America’s Constitution was once our insurance policy against tyranny.
Against a dictator.
There were laws. There were the checks and balances they created that served as our guardrail to prevent any one branch of government from becoming too powerful.
Now as we’ve been witnessing Donald Trump’s disregard for the U.S. Constitution, it feels as though that 237-year-old insurance policy is about to expire.
With the idea of insurance rattling through my mind, I recalled a series of mid-century advertisements from the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company that ran in magazines.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the Boston insurance company ran a series of lavishly illustrated full-page print ads in Life and the Saturday Evening Post that featured historical figures from America’s past. The ads don’t focus on promoting their insurance policies but present a short story about some significant person often with an interesting history lesson.
I began rifling through banker boxes looking for one specific ad.
Finally, the issue of Life from August 23, 1954, featuring the Duke of Edinborough on the cover provided me with the advertisement I was looking for.
It celebrates Chief Justice John Marshall and the strength of our constitution. The ad ran during that golden period of great post-war optimism.
American boosterism was at an all-time high which endowed us with a certainty in the steadiness and permanence of our democratic system of government. At a time when our rivalry with the Soviet Communists was at an all time high, we believed strongly in our way of life.
It is what I grew up believing, and never thought it would waver.
Text From John Hancock Insurance 1954 ad
In 1801 the Supreme Court was so weak that two Chief Justices had resigned because they couldn’t see any future in it. No one even remembered to give it a room in the new Capitol. Then they made John Marshall Chief Justice . And the court has had dignity, and authority and power ever since.
John Marshall just seemed to be born with an instinct for judging. His mind cut like a Bowie knife through the unimportant things right to the heart of a case. He walked the chalk line of impartiality with a sure unwavering step. He had only one bias…his belief that we should be the United States of America. And he was convinced that the only thing that would keep us that was was the Constitution.
But in 1801 the Constitution was spanking new, and nobody was sure what it really said. It had to be drawn up big and broad to cover a lot of territory- and that left open places in its meaning.
But John Marshall tightened it up fast.
In his first big case he ruled that the court could not accept their authority given it under a statute which it had declared unconstitutional. And in depriving the court of this small authority, he established a bigger one.
For he had set the present that it was the job of the court to rule on the constitutionality of laws. And then in one brilliant decision after another John Marshall explained what our new Constitution meant when it said something. And he made his decisions so clear and honest and sensible that the country understood and agreed.
Even today when lawyers tell you what the constitution says, they will use John Marshalls exact words.
As though it understood that it wouldn’t be needed anymore, the Liberty Bell cracked and went silent while tolling for John Marshalls death. We were left in good hands…a constitution which now spelled out our rights and a strong respected court to see that those rights were never tampered with.
Weve done some great things in America. But we’ve had our lucky breaks too. And John Marshall was one of them.”
Reading this now, sadness and fear have replaced certainty in the strength of our Constitution.
Now Donald Trump is declaring himself above the law.
Lawrence Tribe, one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars and a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School has said: “Trump has carried out a blitzkrieg on the law and on the constitution.”
Is a Constitutional crisis in our future? The administration is still entrenched in legal fights in lower courts and so far has not defied orders from the Supreme Court
The separation of powers is a fundamental principle of the Constitution.
But we are now seeing a leap to a new level potentially where the President claims authority to act outside the bounds of the laws established by Congress.
If that happens we will be in a new form of government one that can’t be described as Constitutional in the true sense?
The risks of dictatorship become real.
Every American should be concerned about the way executive powers are being abused misused and overstepping the bounds of authority.
But it still has not violated court orders.
Yet.