Renowned scholar Michael Zuckert spoke to a packed Coolidge Room last night about a "daring idea, perhaps even an insane idea" whose 220-year political dominance is "not bad for longevity": the American Constitution.
His speech, entitled "From Hamilton to Hamdan: Constitutionalism and the War on Terror," coincided with the federal Constitution Day and related current political perspectives to those espoused by some of the nation's Founding Fathers.
After untangling the views of the framers, Zuckert, a professor at Notre Dame, traced connections between President George W. Bush and Alexander Hamilton; between Bush critics and Thomas Jefferson; and between the Supreme Court and James Madison.
Bush, he said, is a "hyper-Hamiltonian" because he believes strongly in flexible executive power and in its constitutional foundation.
On the other end of the spectrum, his opponents (Zuckert specifically named the American Civil Liberties Union) often have absolutist conceptions of inviolable rights.
"These are not pragmatists. You might call them ultra-Jeffersonians," he said.
Despite this lack of pragmatism, Zuckert had sympathy for their ideology, which he said has its roots in the due process language of the fifth and 14th amendments.
"It is in the Constitution after all: twice," he said.
But Zuckert was more comfortable with the middle ground, as supported by James Madison and, specifically in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case, by the Supreme Court.
In this case, the Court ruled that the Executive Branch did not have the authority to try Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, in a military tribunal, thus undermining the trial process that Bush supported for Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Still, the June 29, 2006 ruling did leave open the possibility that tribunals could be allowed if Congress were to specifically authorize them. Congress proceeded to do so and the Court has not opposed them.
Zuckert said that the Hamdan decision, which balances the rights of the Executive and Legislative Branches and allows for flexibility without completely sacrificing rights in extenuating circumstances, falls squarely in the Madisonian tradition.
It empowers both the branches, "but it does not give either of them a blank check," he said.
In tying together these varying ideologies, Zuckert relied heavily on historical perspective. This perspective began with a look at the term "constitution," with Zuckert noting that the current conception of the word as a document enumerating rights and powers differs greatly from the less-structured image it evoked for Aristotle and Plato.
"It's striking now that this modern constitutionalism ... was so late in coming," he said.
When the modern view of the constitution as a written and restrictive document emerged, first with the Whigs in England and later in America, a consensus among the framers was conspicuously absent.
They agreed to follow the tradition of John Locke, but Zuckert said that fault lines emerged when they had to decide whether the Executive or Legislative Branch should wield wartime and emergency powers and whether these powers should even be included in the Constitution.
On the second issue, he said that Hamilton and Madison supported putting them in the document, but Jefferson disagreed.
While Jefferson recognized that they might need to be exercised, he supported going outside of the Constitution in those cases.
"The Constitution should be written for safe times and ordinary circumstances," Zuckert said, summarizing Jefferson's view.
Zuckert, the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor and political science department chair at Notre Dame, is a prolific writer whose books include "Natural Rights and the New Republicanism" and "Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy."
He is also the former professor of Vickie Sullivan, Tufts' Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences. In introducing him before the event, she said she still considers him her teacher and called him "a scholar of amazing depth and breadth."
His speech was sponsored by the newly-minted Tufts Center for American Constitutionalism with the help of the Toupin Fund, the political science department and the offices of University President Lawrence Bacow and Dean of Undergraduate Education Jim Glaser.
This was the first event for the Center for American Constitutionalism, which was founded by Assistant Political Science Professor Vincent Phillip Mu?±oz and Political Science Department Chair Robert Devigne and opened last semester.
It aptly coincided with Constitution Day, which universities receiving federal funding are required to celebrate by a federal law sponsored by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). Those who do not celebrate it could see their funding cut.
"I think it's kind of unfortunate that it's mandated," Glaser said.
But he said that the goal behind the celebration is very much worthwhile, something that Mu?±oz agreed with.
Mu?±oz said that this is particularly true as the War on Terror causes the Constitution to be "stretched and threatened."
"I would say that studying the Constitution is as relevant now as it ever has been," he said.
