Casey Mattox on Why the Constitution Still Matters and How We Can Defend It

Even more fundamental, even behind that is the work that all of you and that so many people around the country do all the time to build up all the other institutions.

In your church or communities, those are, if you're defending a republic, right, or a republic isn't just the government. It's all of the other institutions of society that we are helping to make happen, that create a country where all of our answers don't have to come from now. Because we are providing answers through other means.

“That is, I think, fundamental to the future of the Constitution, the future of the republic is that we don't turn everything into a problem for government to solve.”

But we don't do that is by solving this problems in all the other areas. Americans are capable of achieving extraordinary things when they have the freedom and opportunity to do so. This is American Potential.

Everyone, welcome to the American Potential Podcast. I'm your host David from today's Constitution Day, which is the founding document of our government.

So we're going to be talking about the Constitution. Do you know who the writers were? Do you know what about where they pulled inspiration from or what about the amendments that have been added? These answers and more are going to be part of our discussion today with our guests, Casey Maddox, who's a senior advisor for Americans for prosperity. Casey, welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me on, David.

Thank you. Well, you know, I know those of us who are a constitutionalist, limited government guys. I really love the Constitution, and I know that you love it more than most and no more about it more than most. So, you know, the Constitution was signed 11 years after the declaration was signed, which obviously being our tune to 50th anniversary. We're celebrating that like crazy, but the Constitution obviously is vital to our nation's functioning and kind of how it's progressed.

What were some of the debates about how government should run and that shaped the Constitution? Yeah, well, you know, obviously the time of the founding.

And we first of all when they called the Constitution convention, it was called as just an effort to try to fix the system they had at the time.

The articles of the Confederation, which was the system we had at the time. And so they called it as an effort to try to fix the articles of Confederation.

“It pretty quickly realized that the only way to fix the articles of Confederation was to scrap the articles and move on and just create a whole new constitution.”

Because the articles of Confederation basically set it up so you had 13 totally independent nations, right? And each of the colonies and they were sort of supposed to be kind of voluntarily working together. But that created all kinds of problems. So you had to have a system that would work and our constitution is actually what came out of that. So who were the kind of the key players, the founding fathers as to who were most involved in shaping the Constitution?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's a long list. I think most of the, one of the things that people don't really appreciate though is that so many of these people were a lot younger than you think they were. You know, I think James Madison was 25 years old. He's sort of thought of as the principle drafter of the Constitution. Really 25 years old.

Which is, you know, in part how you get the, if you look at the, you know, some of the ages in the Constitution itself, right?

“Like so how old do you have to be a United States congressman?”

And the age chosen is 25. Is it any accident that the guy who is writing the documents says, I think about 25. We don't, we don't make it older than 25, 25 sounds about, right? And but you know, I think it was Thomas Jefferson back here. Thomas Jefferson was in his early 30s.

Most of these guys were pretty young. I think it was only Ben Franklin who sort of the elder statesmen of the group was in his early 70s. Most of them were, they were handful of them that were in their 50s. Most of these guys were in their 40s and 30s. And some of them as young as their 20s Alexander Hamilton was 21 years old.

He signed on to a Constitution that made him ineligible to be a member of the House of Representatives for four more years. Wow. So very young. But, you know, I think, you know, obviously Madison comes to mind immediately with the Constitution.

Where is anyone who has seen Hamilton knows John Jay, Alexander Hamilton. And Madison were sort of the drivers of the federalist papers. People like James Wilson was from Pennsylvania. It was also one of the primary kind of framers of the Constitution.

But it was fundamentally a, you know, some committee work basically.

It was written by committee in a lot of ways. So what were they inspired by? Like, what helped, what went into forming this really landmark document? You know, I think even at the time, they recognized that this was a pretty strange assembly. And you know, Ben Franklin later said to me, again, he's one of the older older members of the convention.

And he even appreciated that the people that they had pulled together in this room were a pretty exceptional exceptional group of people. And so they were drawing on a lot of, you know, things that they had read, things that they knew.

“But remember that it books were not something that everyone had at the time.”

And frankly, it created a library in Pennsylvania. But it's not like libraries were common, the easy access to information. So you very often you had just a few of the copies of some of these books that were in, in the country, right, on this side of the Atlantic. And they were sharing them amongst themselves. So on locks, treatises of government.

For example, one of the major, I think kind of understood, you know, pieces to help them understand. And how natural rights worked. And so that was, you know, was kind of one of the key pieces of information. The Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, some of these documents that had been there before. But in terms of, you know, Montesquieu and separation of powers, French thinker, they looked outside the English tradition.

They were also very well aware of history. And the fact that they were creating a form of government that had been, you know, that was, was new, but had some parallels in the Greeks and the Romans and in other, in other times. And so they're looking toward those civilizations.

“Those attempts at building something even remotely like this and saying, "What worked? What didn't work?”

How do we reorganize our government so that it will take the best of those parts and leave the parts that didn't work behind?" And that's what we ended up with. So obviously borrowed from and tried to learn the best lessons from the past.

What do you think makes our constitution kind of revolutionary or such an amazing document?

You know, I think what makes it truly remarkable is the way that it, both creates a government, and at the same time, restrains that same government. By creating these sort of checks and balances, one against another, right? And so one of the things that people end up, two mistakes people make. One, they think of the constitution and when they think of the constitution,

the first thing they think about very often are the rights in the constitution, right, the Bill of Rights. But as Justice Scalia once said, that's, you know, every ten-pot dictatorship in world history is had, or at least in recent history, has had something like a Bill of Rights as we created one. The difference between us and the Soviet Union and North Korea today, and so many other places around the world, is that we actually have a structure of government that make sure that those rights and the Bill of Rights are real.

You've got, you know, different branches of government that are playing off one against another. You've got courts that you can go to that are independent courts from the political branches that can protect those rights. And so, and then you have states, the states and the federal government and they are separate sovereigns that have overlapping spheres of influence, but they can check what another, right?

“And I think that's the, you know, maybe that the most important part of our constitution is all the stuff before you get to all the rights that people think of very often, immediately,”

is the way that it sort of slows the gears of government down and forces government to respect the rights of the people.

So go back to you mentioned the Bill of Rights, I've just the first ten amendments to the constitution.

Why did they feel like they needed to include those?

You know, he had drafted the constitution, the first seven articles of the constitution.

I thought he did a pretty good job and thought we don't need the amendments, but they had to submit them to be, you know, be ratified by the states. And as they sent them out to be ratified, this was one of the major concerns people had. Madison's view was, look, if we didn't give the power to Congress to regulate your speech or religious freedom or anything else, then that it's, you know, no big deal.

They can't do those things, we already said it, right? So we only need to put something else in saying they can't violate these rights, they don't even have the authority in the first place.

I'm glad you lost that debate because it turns out that you need both a belt and suspenders. Yeah, it's very common for, for government to, you know, sort of forget its limitations there and start doing things under powers that has that actually would end up infringing, infringing it rights.

“And so, but that's how we ended up with a bill of rights was basically the states saying, I'm, we're not so sure that we can trust that this federal government is actually going to stay within its, in its confines.”

And so we need to not only say what rights or what powers they have, but we also need to say specifically what things they can't do. And so, that's how we ended up with, with Bill Wright says that sort of bonus edition while the states were making the determination about whether or not to ratify the constitution in the first place. Yeah, I am glad that they included the bill of rights because it just seems, I feel like every third show I do here, every third podcast is talking about government overreach and how it's of how it affects people's lives and every sector of, you know, of our society.

It seems like, you know, there is, there's been a constant push to expand government to all aspects of life and having a document that spells out, you know, limits on that even though that's so open to interpretation.

“It's, it's a constant struggle, and I know that those of us who believe in limited government, I think that we'd probably share the views of the founders, at least in our minds, that, you know, that's, that's a necessary tool right now.”

We, we've been, are bad shape without it. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's the, the bill of rights of effectively created a separate check that the people have through the courts, especially on the power of the federal government as well. And so it's sort of opened up another front for it for us to make sure that government doesn't overstep its bounds. Well, I, you know, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding out there, you know, I was like, say, particularly amongst young people, but that's sometimes being unfair.

It is a lot of misunderstanding in general about where rights come from. And, and then, you know, I, I, I asked somebody the question the other day, I wanted, it wasn't one of my kids, because I wanted to say that they've been raised right and learn the right things, but, but, you know, I kind of said, like, you know, where do you think our rights come from?

“No, I, while they're given to us about the government. Well, that was true in a lot of, a lot of nations took in the past, but that's not true for us, is it?”

No, it, it's not. And both in the Declaration of Independence, very, very beginning of the Declaration of Independence, you know, it's, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. They're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, right? We didn't have a government yet. We hadn't set up a government, we hadn't planned anything about how the government was going to function. And the very first words out of Jefferson's pen were about the self-evident nature of our rights, right? That they didn't come from, from any government that they, they came separately from natural law and from God.

And so that, I think, is extraordinarily important. It's also reflected in the Bill of Rights. They're not framed as grants from the government. They're framed as restraints on government. What it can't do, which assumes that those rights are things that we already have, right? Congress can't make a law respecting the freedom of speech. It didn't say, and this is what the freedom of speech is.

And here's what we protect as the freedom of speech. It's that Congress can't violate the freedom of speech, which is an existing thing that you already had.

Right? And so it's a, it's very important that that's, that's how it sets, it's set up, right? That government is coming on to the scene with rights already existing. And it can't just wipe them away and it can't get them to us. They're already there.

It kind of puts it into like an operating system and it's like, hey, just make sure you know that we have these rights no matter what the government's doing.

That's right. Exactly.

“What do you think is one of the most common misunderstandings from Americans about the Constitution?”

You know, I think one of the things that people misunderstand a lot about the thing, I mean, it's not a very long document, right? You could read it. The whole Constitution, you know, in maybe 10 to 15 minutes, you can get through the whole thing. But people tend to very often equate constitutional with good and, you know, people on both sides of the aisle all over the place. Well, let's tend to do it in some way or another. To think that first of all, whatever the Constitution protects must be a good thing.

And second of all, that any good thing must be protected by the Constitution.

And that's not, that's not always true, right? There are all kinds of things in the Constitution that, you know, that were sort of not stopped in the case of slavery, for example,

or that were that are protected, right? A speech that is protected, that you don't have to believe that the speech is good to think that this is protected. There's a lot of ugly and free political, a lot of ugly free speech out there. That's protected. Absolutely. It's a lot of, a lot of things that are very much not good things that I, you know, I wish ideas that I wish didn't exist that people didn't hold,

“that are nevertheless constitutionally protected. And so that's, it's an important thing to not conflate those two things, but very often I think in our political debates.”

People do end up doing that on some level, thinking that basically the Constitution is sort of revered. And so therefore whatever, whatever it does must be good or whatever is good must be something that it certainly protects.

That's not always the case, right? The Constitution sort of sets the basic framework for how we're supposed to engage with one another and what rights we have and what government can do.

But the other big actor here is us. You've got a group of people, citizens who are empowered to act through the Constitution, through choosing their representatives, through electing a president. And so the result of that is that we get to put our policy preferences or at least argue these questions out on the national level. So that's going to get you to some ideas that are very good ideas that end up being protected and made law and some things that can be very bad that can be made law through that process.

You know, I think that that's really interesting because I think if a friend of ours, you know, I'm certainly someone who's on the right and I think a friend who'd be wearing a constitution t-shirt and then advocating for really violating some of our rights just because it's like they want to do good. But it's like, hey, you know, eventually when you just empower, you know, we need to be protected. We need our rights safeguarded no matter what, what do you see, you know, looking across the political landscape, looking back in history, what do you see is the biggest threats to our constitution right now.

“Yeah, I think that maybe the biggest threat right off top of my head is just sort of the sense that we're in constant crisis.”

And so we need someone to act and we need them to act now. That's been, you know, true for a lot of American history. We tend to get ourselves or be in a lot of crisis moments. The crisis is almost always places where we're willing to give up freedom or willing to give up, you know, something important in order to have some safety to have some certainty that, you know, they were going to be protected and that's very, and it's very hard to pull that back. But that sense of, you know, I think most of the arguments against sort of what the constitution requires it in the given circumstance are very often people saying, but it's, you know, but it's necessary, it's needed in a certain circumstance right.

You know, the economy has changed, so therefore we must dot dot dot, and I think that's that mentality when we allow ourselves to get in the mentality that the constitution is an obstacle to protecting us to, you know, preventing problems from happening that we don't want to see happen.

I think that's the, you know, maybe the biggest challenge that we're. It would be face kind of throughout American history and certainly now, is that sense that we must do something and the constitution very often makes it hard to do something really fast. Yeah, I think, you know, you see, we're launching the Supreme Court and sometimes it's frustrating, just because the other, the way they're interpreting it. What do you think, is there is there a right that you believe is most under attack right now or that you're most fearful about.

You know, I think probably the things I'm going to say would be both first and fourth amendment rights.

I mean, first of all, rights are very well protected. In law, right, in the history of the world, if you were trying to, if you, you've got someone to worship or something to say.

“In the entire history of the world, you should probably pick right now in the United States, right?”

In law, we are better protected than it's ever been before, right? But culturally, we're, you see signs of kind of losing that confidence that free speech, religious freedom, those things are actually good things. And when you start to lose that cultural confidence, you know, how long can the courts, you know, refuse when you start to lose that cultural confidence. I think that's one concern. I think, and then on, you know, fourth amendment rights, that's the other big, big challenge. I think the founders would look at, you know, a lot of it has got to broaden ourselves.

We obviously, we all walk around the advice in our pockets that, since information to third parties and tells those third parties where we are and all kinds of information about us at all types.

“And that's the modern world work we're living in and the courts are trying to figure out how do we protect privacy?”

Sort of given that reality, right? I think the founders would be stunned by, you know, sort of the way that information about us is able to be shared with a government. And that's just sort of the degree to which we have handed that information over, but it is difficult trying to figure out how do you make sure that at least the spirit of those protections is still maintained. And that sort of the way that we handle things now doesn't just sort of swamp the whole protection of the fourth amendment.

So as you wrap up yourself, we're a constitution day. I'm sure that you have a big party, maybe you're dressing up, really constitution, everything you constitutional scholars like to do. We all do this, right? I'm sorry, that's just a Friday night for case I do it.

“But what, what would you say to, you know, folks who were listening to this and, you know, really, or like, hey, I'm sort of about constitution, how can people take action to try to defend the constitution?”

You know, I mentioned earlier, but legitimately, it's constitution day. Go read it. Read the constitution. You're probably going to see something in it that you didn't realize was there. I mean, even if you have read it before. The constitution day is a great day to do it. Because it can empower you to, I mean, just, you know, that's simple step can empower you to actually have some, some conversations going forward that are better informed. I mean, you're a David, I have joked here about me being that constitutional attorney.

But, you know, the vast majority of people in the constitution was ratified the vast majority of the people who were writing it and then ultimately were the ones who ratified it were not lawyers.

And they were coming up with words that made sense to them. There's nothing particularly fancy or, you know, requires a lot of great to be able to understand the words that are written in the constitution. And so, I think, you know, the more we can be better prepared to be able to advocate for it, not in a legal sense, but, you know, the people who it protects. I think the other thing I would say is, there's a lot that's necessary to defending the constitution that has nothing to do with actual sort of constitutional advocacy or certainly anything in the courts or law.

AFP is fantastic at connecting people to opportunities to engage with elected representatives, even more kind of fundamental, even behind that is the work that, that all of you and that so many people around the country do all the time to build up all the other institutions.

And I think that create a country where all of our answers don't have to come from the government because we're providing answers to, through other means.

“That is, I think, fundamental to, you know, the future of the constitution, future of the republic is that we don't turn everything into a problem for government to solve.”

And the way we don't do that is by solving those problems in all the other areas of our lives. And I think history shows us that often government will try to solve any problem. And expand government to move into those places that if these other institutions like your communities or our families or churches are in solving the problems, then we're inviting government over reach a bigger government. So you're right, kind of make sure that those institutions are healthy is really an important part. Absolutely.

Plus it just gives you a good life.

That's right. It's so much better to live life that way. You get it. It's got to be just engaged with that, you know, with your community, with your neighbors.

“It's, you know, it can be an unsatisfactory answer to say that the best thing you can do to defend the republic may be befriending your neighbor, inviting them over for barbecue.”

But for most people that is probably true that building those sort of societal bonds is as important as anything you can possibly do. We have a society that can function and we've got a constitution that can function for that for that kind of society. Well, I think someone on something case of you. So everybody's homework assignment. If they wanted to defend the constitution is invite neighbors over for barbecue and read the constitution.

That's right. Perfect. You know, constitution day experience. Since you're maybe send us your photos of you and your constitutional, a tire standing in your backyard building of ours. Excellent. All right, case of addicts.

Thanks you so much.

“Casey for talking to us about this important document and helping us celebrate constitution day.”

Absolutely. Thanks David. Thanks. Hey folks, if you like this episode and would like to say connected with the podcast, be sure to sign up on our community app, which is new to interact with me. Also, be sure to like and subscribe to our channel, as well as following us on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube.

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