Ben Carson remains in the presidential race notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that the retired neurosurgeon and first-time-candidate-for-any-office wouldn’t last this long. Indeed, the most recent polls show Carson leading Donald Trump in Iowa, which kicks off the presidential primary season with its caucuses on February 1.
With his wife, Candy, Carson has now published A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties. It has been a bestseller in the weeks since its release in mid-October. I read it and then interviewed Carson, finding five things about the book that voters assessing his candidacy might want to know.
First, A More Perfect Union cites by name only one Supreme Court decision on the Constitution. It’s Roe v. Wade, which declared a right to abortion. But no other rulings are mentioned. Not Marbury v. Madison (1803), which confirmed the power of judicial review; or Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which struck down public school segregation; or this year’s Obergefell v. Hodges, which created a right to same-sex marriage.
I don’t mean this in a negative way. My point rather is that the book aims to focus the reader not on what judges have said about the Constitution—as so many tomes on the Constitution do—but on the text itself, the Constitution of 1787 as amended. The book discusses the history, principles, and structure of the Constitution, and it has one appendix: the Constitution. Carson emphasizes that the text is not long and is within the grasp of ordinary citizens. “You don’t have to be a constitutional lawyer to understand it,” he told me.
Second, Carson urges readers to memorize the preamble to the Constitution. It says (in case your memory fails), “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, 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, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The Framers added the preamble toward the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. In itself, it had no substantive legal meaning; it was understood as merely declaratory. Yet as the historian Forrest McDonald has pointed out, the preamble “has considerable potency by virtue of its specification of the purposes for which the Constitution exists.” Carson agrees and devotes more than a third of his book to it. “You need to understand what’s in the preamble in order to understand the rest of the Constitution,” he said.
Third, the book takes its title from the preamble’s “a more perfect Union.” In writing the Constitution, the Framers famously divided power between the federal government and the states. Their goal was to achieve a better and stronger union—one “more perfect”—than the notoriously weak union under the Articles of Confederation.
Carson writes that the Framers “set up a good balance of power,” which worked well for many years. That balance, however, has been upset and “our constitutional liberties” compromised. The book points to “overreaching” by the three branches of the national government in explaining how it has become “much too large and much too powerful,” taxing and spending “far more than it should” while also deciding matters (like same-sex marriage) that “could be more efficiently handled” at the state level. “We must return power to the states,” Carson argues. “Only by doing that will we return to being a ‘more perfect Union.’ ”
In the context of the book’s argument, the “we” in that peroration is, of course, “we the people,” the first words of the preamble. Carson uses the term often to make the point that in America there is only one source of political authority. As Carson puts it, “we the people are in charge.” We the people, however, are not always prudent in the self-governing decisions we make; nor are we sufficiently attentive to what is happening politically. For Carson, returning to “being a more perfect Union” doesn’t require a new constitution but a citizenry that sees the Constitution as a guide to the conduct of our politics and the best security of our liberties. In sum, a citizenry more committed to a constitutionalist politics and the discipline it demands.
Fourth, Carson’s book provides a standard for judging a president—how well he executes the office he was elected to. Section 1 of Article 2 states the oath a president takes: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” This oath of office is the only one spelled out in the Constitution. The president is the only officer obligated to execute a particular office.
There are limits on how a president may use the executive power and thus execute the office—in particular, a president may not legislate, as Carson emphasizes. But those limits do not necessarily prohibit what Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist called “extensive and arduous enterprises” undertaken for the public benefit. Might such an enterprise be a project to reduce the power of the national government and return power to the states? “Because of the founders’ wisdom,” writes Carson, “we have all the tools we need to reduce the power of the federal government.”
Not surprisingly, the book finds wanting President Obama’s execution of office. It faults Obama for acting on his own where the Constitution requires that the president work with Congress. It laments the recess appointments Obama made that were found unconstitutional in the Noel Canning case (if I may refer to a Supreme Court decision). And it criticizes Obama’s unilateralist approach to governing in which he has effectively legislated through various types of executive action. For Carson, “almost anyone could do a better job of execution” than Obama.
Fifth, the book places verses from the Bible at the start of each chapter. The selections are from the Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, John, Romans, and II Timothy. The Constitution, of course, doesn’t mention any Scripture. I asked Carson why he included it in a book on the Constitution. He said he did so to show that “our nation has a Judeo-Christian foundation.” And in his book he makes the fair point that “many of the framers subscribed to a political theory that viewed human rights as being derived from God.”
Carson, a Seventh-day Adventist, does not go so far in his use of Scripture as some notable political figures have. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, for example, recast Christ’s metaphor for the church, “a city on a hill,” into a metaphor for America. Yet Carson’s employment of John 8:32, where Christ says, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” is striking. The verse introduces Carson’s chapter on the history of the Constitution and evidently is meant to convey that you shall know the truth about our Constitution’s history and this truth will set you free to form a more perfect union, or something like that. Of course, the church has always understood “truth” in this passage as the truth of the Gospel and the freedom it secures as freedom from sin and death.
A More Perfect Union has some imperfections, not least such empty constructions as “Today America faces dangers at home and abroad” and “There is still time to turn things around, but we must act immediately.” But the five features of the book reviewed here help confirm key aspects of Carson’s candidacy. Namely, that he is a religious conservative who seeks a more constitutionalist politics; is sharply critical of the non-constitutionalist politics of our current president; and looks poised to seek a mandate for his more perfect union, one in which the balance of power between the federal government and the states would be altered. Carson told me he plans to “block grant some things back to the states.” He says he will announce his proposal before the end of the year.
Perhaps most notable about Carson is how people warm to him, as evidenced by his high favorability ratings. “This whole presidential thing was not really my idea,” he told me. “It was the idea of the people. It was a draft movement, with petitions for me to run coming in boxes,” as many as 5,000 at a time. Carson distinguishes between “ordinary citizens [who] are out of place in Washington” and “professional politicians [who] rule the day” (the terms are from his book), and he pitches his message to the former while taking digs at the latter. He seems to enjoy his personal interactions on the trail and in bookstores (the tour ends November 6), which are capped off every evening when he goes on Facebook to answer questions from 4.3 million “friends” on a variety of topics. He told me that the daily sessions have been “tremendous help” to him in terms of understanding what people are thinking about. It’s “something I would continue as president.”
Especially, perhaps, if the alternative is visiting with politicians who in his view “talk a lot and don’t get anything done.” Says the doctor, “The country won’t find that to be the case with the surgeon.”
Terry Eastland is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
