Constitution Day 2024
Story and photos by Hank McIntire
The Center for Constitutional Studies (CCS) held its annual Constitution Day conference Sept. 17, 2024, in the Clarke Building. The theme of the conference was “Parties in the USA: Does Partisanship Undermine the Constitution?”
Before an audience of nearly 500 in their morning keynote address, Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis, co-authors of The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America, discussed how a healthy two-party system contributes to the American constitutional tradition.
“The meanings of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are constantly evolving, along with our two major parties,” explained Verlan Lewis. “Words have consequences. There is no coherent, enduring, historical philosophy binding together [‘left’ and ‘right’] issue positions. Instead, let’s talk about ‘Democrats’ and ‘Republicans.’ That implies groups of people who have decided to work together to achieve certain common ends. That’s healthy for our politics. And it’s a false idea that one party must be correct about everything, and the other party is wrong about everything.”
In the afternoon session of the conference, a panel—moderated by Matthew Brogdon, senior director of CCS; and joined by Ryan Bell, of Better Boundaries Utah; Savannah Eccles Johnston, assistant professor of Political Science at Salt Lake Community College; and Derek Monson, of the Sutherland Institute—discussed the Utah Legislature’s ongoing effort to roll back the Utah Supreme Court’s recent decision altering the initiative process and the proper role of direct democracy in constitutional self-government.
“There has been a tension in American political development between a Founding era that is deeply suspicious of the direct-democratic process and the Progressive era, which sees exclusively representative functions as inadequate to getting the will of the people passed,” observed Johnston. “Having been ratified during the Progressive era, it’s fundamental to Utah’s Constitution to have a direct democratic method. And the idea is that the people can be trusted to be good-enough citizens to understand difficult questions.”
Summing up the impact and importance of the conference, Brogdon believes that “we live in an era of eroding trust in our laws and institutions—legislatures, courts, law enforcement, political parties, even the Constitution itself,” he said. “These Constitution Day discussions are an effort to lead our community in reinvigorating and restoring needed trust in the institutions We the People need to do the work of representative democracy and constitutional self-government.”