The Columbus Dispatch first published this opinion piece.

When Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the American framers had created, he wryly replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

This Constitution Day, on the brink of celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is fitting to wonder whether we have, in fact, kept what the Founders gave us — and how.

In July of 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed the revolutionary idea that governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.”

A guard against a 'long train of abuses and usurpations.'

After winning the War of Independence, the young nation’s Constitutional Convention of 1787 then set out to enshrine that fundamental concept in a rule of law that would preserve the rights envisioned by the Declaration and establish a government in which “We the People,” not lords and kings, are sovereign: the U.S. Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson’s famous Declaration had accused England’s King George III of a “long train of abuses and usurpations.” The Constitution was designed to prevent our own government from one day repeating them.

The king, for instance, had dissolved colonial “Representative Houses” and undermined local legislatures. In response, the Constitution vests legislative powers in a regularly elected, bicameral Congress of the people’s representatives.

Instead of an authoritarian monarchy in which virtually all power resided with a king, the Constitution gave us a presidency required to “faithfully execute the laws” enacted by the people’s Congress.

Whereas European monarchs routinely exerted control over judges and nullified juries, the Constitution insulates federal judges from overt presidential pressure, granting them lifetime appointments and putting Congress in charge of their salaries.

Affirmation that 'all men are created equal'

And to reassure states that the new Constitution aligned with the Declaration and would secure our “unalienable rights,” the Convention quickly ratified the Bill of Rights in 1791.

Decades later, as civil unrest tore the American fabric in two over the issue of slavery, Abraham Lincoln wisely explained that America had embraced the Constitution and its Bill of Rights not to destroy or replace the Declaration of Independence, but to adorn and preserve its ideals.

After Lincoln’s death, the Union again amended the Constitution to better comport with the Declaration’s self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.”

Mr. Jefferson had asserted our God-given rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and in the wake of the Civil War the 14th Amendment echoed his great claim in its equal protection clause safeguarding “life, liberty, and property” with due process of law.

Such echoes have continued to reverberate down through our history. In the 1890s, the Supreme Court declared that “it is always safe to read the letter of the Constitution in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.” And its Reynolds v. Sims decision in 1964 it did just that, tracing the “one person, one vote” principle back to the Declaration.

More recently, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard again read the Constitution through the Declaration’s lens, noting that “the Constitution’s colorblind rule reflects one of the core principles upon which our Nation was founded: that ‘all men are created equal.’”

The genius of the American republic lies in part in the close relationship between its two founding documents.

Its first lays claim to the rights of a free and independent people to choose their own governors, and the second frames a three-tiered political structure specifically designed to check and balance government power in order to protect those sacred rights.

Imbued with the spirit of the Declaration, the U.S. Constitution has survived, enduring as the bulwark of our republic that we still endeavor to keep — perhaps to Mr. Franklin’s pleasant surprise.  

David C. Tryon is the director of litigation at The Buckeye Institute.