the pre-conditions for restraining a military’s interventionist appetite (Finer, 2002). This is clearly not the case in Egypt, where prospective future coups now have a solid constitutional basis.” Chapter 2: The New Leviathan, pages 52-53

Angels hovered round his path, charged to minister to his soul; spirits of darkness vainly leagued together to tempt him from his allegiance. His burning piety could use no liturgy; his penitence revealed itself to no confessor. He knew no superior in holiness. He could as little become the slave of priest-craft as of a despot. He was himself a judge of the orthodoxy of the elders; and, if he feared the invisible powers of the air, of darkness, and of hell, he feared nothing on earth. Puritanism constituted not the Christian clergy, but the Christian people, the interpreter of the divine will; and the issue of Puritanism was popular sovereignty.