Jamelle Bouie: The Constitution Belongs to the People

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

Outside of the Bible, there may not be a document more Americans are familiar with than the U.S. Constitution. If you haven’t read it in a while, it’s a short text that you can get your hands on pretty easily: Besides online, there are numerous organizations that will mail you a free pocket-sized copy.

These pocket-sized Constitutions are for more than reading. Often, a “pocket Constitution” is brandished for rhetorical effect. From the Watergate hearings to the tea party movement and the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the flourish gives the document an almost-sacred status. It’s used to emphasize one’s fidelity to country or question the fidelity of one’s opponent. As I type this, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) is holding a filibuster on the Senate floor. He’s been going for 18 hours. And at 7 a.m. this morning, he pulled out his pocket Constitution, saying, “I’m still going strong because this president is wrong, and he’s violating principles that we hold dear and principles in this document that are so clear and plain.”

But the Constitution isn’t just a symbol, it’s still the base document for our democratic republic. And it’s beginning to look like our democratic republic is going to face a serious constitutional crisis — if it isn’t already. Two months into President Donald Trump’s second administration, he and his appointees are expressing open defiance of due process, judges’ orders, separation of powers, and the plaintext of constitutional amendments.

Over the weekend, Trump mused about serving a third term as president — insisting he was not joking, despite the Constitution’s two-term limit. Trump and his administration are brazenly rejecting the authority of the Constitution in word and action.

From PBS and the San Francisco Chronicle to Christianity Today, news outlets are turning to lawyers and historians to ask whether this is a constitutional crisis. But are legal experts the only people to turn to? Is the Constitution just a document for lawyers and historians to debate and define?

Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times opinion columnist, doesn’t think so. The Constitution, he said in our interview, belongs to the people. Americans aren’t just governed by the document; they take the primary role in crafting the meaning and application of the Constitution.

Bouie regularly weaves an assumption of political agency into his analysis of the current political moment. That agency is one he sees throughout American history, from the founders who sought to create a constitutional republic to the abolitionists and Reconstruction-era politicians who sought to redefine that republic as applying to everyone, regardless of their skin color or national origin.

In our interview, we discussed Bouie’s approach to history, lessons from the Reconstruction era, and taking seriously our capacity as “sophisticated constitutional thinkers” as we seek a more perfect union.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: Where did your interest in American history, especially the political commentator, begin?

Jamelle Bouie: That’s a funny question, because I actually am not sure that I have a good answer. In part because I grew up in a household where my parents, more my dad really, were into history, my grandfather was into history. I just grew up in a very civically engaged household, so I don’t really remember a time in my life when I did not find American history interesting.

I also grew up in Virginia, in the Hampton Roads area — Yorktown was an hour-and-a-half away from where I grew up. Williamsburg, about two hours — in colonial America, Revolutionary War heritage region. As a kid growing up there, you’re always doing field trips to Williamsburg or Jamestown or wherever. For a certain kind of kid, it’s just in the atmosphere and some kids just really get attached to it. Also, not far from Civil War battlefields. So, you’re just there.

I didn’t necessarily study it in college; I did more political theory. But obviously, that involved some historical study as well. When I got into journalism, about 15 years ago this summer, especially when events really impressed upon me, as an observer, the importance of knowing larger context, that’s when my interest in history began to merge with my professional duties as a journalist.

As I’ve grown more into it and really began to engage with contemporary scholarship and scholars and tried to become at least like a hanger on to the community of professional historian, it’s just brought more and more of that sensibility into my writing.

Were there any moments where you felt you were very consciously trying to bring it in more?

I’m much less interested in my particular view — which of course I have — and much more interested in providing readers with context, with conceptual distinctions that might be useful to them, and placing a given set of events within a larger narrative and story. I’ve often found that a lot of political commentary acts as if history began 10 years ago or as if it began 20 years ago. But that’s not true.

Obviously, the roots of what’s happening today extend all the way back. It’s important to look back to the past, not just for roots and not just for examples, but to the fact that we are not the first set of Americans to exist. Previous generations of Americans have encountered problems and crises — that are not the same as ours, but there are some similarities to ours. They encountered similar kinds of questions about their society. And it’s worth looking at how they responded to it and how they answered those questions. Not because we can get a kind of one-to-one relationship between then and now, but because there is real value in just seeing what other groups of people did with the challenges facing them.

I was homeschooled and my Constitution class was a video course taught by Michael Farris. Folks like him claim to really love the Constitution, and I’ve been surprised how little they’ve had to say about Trump’s defiance of the Constitution. [Farris helped lead the movement to legalize homeschooling beginning in the 1980s. From 2017 to 2022 he was CEO for the Alliance Defending Freedom. On Facebook, he has recently defended the Trump Administration’s attempt to redefine birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.]

When I got to college, I began to hear friends say things like, “I don’t know why I should care about what the Constitution says. It was just the work of these dead, white, slave owners who were all men.”

Is there a more constructive way to approach our founding documents and the work of the people who created the constitutional structure that we have?

I think there is. It’s funny, I feel like I’m sometimes associated with that perspective, even though I’ve never, ever expressed it. I have certainly talked about the fact that the framers were a lot of slave owners and prosperous merchants — a very distinct group of people. Some of whom weren’t great! They were bad, in fact! I live practically down the street from Monticello. Thomas Jefferson? Not a great guy in a lot of very important ways.

But, stipulated that they’re all slaveholders, I actually don’t think that’s a very constructive way of thinking about the Constitution and the founding. It’s an understandable reaction, given the deification and founder worship that is common in American political culture; the attempt at a kind of iconoclasm that says, “Why should he care about these people that are horrible?” makes a lot of sense.

But if you take these people on their own terms — which is an important thing to do when thinking about anything in history — they genuinely were trying to do something extraordinary. And I mean that in the most direct and literal sense.

They were trying to remake the world for themselves, trying to create a new kind of society in human history — this representative democracy. They were doing it with very few precedents; there wasn’t that much they could look back on to guide them. They were operating very often from first principles. They were trying to solve specific problems.

It’s always important to remember that these are practical politicians trying to deal with very specific issues that they had in their society and form of government. And they were trying to instantiate a level of political equality that had never really existed before.

Those things are, if not praiseworthy, if that’s too strong, they’re worth taking seriously. The answers they came up with, as they tried to do all of this, are worth taking seriously. The insights they had are worth taking seriously. The document they produce and all of the political conflict around it is worth taking seriously — especially as Americans whose political culture is basically soaked in constitutionalism. It’s hard for an American to even conceptualize politics outside of constitutional thinking.

You can take it seriously without engaging in founder worship. And in fact, demystifying them, taking them seriously, for example, as slaveholders can also help us think through the kinds of things they were trying to do politically and help us think through the choices they end up making.

For me, the constructive way to go about this is not to say that what they did doesn’t matter — it very much did matter, their status as slaveholders or whatever other unsavory things they were engaged with. But we should try to engage with those aspects of them nonetheless, because they offer some insight.

This is a very famous formulation, from the late historian Edmund S. Morgan: In the Declaration of Independence, these slaveholders are talking constantly about, “We’re being enslaved by the crown. We don’t want to fall under political slavery.” Their visceral understanding of what slavery meant — by virtue of them being masters — does inform their sense of what liberty entails, and that makes its way into our political traditions.

That’s not just interesting in its own sake; it has implications for how we think about the kind of society they were trying to create.

Who decides the meaning of the Constitution?

In my understanding, the people themselves do.

Obviously, “the people” aren’t a singular thing. It’s a pluralistic and divided thing. But I very much reject the notion that, in trying to understand or interpret the Constitution, we are bound by what the framers and ratifiers intended — contemporary originalists will say “the original public meaning.”

These things are interesting to the extent that they can even be uncovered. There’s a bit of an epistemological problem with originalism. It’s a claim to be able to recover a kind of knowledge that may actually be irrecoverable. It’s also a claim about the kind of document the Constitution is. Is the Constitution simply another form of law, or is it something else? Something more political, more contingent, for which the legal community does not have exclusive claim.

But setting that aside, the Constitution belongs to us. And that doesn’t mean that the words on the paper say whatever we want them to mean. But it does mean that our senses and intuitions about what lies at the foundation of our society, our common understanding of what things mean, those actually do matter.

I am a person on the political Left. I have a very broad sense of what it means for people to have bodily autonomy. I am opposed to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling ending federal protection of a right to an abortion.

Reasonable people can disagree about this, of course, but what offends me about the ruling is it’s based on this notion that abortion protection isn’t within the history and tradition of the United States. It establishes this by writing out particular histories, in particular traditions, only focusing on a narrow history and tradition of a certain subset of Americans.

But, beyond that, Roe was the law of the land for 50 years. Why isn’t that history and tradition? Why? Why does the public’s acceptance of a set of rights, its taking for granted of a set of rights, in the language James Madison would’ve used, why doesn’t that liquidate the meaning and attach that to the Constitution? In my view, it does.

That kind of gets to my sense of who has ownership over this thing — Americans believed for half a century that they had a constitutionally protected right to an abortion. And as far as I’m concerned, they did.

I should say, I feel similarly about gun ownership. Even before the Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which established an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, there’s a very good case you can make that Americans have just understood themselves to have this individual right to bear arms. It’s there. And it effectively is in the Constitution, even if the specific words aren’t there.

Taking seriously the fact that Americans can be sophisticated constitutional thinkers in their own right is worth doing.

I read a quote in one of your pieces from Charles Sumner. Sumner wrote that, “men ordinarily find in the Constitution what is in themselves, so that the Constitution in its meaning is little more than a reflection of their own inner nature.”

Could you tell me a little bit more about Sumner and that quote?

Charles Sumner is one of the more interesting lawmakers in the American history. This is a bit of an aside, but Americans, we worship presidents. We put presidents on the pedestal — for good reason. They’re the winners of a single national election. They can define entire political eras. It makes total sense. But American history is also filled with fascinating and important legislators. People who had no aspirations to be president, who made their home in the legislature, and who did many things — some great, some not so great — from that position.

Charles Sumner, in my view, is just one of the great lawmakers of American history. He represented Massachusetts in the Senate from 1851 to 1874 — a quarter century.

He began his life in politics as a member of antislavery groups, he was elected to the Senate in 1851 as a member of the Free Soil Party and in very short order, he became a founding member of the Republican Party. He devoted his time in Congress to being an abolitionist, to opposing slavery, to specifically opposing the slave power — the nexus of political and economic power around slavery — and, during the Civil War, was very critical of Lincoln for moderation towards the South. He is very much one of the radical Republicans who were on the vanguard of antislavery politics and pro-union sentiment during the war.

After the war, Sumner in the Senate, along with Thaddeus Stevens in the House, led the efforts to give equal civil and political rights to the formerly enslaved people and to Black Americans writ large. He authored one of the most significant civil rights bills of the 19th century, the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Which, in a lot of ways, presaged what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When he died, he received basically a state sendoff, especially from Black Americans who saw him correctly as a great champion of their interests. He was an interesting guy.

Sumner, like most abolitionists, had a theory of the Constitution. Sumner is trying to draw a connection between people’s psychology, their basic orientation towards the world, and their view of what the Constitution is as a document and what it allows.

The slaveholding class, the slave power that he struggled against so heartily, they existed in this environment of mastery. They had mastery over other human beings — absolute and total domination over other human beings. That was inculcated in their lives through mastery, through violence, and through exploitation. In Sumner’s view, of course they would have this hierarchical vision of the constitutional order, which granted them unlimited authority over other human beings. Of course they would have that perspective.

The abolitionists, and especially Back abolitionists, adopt a vision of the Constitution, to use [Frederick] Douglass’ language, as a great “liberty document.”

Of course they would. It doesn’t diminish it, but people who experienced bondage are going to take this document and zero in on the things that seem to establish political equality, that seem to establish opposition to domination and so on and so forth.

That line, which is from a discussion of the 15th Amendment, I believe, is a really astute observation of the things that we as individuals bring to not just our constitutional understanding, but to our political understanding. These qualities of ourselves, based on our backgrounds and experiences, we bring to trying to understand the political world.

Sumner: Also famous for almost getting beaten to the death on the floor of the Senate by Preston Brooks.

That’s basically most of what I would’ve known about Sumner outside of just the big picture Republican Party and antislavery stuff.

Not to make this a Sumner interview, but he's just a really fascinating guy. He was big. He was a big dude, very tall and broad shouldered. He was very flirtatious, so to speak. He maintained a close personal relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln. Just a character.

There’s a whole rabbit trail we could go down, because your reflections on that Sumner quote are making me think of the insights of liberation theologies as it relates to how we read scripture. But let’s talk about the Reconstruction era of politics instead.

How does understanding Reconstruction help in today’s work for social justice and equality?

I think Reconstruction’s fascinating in its own right. This question of, “How do you rebuild a society after a truly catastrophic war?” I’m not sure that our popular culture about the Civil War really emphasizes how much it was a cataclysm for those who experienced it. Close to 1 in 10 Americans were killed or wounded in the conflict. Entire generations were permanently touched by it. It was a huge event.

That’s before you get to the fact of the emancipation of America’s enslaved — 4 million men and women and children. Basically, the largest emancipation of people in bondage until the czar emancipated the serfs in Russia. And the two things are happening concurrently. One of the big differences, of course: The serfs are emancipated, but they’re still effectively serfs. Enslaved people are emancipated, and there’s a sense to put them on the base of political equality, which is also totally novel. Within a handful of years — three years — at the end of the war, you have formerly enslaved people serving in legislatures. Within a decade you have them serving in Congress. That’s extraordinary.

Reconstruction, because of the extraordinary nature of what’s going on, raises these questions that are still relevant to our politics today: What obligation does the federal government have to its individual citizens beyond simple protection? What does American citizenship mean? What are the privileges and immunities of citizenship? What does it mean to belong to this polity? What is the minimum that you get for being an American citizen? Who belongs to the country in the first place? The birthright clause in the 14th Amendment is a statement of who belongs in the country.

Reconstruction also highlights the importance of political economy to social reform. Part of what unravels Reconstruction is a depression, the Panic of 1873.

Part of what impedes the ability to create a stable basis for the political equality of Black Americans in the South is the fact that the economic system wasn’t meaningfully reformed. The people who held concentrations of wealth and property before the war largely still held them after the war. That, as much as anything else, shaped the possibilities of Reconstruction.

The other thing Reconstruction highlights, that need to be emphasized all the more today, is that people, even under the worst circumstances, still have agency. They still retain agency. They can still act for themselves and for others and act collectively.

So much of what I find interesting and inspiring about the Reconstruction era is the way that Black Americans and their allies exercise their agency to do the most they could to make better lives for themselves.

Even though the former confederates and their children end up retaking control of the South — through the use of violence, through the failure of will and nerve from the North — the agency that Black Americans exhibited continued to pay dividends. There’s a line you can draw from the political activity of Black Americans during Reconstruction to the political activity they would engage in at the turn of the 20th century. The creation of organizations like the NAACP, the efforts to really force the federal government to take seriously the on-paper commitments to political and civil equality. It’s all there in the beginning, and it’s all important.