America’s Political Tradition Comes From The Constitution: The Trump Mandate Calls For A Restoration Of Its Original Meaning And Preeminence

When Donald Trump offered a return to “basic common sense” on the campaign trail this cycle, he was yet again hearkening to this great American tradition of constitutional governance.

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The Constitution of the United States is the law of the land. It is the cornerstone of our system of republican government – and provides both the moral fuel behind the “rule of law” as well as our national self-conception as a free and liberty-bearing people. For many Americans, particularly new arrivals who have been insufficiently assimilated or those who have been indoctrinated by the school system in recent decades, the idea of the Constitution’s supreme authority may seem strange, even objectionable – or in the favored parlance of modern times, “problematic.” But the bitter pill to swallow for these types is that the only way political power and its dissemination in modern American society can be meaningfully discussed is by reference to the Constitution, which was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and established three separate but theoretically co-equal branches of government.

The first branch described under Article I is the legislature, comprising a bicameral Congress with two chambers: an upper house, the Senate, which is supposed to be the more deliberative, restrained body. Modeled after its Roman antecedent (where the name derives from) – the Senate was conceived as the more aristocratic of the two chambers. The Senate is broadly analogous to the British House of Lords. Senators have the power to offer advice and consent over presidential appointments, ratify treaties, hold impeachment trials, and, with cooperation from the House of Representatives, pass laws. The “house of Representatives,” in contrast, was originally the more democratic of the two chambers – it held exclusive power over the purse and was more directly accountable to the people who elected its members. Its members, unlike the Senate, are elected every two years, just one third of the time of the Senator’s enumerated tenure. The frequency with which House members are up for re-election was intended to facilitate turnover, and with that, inculcate a time-sensitiveness to congressional offices, offering motivation to pass legislation, in accordance with the people’s will “with all deliberate speed” – to borrow a favorite catchphrase from our legal discourse.

The second branch of the government – aptly outlined under Article II, is the executive. The executive branch, under the Constitution’s very explicit original formulation (which, contrary to the overwhelming sentiment in today’s Washington is an article that has not undergone emendation – the Founder’s only enumerated mechanism for constitutional change) is vested entirely (in noticeable contradistinction to “mostly” or “largely”) in a (again, singular, one) President of the United States (“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” – is as clear a phrase as one will ever find in that occasionally abstruse text). In other words, of the three branches of government, the executive branch is the only one under our Constitution – which, again, is the law of the land – that is vested in a single individual. To continue our analogy from above, the President is roughly akin to a British King – a comparison made both favorably and unfavorably throughout the Federalist Papers, that handbook to aid constitutional interpretation and explanation, devised by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. In Roman times, though the analogy is far less apropos (for reasons that should be quite obvious), the American president would be roughly equivalent to the emperor-type figure.

In official duties, the President – or Chief Magistrate – is tasked with law enforcement. He is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, ensuring civilian control over the military (something of paramount importance to all the Founding Fathers) – not, as our latter-day betters would have us believe, something to be outsourced to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Pentagon, or lobbyists and consultants working for Raytheon. Being singular or unitary, the President appoints cabinet secretaries and federal judges. The former answer to him alone. And while Congressional approval, in some cases, is needed to fulfill the President’s constitutional obligation for nominations, the President – as the Unitary Executive – has full discretion over the tenures of each and every one of his underlings within the executive department. If not the President, then who else would be tasked with monitoring and regulating the responsibilities of executive branch officials? The Congress? Some outside agency? The question should answer itself.

As for the agencies (and the larger bureaucracy), the acute observer will find – well, problematic – that no such fourth branch of government exists within the text of the Constitution. The third article, Article III, deals with the establishment of the Judicial department: the Supreme Court, other federal courts – and the procedures for regulating the assignment of jurisdiction. There are no other articles contained in the Constitution outlining a fourth or fifth branch of government. There are only three: Legislative, Executive, and Judicial. The intellectual origins for this go back millennia, to Polybius, that most worthy of Greek thinkers, whose own thought was later repurposed – or rediscovered – many centuries later by Montesquieu, who introduced “separation of powers” into our political lexicon. But Montesquieu was simply mimicking his ancient superiors, whose template afforded both enlightened Philosophe and Founding Father alike with the rubric by which to model their own post-Revolutionary governments, so ordered as to maximize individual liberty and minimize governmental overreach.

It is a rather sorry development of our own sorry times that we have forgotten so much of our venerable past – most especially, the grand Constitutional tradition, the cardiovascular system of the American republic, even a republic significantly enervated relative to its original conception. In a few words, the Constitution – and the broader tradition inclusive of the Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, and Federalist Papers – is the only thing that gives our laws authority, our elections significance, and our political life ultimate meaning. If not for the Constitution, then what on earth impels our quadrennial elections – and the national furor which surrounds their outcomes, every four years, in the hard-charging media narratives that pervade every new administration, and the existential rhetorical drapery over which so-called “newspapers of record” have increasingly adorned the stakes of recent administrations – and the Trump years in particular. If “a government of laws, not of men” is our unofficial national motto: then, what, other than the law-of-the-land itself, would dare claim to give the rest of our laws their derivative legitimacy? Americans, including far too many conservatives (and not just conservative voters, but the officials who comprise Republican administrations) have seemingly forgotten that laws do not come out of thin air. So too have they forgotten the all-important axiom that laws, decoupled from justice, are functionally inoperative: moot, impotent, dead.

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What is Justice in the American context? It’s essentially that which connects any law to our longstanding, venerable national tradition whose origins lie in the Constitution, and traceable to the American founding itself. A law that cannot trace itself to that heritage, the American heritage, in any meaningful sense is not something that should be blindly followed simply because it has been inscribed onto legal parchment, under the veneer or pretext of a law-making authority.

In a similar vein, any sort of extralegal committee or commission (think: the January 6^th Committee) that does not manifestly follow from that Article I power – namely, the Congress – is not something to be taken as ipso facto legitimate. The responsibility for holding extraconstitutional lawmaking bodies accountable lies with both Congress and public alike. An agency or organization created by executive (really, bureaucratic) fiat, lacking the lawmaking authority of Article I, is not something that the rest of society should take seriously. This is especially so for any such entity enacted by bureaucratic fiat, perceiving its own powers as independent – if not superior – to the Article II function explicated in the Constitution itself.

Again, the Constitution – not the bureaucracy, which even in 2024, surprising to many, is utterly absent from the text of the Constitution – is the law of the land. America has a tradition of written constitutionalism. We are not England, where the Constitution is “unwritten” – and comprises the customs and traditions established over years and years by mere habit or social artifice. America has always harbored a formalistic approach to Constitutional theory and the application of law – this, in fact, is the only approach that would be recognizable to the Constitution’s designers. On that subject, the Left’s desire to tear down the Founders – as either vile racists or immoral cretins of the worst possible sort – is inextricable to its greater mission to discredit the written constitutional tradition altogether. If one cannot see that, one is blind to the Left’s greater effort to subvert, undermine, permanently alter, and then ultimately replace our Constitution.

In recent years, it has done a remarkable job towards that end. The tradition has been desecrated by those who find our country’s history – including the esteemed men who began that history – morally objectionable. If the men who wrote the original laws were irremediably immoral, then implied in that pernicious logic are the laws also objectionable — null and void. The original Law, from where all the subsequent laws follow, is the Constitution. Thus, if the Constitutional framers were so immoral in their own convictions, as the Left believes, they would be incapable of laying down the Supreme Law of the Land, which not only structures political institutions but declares our political morality in the most resounding, eloquent, and authoritative of terms. There is no preceding system of law, nor is there an alternative “system” of laws – or an alternative constitution – that has eclipsed (or to draw from Biblical language, “superseded”) the original. Furthermore, there is no “unwritten Constitution” that has developed over time, in tandem with, and for the edification of, the text of the original. Americans, by way of birth, submit to this unalterable political system: the original Constitution, the bedrock of our social contract. The social contract was devised by our ancestors and binds their progeny generation after generation, engendering the American political tradition. The social contract can only be abolished by way of Revolution – short of that, the only mechanism for change is Constitutional amendment. Otherwise, the text of the document holds authoritative.

Seeing as Americans of all stripes grant enormous importance, even today, to the political branches – and the authority and weight they each command in public affairs – would heavily imply that the vast majority of Americans – both Right and Left – still (at least) unwittingly submit to, and through that action, believe in, the original constitutional tradition. For that reason, it is incumbent upon all of us to preserve it. We have a legal, moral, and political obligation to do so. We have no choice but to do so.

For the litany of new people entering the next Trump administration, they each have a special obligation to follow the Constitution’s text and mandate. Undoubtedly, the political mandate afforded by this year’s election results is a clear signal that the American people want change from their political institutions. Change, in this context, most accurately means restoration: and the restoration – or revival – so many Americans desire is the Constitutional tradition: faithful adherence to the text of the Constitution and its original meaning with respect to lawmaking. Every government official is therefore compelled to reread the text and take its commands to heart. It is not as though they really have any choice in the matter – as there is no alternative to the founding Law. Having said that, the Constitution provides, even today, as clear a roadmap as such exists for ruling and navigating America’s labyrinthine political institutions in the best way possible. It is the handbook for administering an increasingly complicated, bureaucratic, and historically anomalous imposter government, with its counterfeit institutions – the deep state and Military-Industrial Complex – that have no real binding authority because of these institutions’ manifest absence from the original text.

The courage of conviction that comes with faithful interpretation is exceptionally rare in our government today, almost nonexistent. However, such conviction will be necessary to restore some semblance of coherency, if not integrity, to the rule of law to America, as those terms have been rendered effectively meaningless by how far we have deviated as a society from that which gives all laws any authority at all: the Constitution. Constitutional understanding runs hand-in-hand with civic engagement – and enlightenment. Without the latter, lawmaking in the American context is like operating an airplane with no experience: a doomed endeavor.

Many times, conservatives like to be engaged in politics, a good impulse. Alas, they have no moral compass or intellectual framework by which to navigate the waters of their political expedition. Thus, without a thorough understanding of the Constitution – and the accompanying texts that aid and abet its construction, conservatives will find themselves adrift at sea, unmoored from the principles that are supposed to guide their convictions and self-identity to start. What good is it to be against the Left if you yourself are too scatterbrained or cowardly in your temperament to make any serious commitment in learning the preponderant wellspring that is the source of all your putative beliefs? It is often said that politics is war by other means. Much as any army would be foolish to enter battle ill-equipped with the proper weapons to take down the enemy, those conservatives who enter the political arena would be equally foolish to not have a deep-rooted knowledge in the Constitution, the founding Law and source for our political institutions, which remain, however battered and embattled, still in operation today.

Why is the original law – and history – so important to self-conception: as both a nation and on the individual level?

To most adequately know a law is to know its origins – the Constitution is the founding law, responsible for giving birth to our grand and still-ongoing political experiment in latter-day republican government. The original law is the most important because it gives meaning to all else which follows it. This is intuitive, a function of both common sense and logic. Perhaps the irrational mind would no longer find that logic to be intuitive, but it remains so, insofar as man is an animal distinguished by his rational faculties, his ability to reason, and can meaningfully communicate in a way that gives him a sense of his placement in time – with a past, present, and future. This is what Aristotle meant when he declared man to be a political animal. Only squirrels out in the garden live moment-by-passing-moment. The beasts of nature, in this sense, lack history: there is no meaningful progress in animal societies. That man did achieve political progress “in the course of human events,” one which – in the American context – culminated in the Revolution, is what was once thought to have differentiated thinking man, Homo sapien from Homo brutalis. Thought, extrapolated across human society affords not just a political elite, but even regular men and women of lesser reasoning faculties, the opportunity to live out lives far and away superior to animals found in nature. The practical wisdom of the everyday, in this context, is what was once termed “common sense.” It is this same type of wisdom which informs America’s political thought. Furthermore, it adeptly gauges the proper temperament for constitutional interpretation and application.

The Constitution was not, as liberal jurists would have you believe, a living document – one where all sorts of extraconstitutional ideals and fancies might be read into the document, in devotion to a larger principle not found within the text itself. This is pure political idealism, and dangerous, especially in America. Though idealism has its place in certain discrete situations, moderated by the heavy hand of rational judgment, in the American political context, much less so than in other contexts like France and Russia, which underwent political revolutions of their own, idealism is invariably subordinated to pragmatism and basic common sense.

When Donald Trump offered a return to “basic common sense” on the campaign trail this cycle, a line that he repeatedly made at rallies, he was yet again making direct invocation to this grand American tradition of constitutional governance. Whether deliberately or not, he tapped into the very psychology – or essence – of our political self-framing as Americans. Common sense, or political pragmatism, informs constitutional interpretation – and should stand as the great moderating force in administering our public affairs. Pragmatism dictates that words not inscribed on paper be not given significant authority or credence in a legal context. Thus, in faithfully interpreting the Constitution, the text reigns supreme. A written constitutional tradition dictates that textual prerogatives, certainly over the whims and caprices of judges or bureaucrats (whose authority themselves rest on dubious, extraconstitutional grounds), are of first priority. In fact, the constitutional text occupies such a privileged perch in our civic and legal tradition as Americans, a people governed by the rule of law, that nothing else comes even close to its gravitas. Likewise, anything that competes against the textual prerogative – whether an agency or court order – must be read in light of the text of the document. If there is a conflict, the countervailing interpretation must yield to the text: every single time.

That should not even need to be stated. It should be so obvious as to be self-evident to all well-informed Americans. Those who claim to take lordship in the mantle of Americanism but find themselves noxiously at odds with anything said in this article, have abdicated their natural birthright. They do not belong to the grand and illustrious tradition of what it means to be American in any meaningful sense. In fact, one could go a step further and declare them enemies of that grand tradition. And what is to be done with political enemies? There are really ever only two choices: get on board or be swept aside.

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A slightly modified version of this piece was originally published in The Gateway Pundit, and can be found here.

Paul Ingrassia, a graduate of Fordham University and Cornell Law School, is an Attorney; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the NYYR Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow Paul on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.