What Is Needed to Save the U.S. Constitution?

The topic for this Constitution Monday concerns the saving of the Constitutional Convention 237 years ago. Tad Walch at The Deseret News wrote about the divisions among the attendees at the Constitutional Convention and how George Washington later explained the following September the saving of the Constitution while reporting on a speech given by Thomas Griffith. 

“The Constitution, which we now present, is the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable,” Washington wrote. “

Walch reported on an address given by former BYU general counsel Thomas Griffith at the annual conference of Braver Angels in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Friday, June 28. Concerning “Amity, mutual deference and concession” being three virtues that created the Constitution, Griffith said, “They are needed to sustain the Constitution today.” Griffith should know what he is talking about because he is a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, “widely considered the second-most important and powerful court in the country.” Walch continued with the following:

The example set by Washington, Benjamin Franklin and others in 1787 is vital in “this perilous moment” of “toxic political polarization,” Griffith said during a week that included a presidential debate and major Supreme Court rulings.

Griffith also quoted President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who recently told church members that, “on contested issues, we should seek to moderate and unify.”

Griffith pulled from a journal article by Stanford’s Derek Webb, “The Original Meaning of Civility: Democratic Deliberation at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention.” Griffith said that the “Constitutional Convention moderated division in three key ways.”

First, the convention’s rules banned talking, reading and writing while someone was speaking, which promoted careful listening.

Second, the delegates formed dinner groups across regional and ideological lines. (Griffith loosely paraphrased what George Mason of Virginia wrote to his son – “People from New England aren’t so bad after all!”)

Third and most important, a group of moderates met in Benjamin Franklin’s home and agree “to persuade their colleagues to compromise for the sake of unity even before they knew the terms of the compromise.”

They put, Griffith said, “the nation’s well-being ahead of (their) own interests.”

Griffith recommended a new book he called the most important ever written on the Constitution: “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation – And Could Again.” He said the author, Yuval Levin, shows that the Constitution not only protects Americans’ rights, it also creates a governmental structure that “can only work when majorities and minorities act together through negotiation, compromise, and conciliation.”

“Following the processes of government the Constitution creates gives us practical experience in living and acting together,” Griffith said.

For those who have never heard of the Braver Angels, the organization is “dedicated to political depolarization. It promotes the active listing modeled by Washington, Franklin and the rest of those who were in Philadelphia in 1787.”