Why the People Are the Final Constitutional Authority

The most consequential misunderstanding in American constitutional life is not about courts, or impeachment, or even presidential power. It is about who bears responsibility for the Constitution itself.

Many Americans assume that constitutional authority ultimately resides in institutions—especially courts. When something goes wrong, we wait for a ruling. When power is abused, we ask what judges will say. When the Constitution is strained, we look elsewhere.

That instinct is understandable. It is also wrong.

The Constitution does not vest final constitutional authority in courts. It vests it in the People.

This is not a slogan. It is a structural fact.

The Constitution was not written by judges, interpreted into existence by courts, or enforced into legitimacy by lawyers. It was written by the People, ratified by the People, and sustained only so long as the People insist on fidelity to it.

Every constitutional officer—legislator, executive, judge—takes an oath not to a court, not to a party, not to a leader, but to the Constitution itself. That oath is not ceremonial. It is a declaration that authority flows from the People, through the Constitution, and only then into office.

Courts play an important role in this system, but they are not its guardians. They resolve disputes. They interpret law when asked. They do not initiate constitutional accountability, enforce constitutional fidelity, or supervise governance.

That work belongs elsewhere.

When the Constitution is violated, the first constitutional response is not litigation. It is judgment by the People, acting through their representatives. That is why impeachment exists. Not as punishment. Not as politics. But as a mechanism by which the sovereign People decide whether constitutional power has been abused.

This design assumes something modern Americans are rarely told: self-government requires self-restraint.

The Framers did not expect constant constitutional violations. They expected constitutional obedience to be the norm. Impeachment was meant to be rare not because violations should be tolerated, but because officials were expected to govern within constitutional bounds.

At the same time, the People were expected to remain attentive. Not outraged at every disagreement, but alert to genuine abuses of authority. Not passive spectators waiting for courts to intervene, but active custodians of constitutional order.

When we forget this, the consequences are predictable.

Legislators stop asking whether a law exceeds constitutional authority and ask instead whether it might survive judicial review. Executives test limits until someone tells them to stop. Citizens wait for verdicts rather than exercising judgment. Courts, pulled into roles they were never designed to play, become both blamed and overburdened.

This is how constitutional government weakens—not through collapse, but through misplacement of responsibility.

The Constitution does not protect itself. Courts do not protect it for us. And no institution can substitute for an engaged, constitutionally literate People.

That was the Framers’ bet.

They trusted that a people capable of establishing a Constitution would also be capable of sustaining it—by recognizing violations when they occur, by refusing to normalize them, and by holding constitutional officers to the standard their oaths require.

Self-government does not end at the ballot box. It begins there.

If the Constitution is to endure, We the People must stop treating it as someone else’s job to enforce—and remember that it was always ours.