rittmeister said:
Andersonh1 said:
jgoodguy said:
The People of the US created the Consitution and only the people have the power to undo it.
Under this theory, how do we account for the fact that Rhode Island did not participate in the creation of the Constitution?
don't you think joining means okaying the constitution in existence?
It does, but that occurred after it was already in existence, and under pressure to ratify or be treated as a foreign country. That doesn't explain how "the people" created it when 1/13 of "the people" sat out the creation of the Constitution.
[hr]
The thing to remember about the preamble is that it is not law, unlike the rest of the Constitution. The preamble is a "mission statement" to use modern terminology, and it uses language that is more poetic than factual. It is also deceptive. The original language listed each state by name, but since they could not know who would ratify and who would not, the state names were removed and the far more broad and vague "we the people" left in place.
They did not know how many among "we the people" would ultimately endorse the new Constitution, so to claim after the fact that the phrase means something that it does not is a poor foundation for a legal argument.