It is the People who are inherently invested with all authority and legislative power to create and alter governments, constitutions, charters, and laws.  Thus it is the People who are the primary Constituent Power of every polity---the governing political element of society.  In line with this, constitutions and governments are inherently derivative.  This state of affairs is known as the First Principles of every organized society.

Accordingly,  recognition and use of First Principles is the first step to be taken whenever People come together to establish or reestablish a society.   Its use by the citizens of this nation became visible during the British colonization of North America.   It found expression in  the Mayflower Compact of November 11, 1620, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of June 12,  1776, the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 and the U.S. Constitution of September 17, 1787.  The founding generations of Americans thus practiced firsthand the power to create and alter their governments, constitutions, and laws.

James Madison pointed to the primacy of First Principles on August 31, 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia--in response to delegate Mr. Daniel Carroll of Maryland, who had asserted there was no way to amend the Maryland Constitution other than by what was contained therein.  Madison clarified:

"The difficulty in Maryland was no greater than in other States, where no mode of change was pointed out by the Constitution, and all officers were under oath to support it. The People were in fact, the fountain of all power, and by resorting to them, all difficulties were got over. They could alter constitutions as they pleased. It was a principle in the Bills of rights, that first principles might be resorted to." ¹

Earlier, on June 6th, at the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson, second only to Madison in fashioning the Constitution, described the context of our republican structure:

"The Legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole society. Representation is made necessary only because it is impossible for the People to act collectively." ²

Wilson was acknowledging the obvious impossibility of assembling great numbers of People from distant geographic areas to operate a polity.  These physical limitations dictated the structure of our government in 1787.

The Framers specified reliance on First Principles in Article VII which called for the use of the People’s constituent power to be expressed in state ratification conventions to create our government.  Given that technology was lacking to overcome the great distances of Colonial America in assembling the growing numbers of People, they had no choice but to build a representative structure as the sole legislative branch of the government.  To have designed a constitutional procedure whereby the People could amend, establish policy or make laws directly at that time was simply not on the horizon.

Nevertheless, today, as at our founding, the Constitution can be amended two ways: as specified by Article V by elected representatives and as clearly implied in its Preamble by the People directly.  The language of Article V is tailored to potential use by the defined federal and state  governments,  for their use alone in amending  the Constitution.  That structural specification has no effect on the sovereign constituent power of the People -- the Constituent Power to create or  amend the Constitution today as in 1787.

It is self evident although not obvious in conventional thinking that the Constitution does not and cannot limit the powers of its creator –-the People.  It would be ludicrous to suggest that the creator is subject to its creation, i.e. the officialdom of government.  The People can at any time exercise First Principles to amend the Constitution and enact a law establishing legislative procedures to legislate in an orderly fashion. 

First Principles is the political heart of the voluntary supra-governmental election now being conducted by the nonprofit corporation Philadelphia II on behalf of the People permitting citizens, if they so choose, to amend the Constitution by ratifying the Democracy Amendment  and to enact the Democracy Act  as a federal statute.  Should a sufficient number of citizens voting agree to these actions, the People will establish, for the first time, legislative procedures and legislative elections with which they can continue to  exercise their legislative powers in an orderly, deliberative and statutory  manner.

It is important to realize that it is the People rather than the Congress, who will have enacted the Democracy Amendment and the Democracy Act.  In doing so they will have again followed the good advice articulated by James Madison at the Philadelphia Convention on June 5, 1787: 

"For these reasons as well as others he [Madison] thought it indispensable that the new Constitution should be ratified in the most unexceptionable form, and by the supreme authority of the People themselves." ⁴

and on July 23, 1787:

"These changes would make essential inroads on State Constitutions …and in the case of these a ratification must of necessity be obtained from the People." ⁵

ENDNOTES

1.  Farrand,  Max, Ed. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, (New Haven, Yale. Univ. Press, 1966),  Vol. II, p. 476

2.  Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 132-133

3.  McCloskey, Robt. Green, Ed. The Works of James Wilson, (Cambridge:  Belknap Press, 1967) Vol. I., p .405.

4.  Farrand, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 123.

5.  Ibid., Vol. I, p. 92

6. Meiklejohn, Alexander, Political Freedom - The Constitutional Powers of the People (New York:  Harper, 1960),  p. 18

“In those words [the preamble of the Constitution] it is agreed, and with every passing moment it is reagreed, that the people of the United States shall be self-governed. To that fundamental enactment all other provisions of the Constitution, all statutes, all administrative decrees, are subsidiary and dependent. All other purposes, whether individual or social, can find their legitimate scope and meaning only as they conform to the one basic purpose that the citizens of this nation shall make and shall obey their own laws, shall be at once their own subjects and their own masters.” 6 Alexander Meiklejohn, 1960

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