Constitutional reading draws slim attendance
Brandon Hollingsworth
Issue date: 11/29/07 Section: News
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Students Sabrina Ussery and Tim Wyatt read selections from the 1901 constitution on the TMB lawn Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 27. However, chairs set up for a potential audience remained unfilled as the afternoon wore on, evidence of how difficult it is to engage people in a debate about the merits of constitutional reform.
"It's further down the agenda of things that are going on in people's lives," JSU political scientist Bill Lester said. "Things seem to be going well, and people aren't worked up about it."
Sabrina Ussery, president of the CCCR, agreed with Lester's assessment.
"A lot of people don't even know Alabama has a constitution, which was mind-boggling to me," she said. "And those that do know don't understand how large it is, and how out-of-date it is."
Alabama's state constitution has long been infamous to legal scholars and analysts for several reasons, none of them particularly favorable. Its length, at some 357,000 words, makes it the longest functioning constitution in the world and longer than any current state or national governing document.
The world's second-longest constitution is that of India, which clocks in a distant second at 117,000 words. The U.S. Constitution contains some 4,300 words, according to Lester.
At 799 amendments, it is the bulkiest governing document in the United States. The U.S. Constitution, by comparison, totals a trim 27 amendments and is 114 years older.
The state constitution's length can be partly blamed on one concept: a positive-law document.
"A higher-law document is based on fundamental principles. It lays out how government is going to function," Lester said. "It doesn't lay out much more than fundamental principles of government."
A positive-law document, Lester said, tries to envision every eventuality of governance. Positive-law constitutions tend to center power in the hands of the state and away from counties and municipalities.
Some state constitutions, and indeed the U.S. Constitution, are higher-law documents, which leave room for interpretation. Alabama's is not, which means that 90 percent of its length comes from the 799 amendments within its pages, and 70 percent of those amendments apply to only one county or city. Few of the amendments pertain to the state as a whole.
Having a positive-law constitution also means more power is concentrated in Montgomery and less in the hands of the counties and municipalities. An effort to change that standard, called home rule, has taken off in the last decade.
"What it means is that localities and counties have to go back to the state to do very basic things that, in most parts of the United States, local and county governments can do [by themselves]," Lester said.
Though the grassroots efforts to reform the 1901 constitution are growing, the idea is making little political headway. It's hard to convince politicians who owe their careers to the document to rewrite it, according to Lester.
Still, CCCR will press forward in presenting its message to the public. Ussery said more events are planned for the spring semester.
"It's been one of my passions to get involved, and it's definitely something we need," she said. "We need to go out there and make the best of what our state has. Without constitutional reform, there's no telling what we'll turn into."
When he's not harping on about the future of news radio, Brandon Hollingsworth is the news editor of The Chanticleer. He can be reached at (256) 782-8521 or at chantynews@gmail.com. You can read his weekly science blog at brandononscience.blogspot.com.
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