Dr. Chemerinsky, I agree that the Preamble should be included in any interpretation. I am not a lawyer, but I work in a field that is very mature in its understanding of documentation and specifications — information technology — and in my field, the intention of a document (or piece of code) is extremely important to know. Indeed, without knowing the intention, proper understanding and interpretation is almost hopeless — or at least very hard. The Preamble states intention. If it were not important, it would not have been written into the document.

You make some good points, e.g., about privacy, which is not mentioned in the Constitution but perhaps can be inferred. However, I would disagree about the Constitution’s intentions about “ensuring democratic governance”: the term “democracy” does not appear in the Constitution, which uses the term “republic” instead, which indicates the intention that the government be by and for the people, but without a requirement for democratic-style voting.

Isn’t it therefore reasonable to conclude that the authors of the document did not view a democracy to be viable on the scale of the United States? Otherwise, they would have defined a democratic system. Instead, they created a Federation and a Republic.

Also, during the 20th century, we had a great deal of liberal interpretation of the Constitution, and we ended up with massive expansion of the Federal government as a result — which I believe violates the Constitution’s original intention. In my view, there is a-lot of rolling back that is called for.

I favor liberal programs, but at a state level — not a Federal level. The Constitution was designed to define a limited role for the Federal government — that is explicit in the document. Progressive policies are the province of states. I think that was a sound concept, and we have gone far astray from that, and perhaps that is a reason why things don’t work well today: little can work well at the Federal level. Even Europe is still a loose federation — not a single nation. We would do well to adopt that model.