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… is from Randy Barnett’s interview earlier this year with Nick Gillespie [2]; here’s Randy:
Well, the Declaration was the founding document of the country. Then we had the Articles of Confederation and then we had the Constitution. We had two different forms of government here since we separated from Great Britain, but the reason why I appeal to the Declaration [in my new book [3]] is because I’m trying to show that this individual conception of We the People has as long a heritage as the democratic or majoritarian one, the one that We the People as a group and you see it in the Declaration. It is to secure these pre-existing rights that governments are instituted among men.
If you take that view, then it’s not so much that We the People govern. That’s not what popular sovereignty means. Popular sovereignty means that it’s the rights of the individual person that needs to be protected by government and then the people control or they limit government, but government is not the same as us. They’re a small subset of us. They’re the governors and the reason we have a Constitution is to provide the law that governs them.