Public Knowledge and the Constitution

 From the Annenberg Public Policy Center:

The 2024 edition of the Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, released annually to celebrate Constitution Day on September 17, finds that:

• Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) can name all three branches of government.
• Asked what specific rights are guaranteed by the First Amendment, nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) name freedom of speech. The other four rights are recalled by far fewer people: the second most-often cited, freedom of religion, is named by just 39%.
• A little over half of U.S. adults know which party controls the Senate and which controls the House of Representatives.
• Over 80% of Americans support prohibiting Supreme Court justices from participating in cases in which they have “personal or financial interests.” Nearly as many people support creation of a formal ethics code for the court.

“Civics knowledge matters,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “Those who do not understand the rights protected by the Constitution can neither cherish nor invoke them; those who do not know which party controls the House and Senate may misattribute credit or blame for action or inaction.”

Knowing the Constitution

From the Annenberg Public Policy Center:

Many Americans do not know what rights are protected under the First Amendment and a substantial number cannot name all three branches of government, according to the 2023 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s annual, nationally representative survey finds that when U.S. adults are asked to name the specific rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, only one right is recalled by most of the respondents: Freedom of speech, which 77% named.

The civics knowledge survey, released annually to celebrate Constitution Day (Sept. 17), also finds that although two-thirds of Americans (66%) can name all three branches of government, 10% can name two, 7% can name only one, and 17% cannot name any.

As in the recent past, the Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey was fielded in a year of high-profile events that propelled the workings of government into the daily news cycle. This year saw four criminal indictments of former President Donald Trump and numerous trials for those charged in the 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Led by a conservative supermajority, the U.S. Supreme Court sidelined race-conscious college admissions programs and a Biden Administration student-loan forgiveness plan. Several of the associate justices were dogged by allegations of unethical conduct. A plea deal to resolve a gun charge and tax offenses by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter collapsed, while in Congress, Republican Representatives discussed whether to open impeachment proceedings against Biden.

“It is worrisome that one in six U.S. adults cannot name any of the branches of government and that only 1 in 20 can name all five freedoms protected by the First Amendment,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and director of the survey. “One is unlikely to cherish or work to protect freedoms one does not know one has and will have trouble holding elected and unelected leaders accountable if one does not understand the nature and prerogatives of each branch and the ways in which the power of each is kept in check.”

College Students on Originalism

Jennifer Kabbany at The College Fix:

Should Supreme Court justices interpret the U.S. Constitution based on what the Founding Fathers meant at the time — or today’s modern mores?

Most college students say the latter, according to a new College Fix poll, meaning the majority of young people today support a Supreme Court that makes decisions based on a living Constitution as opposed to supporting originalism.

The College Fix asked 1,000 college students: “Should future U.S. Supreme Court nominees base their rulings on their understanding of what the U.S. Constitution meant as it was originally written, or should future nominees base their rulings on what they think it means in current times?”

Sixty-nine percent replied “current times,” while 19 percent supported its original meaning. The rest said they are not sure.

The online poll was fielded Sept. 1, roughly two weeks before the nation marks Constitution Day on September 17. The poll was facilitated by College Pulse, a survey and analytics company focused on college students, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.

Happy Constitution Day

Yuval Levin at AEI:

Populism and elitism are each in its way a kind of politics of hubris. Each is rooted in a plainly unreasonable view about the capacity of human beings — be it a select class or the people as a whole — to make just the right governing decisions. The Constitution is plainly dubious about both sets of claims to superior judgment. It is built upon a profound skepticism about the ability of any person and any group or political arrangement to overcome the limitations of human reason and human nature, and so establishes a system of checks to prevent sudden large mistakes while enabling gradual changes supported by a broad and longstanding consensus. Experts and aristocrats should not govern, nor should the people do so directly, but rather the people’s representatives should govern in a system filled with mediating institutions and opposing interests — a system designed to force us to see problems and proposed solutions from a variety of angles simultaneously and, as Alexander Hamilton puts it in Federalist 73, “to increase the chances in favor of the community against the passing of bad laws through haste, inadvertence, or design.”

That such a system is far from populist should be obvious. In Federalist 63, James Madison says that the constitutional architecture involves “the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity” from directly governing. The more democratic elements of the Constitution are intended to be checks on the power of government, not expressions of trust in the wisdom of the public as a whole. And the more aristocratic elements are checks as well — on the tendency of representative institutions to shamelessly curry favor with the electorate at the expense of responsible government.

Constitution and Citizenship Day

Jon Bari, president of the Constitutional Walking Tour of Philadelphia, writes:

While most Americans know that July 4 is our country’s birthday, far fewer Americans know that Sept. 17 is the birthday of our nation’s government, the date in 1787 on which delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia completed and signed the Constitution of the United States.

It was not until 2004 that Constitution and Citizenship Day was officially established when the late Robert Byrd, one of the United States Senate’s leading Constitutional scholars, introduced legislation that President George W. Bush signed into law requiring that all schools, colleges and federal agencies receiving federal funds offer annual educational programming involving the Constitution of the United States on Constitution and Citizenship Day, Sept. 17.

• The Defense Department has a page devoted to the day.
• FairVote tells the story of Byrd's advocacy of the law.