Constitution Day Event Asks if U.S. Living Up to Ideals

By James Kelly, Molly Kulakovich, and Keenan Wallace

Published October 9, 2026

Students gathered for a Constitution Day event last month to consider one big question: does the United States Constitution actually live up to America’s founding principals?

Professors Jason Charrette, Kelsie Brook Eckert, Mark Fischler, and Jacqui Nelson shared their knowledge and thoughts about the Constitution in the HUB Hage room at the Sept. 17 event, which sought to put the Constitution on trial by comparing it to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

The event began with an overview of the principles behind the Declaration, including the idea that all people are equal and have equal rights, and that government exists to protect those rights with the consent of the governed. The speakers then examined those principles through the lens of current issues in American politics, including birthright citizenship and the war in Iran. 

But who are the people? What does equality entail? How do the governed consent?

Fischler, a criminal justice professor, examined the first of those questions in the context of birthright citizenship and the 14th amendment. On the first day of his second presidential term, President Trump issued an executive order declaring that children born in the United States to illegal immigrants do not receive citizenship at birth. A Honduran asylum applicant sued. 

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the executive order violated the 14th amendment, which says all persons born on American soil and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States are citizens. A key debate in the Court’s 5-4 decision centered around whether the Constitution should be interpreted according to its aspirations or the actual text. The majority argued that the 14th Amendment simply affirmed a de facto continuation of English common law and the concept of jus soli, or right of soil. But in the eyes of some of the conservative justices on the Court who ruled in the minority, the 14th Amendment was created for “a very narrow purpose,” Fischler said: to give citizenship to freed slaves. “That was the original intent,” he said, paraphrasing Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. “These people that come here and have children born here; this wasn’t meant for them.”

Nelson, a military historian, used the war in Iran to examine what government by consent actually means. 

The Declaration of Independence protested the concentration of power into one person’s hands. “I always say it is basically a diss track towards the King,” Nelson said. And mirroring that sentiment, the Constitution created a government with a powerful legislative branch. “That’s why Congress is covered in Article 1. That’s why Article 1 is by far the longest in the Constitution,” Nelson said. “All the power is supposed to be housed there.” Among those powers: the ability to declare war.

The United States has entered armed conflict some 220 times throughout its history, according to Nelson. But the country has only declared war on five occasions (the War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish American War, WWI, and WWII). “Congress has used that power five times,” she said. “The other 215 times, it has been done by Presidential power.”

There are some practical reasons for the President’s power to enter conflict without Congressional approval. “If there is something urgent happening militarily, somebody needs to be the decision maker,” Nelson said. And since Congress is often not in session, “the President was the only one they expected to be on the job 24/7.” 

But those Presidential powers have since expanded, including when Congress passed the War Powers Act during the Vietnam War. Though the Act was designed to limit the President’s military power, it “has been wholeheartedly misinterpreted over time,” Nelson said. To use the powers authorized by the War Powers Act, the President must notify Congress within 48 hours. If Congress determines the action was lawful, the President is allowed a 60-day window to use the military.

Today, that 60-day window is central to the war in Iran. The conflict there began on Feb. 28. “At that point, the 60-day clock starts ticking,” Nelson said. On April 7, the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire. But when the fighting resumed over the summer, the Trump administration claimed the clock had reset.

To date, Congress has voted three times to end the war in Iran. If Congress votes against military action, the President “has 30 days that he’s supposed to have those forces out of the country,” Nelson said. “We are looking at this point right now where the House has said, as the voice of the people, the people do not want this war.” So is our government acting with the consent of its people? What should happen next?

Eckhert, a history and social studies education professor, presented on the right to privacy. “The word privacy does not appear anywhere” in the Constitution, she said, but was established through “more than a century of caselaw,” culminating with the landmark 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision that found the 14th Amendment protected certain privacy rights. In 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson overturned that precedent, in turn eliminating the right to abortion that Roe v. Wade established in 1973 as an extension of the right to privacy.

In his presentation, Charrette focused on West Virginia v. B.P.J., a case that affirmed West Virginia’s restrictions on participation in school sports based on biological sex. Charrette asked the audience to consider what the word “equal” actually means. “Can treating people differently under the law … be in a sense a prerequisite for treating them equally?” According to Title IX, Charrette said, for people to be equal, “we have to put them in different categories and treat them differently under the law.” But B.P.J., a trangender girl who sued West Virginia for their “Save Women’s Sports Act” that prevented her from competing on her school’s girls’ cross-country and track teams, argued that biological sex wasn’t relevant to equality in school sports, and that the Act violated her right to equal treatment. 

Together, the presentations asked students to consider the Constitution both as a framework for government and as subject of debate about the principles this nation was founded on. Through their presentations on rights and equality, the speakers demonstrated how constitutional guidelines and ideals take on different meanings as they are applied to contemporary issues. Though student deliberations after the presentations were far from reaching a simple yes or no answer, this year’s Constitution Day event left its audience with lingering questions and a deeper understanding of our nation’s founding principles.