Episode 30: The Suprising Endurance of the U.S. Consitution with Dr. Robinson Woodward-Burns
AAmy BarnesOct 31, 2022 at 5:55 pm39min
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00:04Dr. Ian Anson
Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.
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00:39Dr. Ian Anson
Americans revere the United States Constitution. Authored by the legendary founding fathers, our Constitution is more than just a legal document to most Americans, in part because of the civic education many of us have received in school. It's an integral part of the mythos that helps to explain our nation's high levels of patriotism, and of course, our attachment to national symbols like Betsy Ross's Stars and Stripes and George Washington's cherry tree, among others. But despite our reverence for the Constitution, many Americans know very little about its history and its evolution over time. The US Constitution has been amended 27 times over our nation's almost 250 year history. But despite the relative rarity of changes to the Constitution, it has managed to stand the test of time. In fact, the US Constitution is one of the world's oldest democratic documents. Our Constitution is much older than countries like France's, which we normally associate with democratic stability in today's day and age. So what explains the impressive durability of our Constitution, especially when it's been so relatively immune to change over the last century?
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01:50Dr. Ian Anson
On today's episode of Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring you a rebroadcast of the 2022 UMBC Constitution Day lecture sponsored by the Department of Political Science and CS3. This year's lecture was delivered by Dr. Robinson Woodward-Burns, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University in Washington, DC.
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02:16Dr. Ian Anson
Dr. Woodward-Burns' recent book is entitled "Hidden Laws: How State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics," and in this acclaimed volume, Dr. Woodward-Burns argues that our Constitution endures in part because of a set of 50 other documents that are perhaps even less well understood than our venerable constitutional text, by most Americans. In his remarks, Dr. Woodward-Burns explains how our state's constitutions and yes, you might be surprised to learn that every state has one, including Maryland, these constitutions have important consequences for democratic stability in times of political turmoil. This is an incredibly topical and insightful argument, and one that we'll enjoy listening to right now.
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03:01Dr. Robinson Woodward-Burns
Good afternoon. I'm really excited to be here. I would like to thank first, the Department of Political Science and the Center for Social Science Scholarship for cohosting this talk. And will contain is trying to start with a puzzle about the Constitution, which hopefully in about 45 minutes I can answer. So we're celebrating the Constitution's 234th birthday. And that's a bit unusual, because if you look at other national constitutions, they don't last nearly this long. The United States Constitution is an extraordinary outlier in that it's really, really old. So my question for this talk is, how has the Constitution survived for almost a quarter of a millennium? How has it survived the Civil War periods of internal crisis, economic collapse? How is the United States per capita world's oldest ranking national constitution? Not only is the US Constitution older than all other national documents, it's also older than the state documents. So when you compare the US Constitution to the state constitution, the stability of the national government really comes into focus. The states, you see a lot more constitutional turnover. There have been at least 411 accounts to ground new state constitutions. 144 of them have ratified, there have been 255 different bodies gathered, measure two random state constitutions. And similarly, you see a lot more amendment happening at the state level. There have been at least some number 1695 amendments to the current 50 state constitutions relative to the 47 amendments ratified at the federal level. And state constitutions have a much shorter lifespan so no more than half the lifespan of the federal constitution. So why is this, why do we have this system where we have a really stable federal constitution and a lot of instability in the state constitutions? So I'm going to try to answer that over the course of this lecture. And I'm going to do it with a special emphasis on voting in the United States, which is something that's becoming more and more important now as we see retensions for the right to vote, increasingly rolled back, especially at the state level. So I'll try to give an answer for why I think we get this sort of federal stability and state constitutional instability. But first, what I'll do is I'll give you a few kind of common stories about why the Constitution has survived for so long. I'll try to kind of walk through the normal stories. And I'll give my own story and give you more probably two case studies that give some evidence. So first, what's the normal story of why we have a constitution that's lasted for so long? One story is that, again, controversy that could press for constitutional change emerging at the national level, and national actors will step up to the plate and either resolved or failed to resolve these national constitutional controversies. The Supreme Court, for example, can step in and act as an arbiter in ways that define constitutional meaning and either create instability or stability at the national level, you either don't have successfully resolved or fails to resolve these national questions. But one point that I want to make is that we have these students the other state constitutions which are addressing these nationally salient issues in the same way, sometimes causing alarm of outcomes that were attributed to the national branches. And if we're going to state constitutionalism, then sometimes we can attribute outcomes to national without national political actors are not actually causing your state constitutions are also not correctly understanding national colleges in the United States don't exist in isolation. So we'll try to kind of unpack the normal stories, then about a Federal Constitution. The stories that don't include the state is one of those stories.
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06:38Dr. Robinson Woodward-Burns
One answer for why we've had this constitution, the same federal constitution for 234 years is that it's really, really hard to you need two thirds of both houses of Congress, which includes a convention call by the states Mental Health Association, ratification by three quarters of the states of my disclosure or convention, sign as part of the amendment of any national constitution. So that might be why we see so little amendment. But the thing about the Constitution, but our argument, at least when you compare them is that the ones that are very hard to sort of band, or they tend to snap and brutal. We want constitutions that advance so they don't break in this as the US Constitution is in that way. It's the hardest national constitutions we landed in the world. That means it should probably have the shortest lifespan so I don't think diseases really compelling. So another answer might be, instead of amendment, we just take issues to the Supreme Court to resolve constitutional meaning or to Congress. Sometimes Congress will pass statutes, not unconstitutional laws that still help us determine constitutional meaning. And I think that's, again, Jesus story. But remember that if we're only looking at national actors, we're still not fully understanding the process. So we don't think we can look only at national actors, right? Federal Judiciary, the federal judiciary, Congress has statutory lawmaking power in order to understand the US Constitution. So there's one other reason and I think this is maybe the best of the three, which is that Republic really, very, it's the US Constitution. So if you go down to the National Archives, and you get shot, by the text, on the baseball in the text of the Constitution, sponsored by gift back and give the Constitution on it, and it's a British ran for me last week that's really unique in our veneration for the constitution. We put on everything. Rarely, we fully understand its meaning. But there is this broad public culture of constitutional veneration, which James Madison says, grants with Geminis in the constitution. So that might explain part of it. I think that, again, sort of helpful and understanding the longevity of the Constitution, but all given different story here. So what I think is that more often, we see that nationally salient political issues, national concept, constitutional controversies are often pushed on the states in ways that bring about a constitutional change and prevent change to the National Constitution, that we see issues could be resolved at national level, instead of being resolved at the state level, preventing change to the national constitution bringing about a constitutional level. So I'm going to try to break that down a little bit, explain what this process looks like. And to give a broad theory and a little bit of evidence, giving an overview of that before I give you short stories on how this process so in the book, I have this four part typology. I'm gonna go through the nuts and bolts. But we can imagine that a national political issues emerge at the national level and result only a national reform and this occurs at the Constitution Center, something that can be resolved at the state levels. States, for example, cannot raise armies and navies are forbidden from doing it. And largely they don't talk to us at 91 State Constitution creates a Kentucky maybe there's no real reason for that. And it's also constitutional for the most part, that kind of thing doesn't actually happen. Instead, you know, we see a lot of issues involving the states, in areas that are kind of subject to overlapping regulation under the 10th. Amendment, these broad powers and it says that powers that are granted to the federal government are reserved to the States. extensors have ever been in the states can be regulated at the state level. And what this means is that the states and the federal government regularly have a lot of issues together. So we can imagine an issue that's nationally salient emerges at the national level, and then it gets pushed down to the state level. In the 1970s 80s and 90s, there was this big gigantic tax balanced budget movement, which trailed largely in Congress but created all these state level reforms restricting a bunch of Indian taxation house.
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