"We the People of the United States do ordain and establish this Constitution." Those twelve words made the most radical claim in the entire document: the government's authority comes from ordinary people, not from a king, a church, or a ruling class. Gouverneur Morris drafted the Preamble at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and his word choice was deliberate. "Ordain" carried the weight of a sacred decree -- language usually reserved for God or monarchs -- but Morris assigned that power to "We the People."
This was a direct break from the Articles of Confederation, which had been established by state governments acting on their own authority. The Constitution's Preamble shifted the source of legitimacy from the states to the people themselves, a principle political theorists call popular sovereignty. The Supreme Court has taken the Preamble seriously as a statement of intent even though it grants no specific legal powers. In the years before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln pointed to "We the People" to argue that the Union was created by citizens, not by a compact between states, meaning individual states had no right to secede. The phrase still matters because it defines who holds ultimate authority in the American system. Elected officials, judges, and bureaucrats exercise power on behalf of the people -- and when they forget that, the Preamble's opening words serve as a reminder of where that power actually comes from.