- [Kim] Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy
and today I'm learning more about Article VI
of the U.S. Constitution.
Article VI is as we'll soon see
kind of a constitutional grab bag.
It covers debts, religious tests for office
and it establishes the Constitution
as the supreme Law of the Land.
To learn more about what binds these diverse ideas together,
I sought out the help of two experts.
Kermit Roosevelt is a Professor of Law
specializing in constitutional law and conflict of laws
at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
And Michael Ramsey is Professor of Law
and Director of International and Comparative Law programs
at the University of San Diego's School of Law.
So let's start out talking
about the debts portion of Article VI.
Professor Roosevelt, why were the framers
so interested in debt?
What was the historical context that led them
to explicitly address debt in Article IV?
- [Professor Roosevelt] Well, debt is important generally
because nations often need to borrow money.
And specifically with the Constitution
and the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. government
had been borrowing money to pay for the Revolutionary War.
So there was a question we're moving
from a sort of loose confederation,
almost like a treaty between nations,
under the Articles of Confederation,
to a single unitary country
with a stronger national government under the Constitution.
And there's a question, is it still the same country?
Will the new United States pay the debt?
So the old United States.
- [Professor Ramsey] Now, there's a general principle
of international law that a successor government
undertakes the obligations of the predecessor.
So you wouldn't necessarily think this would be a problem
but I think they were particularly concerned
because the idea of a republic was a somewhat new,
and at least in the 18th century a somewhat unusual one.
And the change of a republican government
might cause some worries in Europe
where this money was owed.
So I think they just wanted to reassure all of the creditors
that even if they were changing their method of government,
that that wasn't going to effect any of the debts.
- [Kim] What might have happened had they decided
not to pay those debts?
- [Professor Roosevelt] If they had decided
not to pay the debts, then other countries
would probably have been much less willing
to lend money to the new United States.
Because they might have thought,
well you know another change in government could occur.
- [Professor Ramsey] There was substantial question
throughout the world whether the United States
would be able to survive in the face of all the challenges
that they had after gaining their independence.
So in order to make it seem that the United States
was a country that could be trusted,
a country that could be expected to stick around
and not collapse in the chaos or revert to colonial status,
one of the most important things for them
was to show that the debts would be honored.
Because a failure to honor debts
would suggest that the country did not in fact
have true sovereignty and was not prepared to be an actor
on the international stage that could be trusted.
- [Professor Roosevelt] Another interesting thing
to contrast this to is the treatment of debts
after the Civil War.
Where of course the United States, the federal government,
paid its own debts but there's a provision
in the 14th amendment explicitly repudiating
the Confederate debt.
So if you loaned money to the Confederate States of America,
you're never getting that back.
Because we didn't treat that as a valid government
that would be continued going forward.
- [Professor Ramsey] Another thing that it illustrates
is that the Constitution in some respects
was a visionary document that was concerned
with the long term future of the United States
but in other respects, it responded to very immediate,
practical problems that the framers faced in their day.
They were thinking about not just the future
of the country for the ages, they were thinking about that
but they weren't thinking just about that.
They were also thinking about reassuring France
with respect to the debts that existed right at that moment.
- [Kim] So there's a lot going on in Article VI
and specifically it talks about the Constitution
as the supreme Law of the Land.
So what's important about that statement?
- [Professor Roosevelt] What's important about that
is that it means the Constitution is our highest law.
It prevails over any other kind of law in a conflict.
So one thing that that means
is the Constitution is supreme over state law.
And then the Constitution actually goes on
to talk about that a little bit more.
But it also means the Constitution is supreme
over federal law.
So everyone is bound by the Constitution.
The states can't go against it, congress can't go past it,
the president can't violate constitutional restrictions.
The Constitution is really the last word.
It's the pinnacle or the keystone
of the arch of American democracy.
- [Professor Ramsey] And that's why we can say
that things are unconstitutional,
that laws are unconstitutional and therefore invalid.
And most importantly, it's why the Supreme Court can say
that laws are unconstitutional and invalid.
It creates a superior law that limits the laws
that can be passed by the other parts of the government.
It creates a hierarchy of laws and in doing so,
it assures that we have a single set of rules
that applies to all the states and to the federal government
and it can't be changed except by an amendment.
Which is relatively difficult to do.
There's a procedure in the Constitution
for how you can amend the Constitution
but until amending, the Constitution as written
is our superior law.
And that was different from the way that the framers,
the rules the framers were used to under the English system,
where they didn't have a written Constitution.
They had an unwritten Constitution but that Constitution
was subject to change by Parliament.
- [Kim] So has this supremacy
of the Constitution been tested over time?
- [Professor Roosevelt] There haven't been a lot
of claims that the Constitution is not supreme.
So generally speaking, everyone gives
at least lip service to this idea.
What's been tested is more the question
of who gets to decide what the Constitution means
and when something conflicts with it.
So if you want the Constitution
and federal law to be supreme,
probably you would want to have someone
in the federal government deciding
when there's a conflict say with state law.
And the forms that resistance has taken over the years
are more states saying
not you know we can go against the Constitution,
we're above the Constitution,
but states saying we don't think what we're doing
violates the Constitution.
Right, and you the Supreme Court, you think it does
but you're wrong.
- [Professor Ramsey] In the 19th century,
just before the Civil War,
the Supreme Court decided in the Dread Scott case
that African Americans could not be citizens
to the United States even if they were freed slaves.
And President Lincoln believed that that was wrong.
He said that there was nothing in the Constitution
that denied the ability of them to be citizens.
And he said that the Supreme Court
had misinterpreted the Constitution
and he would not accept the Supreme Court's ruling
in that regard.
Later, in the 20th century, the Supreme Court held
that the Constitution barred segregation
particularly in schools
in the Brown versus Board of Education case.
But many southern governors and other institutions
throughout the south thought
that the Supreme Court had gotten that one wrong.
And they refused to abide by what the Supreme Court had said
the Constitution means.
- [Professor Roosevelt] What they said was not
the Constitution doesn't bind us
but we know what the Constitution means
better than you Supreme Court, you're wrong,
you're making this up, it's political, it's not judging.
- [Kim] Another thing that Article VI talks about
is religious tests.
Why were the framers so interested
in preventing religious tests in government?
What sort of historical evils were they trying to prevent?
- [Professor Roosevelt] So this is connected
to the basic idea of the separation of church and state.
And you separate church and state
really to protect both of those things.
So you want to protect religion from being corrupted
by political considerations
but you also want to protect your political system
from being a battle ground between rivaled religions.
- [Professor Ramsey] So where this comes from is
that in England, they had had a series
of what they called Test Acts.
And what the Test Acts did was it required
that for people to be eligible for government offices
that the people had to be members of the Church of England.
And that other religious groups,
they were barred by the Test Acts
from holding government office.
So actually, many of those minority religions,
many adherence of those ended up coming
to the American Colonies to gain some measure
of religious freedom.
The pilgrims were an example of that.
There was a Catholic colony in Maryland.
And just generally speaking, many of the people,
many of the colonists who came over
were people who were not part
of the main established church in England.
And so you can see why they would not want to have
something like the Test Acts.
And they wanted to make clear
that in the new national government
that any religion, or no religion
would be allowed for government office holders.
- [Kim] Do you think it's true
that we don't have religious tests or oaths
in the United States?
How about the practice of swearing on a Bible
during the presidential inauguration?
- [Professor Roosevelt] Well the practice of swearing
on a Bible is very interesting as is the fact
that when the president recites the oath of office,
every president going back to George Washington
has added on to the end of it, so help me God.
There's actually an oath in the Constitution
the president has to swear to preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution
but the Constitution doesn't say so help me God.
The presidents just add that on on their own.
And actually that sort of illustrates the way
in which the Constitution treats religion.
Which is it can't be part of government
in an official sense.
But we know that members of government are also people
and they have religious beliefs that are important to them
and we don't demand that they exclude religion
from their lives, we just demand
that it be separated from government authority.
So you can swear on a Bible if you want to,
you don't have to.
You can swear on some other religious book.
We had a member of congress
take an oath of office on a Quran.
So individual government officials are allowed to
include religion in so far as it's about them personally.
You know, what you think is appropriate
to mark this occasion.
What solemnifies this oath for you.
You can do that.
But we can't require it and they can't make
the exercise of their power religious in nature.
So you can't, you know as a government official,
exercise your power on religious grounds.
- [Kim] Something that strikes me about Article VI
is that is addresses so many different things.
Do you have a sense of why
debts and constitutional supremacy and religious tests
are all in one article?
- [Professor Ramsey] The Article VI, as you said,
is a little bit of a grab bag.
It's not entirely clear how these different pieces
of Article VI relate to each other.
And I think they were just things that the framers
wanted in the Constitution and didn't know for sure
where else to put them.
- [Professor Roosevelt] I'm not exactly sure
why the debts are there.
If I had to say something about Article VI
it would be it's sort of the glue
that holds the constitutional architecture together.
So maybe the debts are in there to explain the continuity
between the U.S. government
under the Articles of Confederation
and U.S. government under the Constitution.
Then the supremacy clause explains
how all of the different parts
of the federal system are supposed to fit together.
And what the supremacy clause is saying
is the Constitution is above all of them.
The Constitution connects them all.
Everyone has to abide by the Constitution.
And it tells you, you know the Constitution
is the highest law, then you've got federal law
and then below that is state law
so that if there's a conflict
between federal law and state law,
the federal law is gonna win.
And then the last part of Article VI
is sort of doing the same thing.
Because what holds a country together?
What binds people into a single people?
In a lot of countries at the time of the founding,
it was religion.
Right, religion was the glue
that held the society together
and if you weren't a member of that religion,
you were an outsider, you were a second class citizen,
you would be shunned
and not given equal rights in some ways.
The last clause of Article VI says something sort of similar
about America except it explicitly says
it's not religion that binds us together.
Right, no religious tests can be required
but you do have to take an oath.
What do you have to pledge to support?
You have to pledge to support the Constitution.
So there again is telling you the Constitution
is what we all have in common.
That's what makes us Americans.
That really is the glue that binds our society together.
- [Kim] So we've learned that Article VI is,
as Professor Roosevelt put it,
the glue that binds the country together.
In assuming the debts
from the era of the Articles of Confederation,
Article VI established the continuity of U.S. government.
It also placed the Constitution, not religion,
as the supreme law of the United States.
To learn more about Article VI,
visit the National Constitution Center's
Interactive Constitution
and Khan Academy's resources
on U.S. government and politics.