Essay on the constitution than and now

225 years ago, on September 17, 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed their names to the final draft of the United States Constitution.  Less than a year later, on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the 9th state to ratify it, it became, as it states in its own Article VI, the supreme law of the land.  

All these years later, few of us realize how cantankerous were the arguments that brought this document into being-- a first for a nation, a charter that created a country.  Well, actually, it’s the second version of the charter that created the United States.  Call it USA version 2.0.  

That’s because the country was actually created by the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781.  By those articles, the thirteen British colonies-- now referring to themselves as “states” to signify their autonomy-- bound themselves in “perpetual union” with each other.  The problem was, their confederation, which lacked a strong central government, didn’t function very well.  So in the hot summer of 1787, in the Pennsylvania Statehouse in Philadelphia, delegates from all of the states gathered to formulate the second version of an operating system for their new country.

That’s what the Constitution really is-- an operating system.  It lays out how the government will operate, and it leaves it to that government to run the country.  One of the reasons it has worked-- surprisingly well for an experiment-- for over 200 years is because it is an operating system.  The laws and regulations created under its authority are, well, apps.  The founding fathers were way ahead of time in their mode of thinking.

There is only one crime defined in the Constitution, that of treason, and it is narrowly defined.  Other crimes, and laws and regulations that tell us what .  

In the end, the whole turned out to be greater than the sum of its parts, something for which we should all be grateful, and think about as we celebrate the fact that the US Constitution has been around now for 225 years.

Explanation:

mark me