Constitution Day 2025 — Let the experiment continue
To be an American means to be both scientist and subject in the grandest political experiment in human history. The American experiment set out to solve a timeless riddle: how do we empower people to govern us without abandoning our individual rights? The American founders’ answer was an experiment that had never been tried before: a written constitution. Like any lab experiment, this one has seen its share of spills and explosions.
On Constitution Day 2025, let’s don our lab coats, slap on our safety goggles, and keep experimenting.
Our Constitution is the answer to the problem of power. Thanks to human nature, we need a government. But to run a government, we must offer the throne to people marred by the same human flaws that made government necessary in the first place. As James Madison put it, “In framing a government of men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
The Constitution answers this problem by separating the powerful into distinct branches that check and compete with each other. Since we don’t have a Mount Doom that we can cast the Ring of Power into, this system of checks and balances is the best answer for a world in which the temptations of power are always with us. The framers understood that they could not expect politicians to bear the Ring of Power around their necks forever—some would slip it on their finger. To guard against such inevitable abuses, the Constitution pits power against power, or to quote Madison, “ambition . . . to counteract ambition.”
The Constitution’s second answer to the problem of power is the Bill of Rights, which elevated certain liberties beyond the reach of government. But even then, the Bill of Rights has little meaning without the separation of powers—particularly an independent judiciary to rule when the other branches have violated such rights.
Our continuing commitment to the constitutional experiment has everyday consequences for everyday Americans. Can a county steal the entire equity of an elderly woman’s home to pay off a small tax debt? The Constitution says no. Can bureaucrats mummify plans to build much-needed housing in endless red tape? The Constitution says no. Can a medical licensing board prevent a child suffering from a rare cancer from getting telehealth care from a cancer specialist in another state? The Constitution says no.
But all experiments, including ours, have their null results and blind alleys. The Constitution has endured many stress tests since the American experiment began, and 2025 is no different. For the most part, the Constitution has survived these tests. Among other things, our experiment has seen major strides in the long battle for racial and gender equality and a consistent refusal to bow to censorship.
And when the experiment has called for updates, we’ve updated it. Following the Civil War, we learned that we needed to defend our rights not just against the federal government but also against the states. This prompted the Second Founding that gave us the Fourteenth Amendment, the section of the Constitution most often invoked to protect individual rights today.
Yet while the Constitution has lived up to these stress tests, we have not always lived up to the Constitution. For example, we now live in a country where most laws that govern American citizens do not come from the halls of Congress but from the cubicles of a vast bureaucracy. And courts have often failed to protect individual rights under misbegotten ideas about judicial deference to legislative might, even though the entire constitutional design depends on government branches counteracting each other.
But rather than dwell on these flaws on Constitution Day, we should consider a renewed commitment to the experiment, or even a Third Founding, as all great sagas come in trilogies. Or, if not another founding, perhaps a finding—a rediscovery of the truths that catapulted an obscure colony in the wilderness into the most prosperous and free nation in the world. And maybe, as part of that finding, we can also find common accord as lab partners in the grand experiment. That union, while not perfect, promises to become “more perfect” if we choose to keep experimenting, shoulder to shoulder. Celebrating Constitution Day, after all, does not just mean that we look back at a dusty past, but that we also celebrate the steady blossoming of a promise. May the experiment continue.
