250 Years of Misreading the Constitution, and the Preamble Proves It

The Preamble Matters

Recently, during a House Financial Services Committee hearing, Acting CFPB Director Russell Vought told Congress that his job is "to carry out the agenda of the President of the United States." Representative Rashida Tlaib cut him off. His paycheck, she said, comes from taxpayer dollars — his obligation runs to the American people, not to Donald Trump. "You should be fired," she told him.

Vought confused a discretion with a duty. The President may direct how an officer exercises the authority Congress gave him. The President cannot be the source of that authority. Nothing in Article II — and nothing in the statute that created his office — obligates a federal officer to the personal political agenda of whoever happens to occupy the presidency. Vought described the agenda as the thing he serves, when it is at most the thing that shapes how he serves the law.

This is true even after Seila Law LLC v. CFPB (2020), which held that the CFPB's removal protections were unconstitutional and severed them, leaving the Director removable at will by the President. That decision confirms presidential removal power; it does not transform statutory duties into personal fealty. An officer removable at will must still execute the law as written by Congress, not as wished by a president.

The President's own oath settles it. Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 requires him to swear that he will "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Not the voters who elected him. Not his party's platform. If the President himself is bound to the text, no officer beneath him can owe more to the President personally than the President owes to the document. And the powers of that office are identical whether his approval stands at thirty percent or seventy.

The Constitution does not measure.

Tlaib's answer was only half right. She correctly rejected the notion that his admission made him a President's instrument — an obligation that no officer of a statutorily created agency owes. But her alternative — that he served "the American people" — was incomplete rather than merely populist. She invoked the founding-era fiduciary conception of public office, where officers hold delegated power in trust for the public. That conception is sound, but it requires constitutional plumbing: an officer's fiduciary duty runs to the public through the Constitution, not directly to a plebiscitary majority. Government may be politically accountable through elections and morally accountable to the public, but the legal source of a federal officer's power is neither elections, nor popular approval, nor loyalty to the President who appointed or supervises that officer. It derives exclusively from the Constitution and the laws enacted pursuant to it.

I came to this understanding through choice rather than inheritance. Becoming an American would require me to study the document and then swear to it. But I found the true meaning of the U.S. Constitution through ten years of hard legal proceedings, at every level of the American courts — beginning with a custody case for my daughter in California state court, continuing through the quasi-judicial administrative courts of the immigration system, and ending at the Supreme Court, where I filed several petitions for certiorari — all as a pro se litigant. And what I found in the fifty-two words of the Preamble was not a description of government at all. It was the naming of a single object around which the People agreed to unite. That object was not the federal government, nor any future officeholders, but the Constitution they themselves ordained.

The People of the United States did not unite around government as the source of their political identity. Nor did they agree to unite by creating an unlimited federal authority, and not by placing their allegiance in any future officeholder. They united exclusively around a Constitution, and that Constitution, as the second step, created, defined, and limited the government, including the President, that would follow.

These fifty-two words, which the Supreme Court has historically treated as having limited operative force, establish a deliberate constitutional architecture — one that becomes clear from the text itself, and that the founding history then confirms.

The Wording Everyone Ignores

Fifty-two words defining the purpose for which the People of the United States agreed to unite in a more perfect Union, ending with a period.

Look at the verb and at what it takes as its object. The People "ordain and establish this Constitution" — not this government, not this Presidency, not this Congress. The object of the founding act is a text. Nothing else in the sentence is created at all.

The body of the document then confirms this at every point where it could have said otherwise. Article VI, Clause 2 declares that "this Constitution … shall be the supreme Law of the Land." Not the President. Not Congress. Not the will of the People at any given moment. The document names itself as supreme. Article I opens by vesting "all legislative Powers herein granted" — language that presupposes a granting instrument already in force before there is a Congress to receive anything. And Article VI, Clause 3 binds every senator, representative, state legislator, and executive and judicial officer, federal and state, by oath "to support this Constitution." Not an oath to the President. Not to Congress. Not to the nation in the abstract. An oath to the text.

That is what a government of laws and not of men looks like in the plumbing. Most systems in history have bound allegiance to a ruler, a crown, or a party. This one binds it to a book.

The absence of "We the People" from the body corroborates the same reading. The phrase appears once, in the enacting sentence, and never again. No other provision claims that the People directly ordained Congress, the Presidency, the federal judiciary, or any particular power. Those institutions appear only after the Constitution has been established, and they appear as creatures of the text.

Once the Constitution exists, it operates with its own authority. The government it creates answers to that text, not to a fresh act of popular will each time. The sequence is deliberate: the People united around the Constitution, and the Constitution then created, defined, and limited the government. Two distinct constitutional acts, in one direction only.

In 1905, the Supreme Court came close to explaining why, and stopped short. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Court wrote:

The Court has long asked whether the Preamble grants governmental power. That is the wrong question. The Preamble grants no governmental power because it does something more fundamental: it establishes the hierarchy of the constitutional order. The People are the source of all authority, the Constitution is the sole channel through which that authority acts, and the government is subordinate to the text and answerable to the People only through it.

This two-step architecture is sometimes challenged by reference to Chief Justice Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819): "The government proceeds directly from the people; is 'ordained and established' in the name of the people … In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit." But Marshall was not addressing whether popular will operates directly on government or only through the text. He was demolishing the compact theory — Maryland's argument that the states, not the people, created the Union and could therefore tax its instruments. "Emanates from them" was aimed at the states, establishing that sovereignty resided in the people rather than in state legislatures, the same ground Justice Story had occupied in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee three years earlier. Marshall's statement does not contradict the two-step structure. It was answering a different question. The People spoke once to ordain the Constitution, and that text then speaks continuously to govern.

This architecture was chosen not as a matter of minor formality, but with profound significance in light of the events and fears that shaped the founding. After eight exhausting years of war, the framers did not want a system in which future officials could claim that government itself was the direct expression of the People's will and therefore possessed inherent legitimacy beyond constitutional limits. They wanted a buffer between the People and the government. The People would unite exclusively around the Constitution, and the Constitution would then create, define, and limit the government.

Why the Buffer Was Built to Run Alone

None of this means the Constitution was ordained indifferent to the people it governs. The Preamble states its ends plainly: to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Those ends were fixed once, permanently, in the text. But the framers built a structure that pursues those ends without requiring, or permitting, day-to-day steering by popular will, and this was deliberate, not neglect.

Hamilton made the case directly in Federalist No. 71: "The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion." Hamilton grants popular governance and then carves out an exception for transient passion. He defends filtering, not abandonment. Madison, in Federalist No. 63, defended the Senate explicitly as a check against "the people" themselves, against "temporary errors and delusions" that a purely responsive government would simply enact into law. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 68, defended the Electoral College on the same ground — insulating the selection of a president from the "transient impulse" of unfiltered popular passion.

The government the framers built is better understood as an engine than as a servant: engineered once, aimed permanently at fixed ends, and then deliberately insulated from direct popular control through filters and delays — staggered Senate terms, the Electoral College, life tenure for judges, and Article V's demanding amendment process — so that no one, including the majority of the moment, could reach in and redirect it on a whim.

Why This Is Not a Technicality

This is where the two-step confusion stops being an academic curiosity and becomes dangerous. If a government's authority actually ran on current majority backing — if "the people support this" were the source of its legitimacy, rather than the Constitution's text — there is no principled floor beneath majority tyranny. A government validated by fifty-one percent would have no structural reason to restrain itself against the other forty-nine, because its authority would derive from exactly the fact that it has the numbers. Madison named this danger outright in Federalist No. 10: his fear was not government in general, but a majority faction, deciding measures "not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Tocqueville later gave the same disease its name: the tyranny of the majority.

The structure only makes sense once the government's authority is understood as running on the text, not on majority support. The Bill of Rights is incoherent otherwise — a right that says "Congress shall make no law…" means nothing if a large enough majority can simply out-vote it. Judicial review, since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, allows courts to strike down a law a majority in Congress passed and a majority of the public may favor, because the law is tested against the Constitution, never against its popularity. Article V requires two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states to change the document itself — a threshold built too high for any passing majority to clear. Every one of these mechanisms proves the same point: the government was never meant to answer to the people's current will. It was built to answer to the text the people wrote once, and to serve, through that text, the ends they fixed permanently — justice, welfare, liberty, defense, tranquility — regardless of what any majority wants on a given day.

The Immigrant's Oath

A native-born American absorbs citizenship the way one absorbs any inherited institution — without ceremony, without ever having to study the document that created it, without ever performing an act of allegiance to it. An immigrant does not have this luxury, and I do not consider it a deprivation. The Oath of Allegiance a naturalized citizen swears does not bind them to a government, a president, or a party. It binds them to "the Constitution and laws of the United States" — the same object the Preamble names, the same object the framers themselves ordained.

Every federal officer, member of Congress, state legislator, and judge swears the same allegiance under Article VI, Clause 3. But the naturalized citizen is unique: they are the only modern American who swears to the Constitution as a condition of citizenship itself. In that act, they repeat, in substance, the single act "We the People" performed in 1787. That is not sentiment. It is structural. It is why an outsider to the inherited mythology sees the two-step chain more clearly than most of its native interpreters: the immigrant has already sworn allegiance to the correct object, while the native-born citizen was never asked to swear to anything at all.

The Claim, Restated

"The government works for the people" is true only in one sense: the ends it was built to serve were fixed by the people, once, in the Preamble, at the moment of ordaining. It is false, and worse than false, in the sense politicians most often intend it — that current popular support is what validates government action. That version of the claim does not describe the Constitution. It describes the exact failure the Constitution was built to prevent. The Jacobson Court was right that the Preamble grants no power. It simply never asked what its absence of power proves: that the people created a text, the text created a government, and the distance between those two steps is not a loophole in the design. It is the design.

What Two Hundred Fifty Years Cost

The people of the United States chose to be united around one thing only: the Constitution. They ordained it as an engine, engineered once and aimed permanently at fixed ends, to secure their life and liberty against the government it created. That document stands between the people and the state as a deliberate buffer, and every protection they hold flows through it.

And they built it this way for a reason they understood intimately. The framers knew that majorities are temporary. Whoever holds the numbers today may be the minority tomorrow, and they did not want the people who win this year's argument to become next year's target of the federal government. They had felt exactly that under the crown they escaped, where power answered to whoever held it, not to any fixed law above it. So they refused to let government rest on the shifting will of the majority. They anchored it to a document instead, one that protects you whether your side is counting the votes or not.

And the direction matters more than anything else. Authority runs one way only: from the people, to the Preamble, to the Constitution, and only then to the government. The people ordain the document, the document constitutes the government, and the government acts only within what the document allows. Reverse that current, let authority run from a present majority straight to the government, and the whole protection collapses. Because then any administration can answer every objection with four words: the people support this. Every overreach, every silence, every wrong becomes self-justifying, blessed by whoever happens to hold the majority that season. That is precisely the escape hatch the framers slammed shut.

One clarification, because it matters. "We the People" in 1787 meant a narrow slice of the population — white, male, propertied — and Barbara Jordan said plainly in 1974 that she had not originally been included in it. She was right. But look at how she came to be included: through amendment, interpretation, and court decision. The first of those is the People ordaining again, through the channel Article V provides. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments are step-one acts, not departures from the structure. The Constitution was built to be corrected exactly that way. My objection is to the other two.

The framers built this. What followed did not preserve it. Court after court has fixed its attention on isolated clauses and never on the architecture, the way the Preamble's ordaining act governs every institution downstream of it. By missing that structure, and by accepting the politically convenient claim that government acts on a direct mandate from the people, the judiciary has quietly dissolved the buffer the Constitution was built to be.

The result is not sudden. It arrives little by little: a century of decisions that, under one justification or another — national security, sovereign immunity, procedural design — have narrowed the citizen's power to hold the federal government to account. That is not tranquility. It is the slow accumulation of unanswerable power, which is the thing the framers engineered the Constitution to prevent.