ABSTRACT
The Constitution is widely viewed as a sort of secular scripture, something that provides not just the legal framework of the political sys tem, but a divine bequest of universally agreed-on democratic wisdom from the nation’s Founding Fathers. In reality, the Constitution is less a sacred text and more of rulebook, a rulebook for the political system of the United States. A constitution performs a similarly powerful role in relation to the public officials themselves; it determines what they can and cannot do and the nature of their relationship with other officeholders and the general populace. A constitution establishes a set of legal relationships between leaders and the led. State constitutions and the Articles of Confederation clearly went to some lengths to uphold at least some of the core principles of democracy.
