First Principles

First Principles is the authority and legislative power of People to create and alter governments, constitutions, charters, and laws. First Principles is the essence of the collective action of individuals organizing the society into a polity.

The use of First Principles is the first step whenever People come together to establish or reestablish a society. Its use was widespread during the colonization by the British in North America. It facilitated the founding of our country: with the Mayflower Compact, with the New England Town Meetings, with the Virginia Declaration of Rights, with the Declaration of Independence, and with the Constitution. The founding generations of Americans experienced firsthand the power to create and alter their governments, constitutions, and laws. James Madison pointed to the primacy of First Principles on August 31, 1787 at theConstitutional Convention in response to Mr. Carrol of Maryland, who had asserted that there was no way to amend the Maryland Constitution other than by what was contained therein.

"The difficulty in Maryland was no greater than in other States,
where no mode of change was pointed out by the Constitution, and
all officers were under oath to support it. The People were in fact,
the fountain of all power, and by resorting to them, all difficulties
were got over. They could alter constitutions as they pleased. It was a
principle in the Bills of rights, that first principles might be resorted
to."

Earlier, on June 6th, at the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson, second only to Madison in fashioning the Constitution, described the context of our republican structure:

"The Legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole
society. Representation is made necessary only because it is
impossible for the People to act collectively."

Wilson was acknowledging the obvious impossibility of assembling great numbers of People from distant geographic areas to operate a polity. These physical limitations determined the structure of our government in 1787.

The Framers relied on First Principles to create our government. But, given that technology was lacking to overcome the great distances of Colonial America in assembling the growing numbers of People, they had no choice but to build a representational structure as the legislative branch designed into the Constitution.

With respect to legislation, the Constitution addresses procedures only for the exercise of the government’s legislative powers. Those powers, along with all other limitations on government, are sandwiched between the bookends of First Principles: the Preamble of the Constitution: "We, the People...do ordain…" and the self-enacting ratification power of Article VII.

Obviously, the Constitution does not and cannot limit the powers of its creator – the People. The People can at any time exercise First Principles to amend the Constitution and enact a law establishing legislative procedures to legislate in an orderly fashion.
The views of James Wilson at the time of our founding are instructive in this regard:

"All power is originally in the People and should be exercised by
them in person, if that could be done with convenience, or even with little difficulty."

Today, modern technology permits the People to exercise their legislative powers "in person…[and]…with convenience."

First Principles is the essence of the voluntary electoral process employed by the nonprofit corporation Philadelphia II to permit like-minded citizens to amend the Constitution by ratifying the Democracy Amendment and enacting the Democracy Act as a federal statute. By these actions, the People establish procedures through which they can exercise their legislative power in an orderly and deliberative manner.

It is important that, using First Principles, the People rather than the Congress, will be enacting the Democracy Amendment and the Democracy Act. In doing so they will be following the good advice articulated by James Madison at the Philadelphia Convention on June 5, 1787:

"For these reasons as well as others he [Madison] thought it
indispensable that the new Constitution should be ratified in the
most unexceptionable form, and by the supreme authority of the
People themselves."

and on July 23, 1787:

"These changes would make essential inroads on State Constitutions
…and in the case of these a ratification must of necessity be
obtained from the People."
A Legislature of the People, which may seem radical to some, is the essence of the self-government exemplified by our Constitution. Alexander Meiklejohn, the great constitutional scholar, stated it thus:
"The citizens of this nation shall make and shall obey their own
laws, shall be at once their own subjects and their own masters."