Hopefully most of you have spent the past weekend eagerly awaiting the arrival of a day you’ve never heard of: Constitution Day.
The federal observance, called Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, falls on Sept. 17 every year.
Constitution Day celebrates the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787.
Citizenship Day celebrates anyone who is a U.S. citizen.
The one thing that makes Constitution Day so special is how unconstitutional it happens to be.
One of two instructions for the day is that, “Each educational institution which receives Federal funds should hold a program for students every September 17,” according to the Library of Congress website.
The language is not terribly specific, and the use of the word “should” implies that schools may not have to actually do anything to celebrate the day.
It also happens to be technically unconstitutional for the federal government to tell a state what it may instruct in its schools.
The 10th Amendment reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
What on earth does this actually mean, you may ask?
It means that education is a function of the state, and not the federal government.
The federal government can’t forcibly tell a school to stop its normal proceedings and teach the constitution on this day.
They just use their long arm of the law to strongly suggest it.
The second mandate of the day is that, “The head of every federal agency provide each employee with educational and training materials concerning the Constitution,” according to the Library of Congress website.
To me, it means that CIA director Gina Haspel is supposed to hand out those little pocket constitutions to her fellow agents and explain to them what the Constitution is and how it applies to everyday life.
That would be a sight to behold.
The background of how the day came to be is what makes it uniquely American.
A song by Gray Gordon called “I Am An American” was heavily promoted by a public relations firm in New York.
The promotion became so widespread that in 1939, noted news tycoon William Randolph Hearst urged through his many newspapers that a day be created to celebrate American citizenship.
The next year, Congress did just that and made the third Sunday in May, “I Am An American Day.”
It was renamed and moved to its new September date in 1952, but it wasn’t until 2004 that its current iteration, mandates and all, took hold.
In 2004, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia put the changes into a spending bill, and it has been the same ever since.
This begs the question, is there anyone out there actually enforcing that the day is celebrated in some fashion in schools or is it all just a big sham?
In a 2005 interview with NBC News, Byrd said that there was no specific curriculum for schools to teach on that day.
The article also states that the, “Education department seemed to favor an honor system of compliance” when it came to enforcement of the day.
What exactly is supposed to happen on Constitution Day is incredibly muddy and seems mostly up to the institution you attend.
From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. today, San Jose State is holding a Constitution Day event on the Smith and Carlos Lawn that will help students exercise their First Amendment right to petition the government.
If you’d like to celebrate something a bit different, Sept. 17 is also National Apple Dumpling Day and National Monte Cristo Day, and there’s nothing unconstitutional about those.
