The Reading Room
A source
We the People
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Three words that settled an argument before the Constitution made a single rule. The document could have opened with the states, the way the Articles of Confederation did, a league of governments. It opened with the people instead. The sovereignty runs from the bottom up, not the top down, and the rest of the Constitution is the machinery that flows from that first decision. Everything the brand draws from the Preamble starts in this clause: the union, the justice, the posterity. Read who is speaking, and the rest follows.