Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island)

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island)

I recently attended the Second Annual “Living Constitution” Lecture at the Brennan Center for Justice. The keynote speaker this year was Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and his topic was “Living Up to Our Constitution.”

Sen. Whitehouse identified four ways in which we live up to the Constitution. I’ve excerpted some of the best bits, breaking them into four separate posts for your contemplation; this is the final entry in this series.

Part 4
The Constution and Economic Well-being for All

…[T]hat progress toward economic opportunity for all makes good on our social contract and is another important way to live up to the ideals embedded in our Constitution.

When I heard this, it did not seem directly intuitive like the other parts of the speech. There is no “economic  opportunity” clause in the Constitution. However, it does remind me of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech delivered as a State of the Union Address in 1941. Roosevelt said:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want–which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants–everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

[emphasis added]

And, of course the iconic image of the Freedom From Want, created by Norman Rockwell in his Four Freedoms poster series, is of a family gathered around a Thanksgiving table.

Freedom from Want by Norman Rockwell

Freedom from Want by Norman Rockwell

Sen. Whitehouse points out that although there in nothing in the Constitution that allows us to go into court to sue for economic justice, the goals of the Constitution cannot be met unless there is economic opportunity for all.

What does this mean in practice?  We secure the “Blessings of Liberty to . . . our Posterity” when every child finds a foundation for success in our education system.  We aid “domestic Tranquility” by lifting off our families the burden of worry that the next illness will push them into penury.  We “promote the general Welfare” by protecting Americans from usurious 30% interest rates.  We “establish Justice” when our bankruptcy system can fairly and effectively relieve Americans from crushing burdens of debt, particularly those caused by the costs of sudden illness, military service overseas, or the collapse of the housing market.  Our “common defence” is aided when no veteran again slips through the cracks in society’s safety net.  And our “Union” is “more perfect” when the hedge fund manager sipping champagne in his Gulfstream is not paying a lower tax rate than the man outside in the rain loading his leather luggage into the hold.  I could go on.  The list of examples is long.  But my point is that progress toward economic opportunity for all makes good on our social contract and is another important way to live up to the ideals embedded in our Constitution.

On every issue — from health care reform, to abolishing predatory lending, to BRINGING BACK GLASS- STEAGALL, to undoing the Big Corpa giveaways in the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act of 2005, to fair taxes — Freedom from Want can only occur if we undo the skewed economic  policies of the BushCo era, rejecting policies responsible for the biggest income disparity between rich and poor since the Gilded Age.

We defend the purpose of our Constitution when we create economic opportunity for all.