A People's Constitution: Not just for nine Americans to read, and to follow.

Opponents of the campaign-finance bill are arguing that President Bush should veto it because it is unconstitutional. In making this case for a veto, the opponents have raised a question whose importance transcends the particular constitutional dispute at hand: namely, does the president have a duty to make judgments about constitutional disputes in the first place?

These days, we tend to regard the protection of the Constitution as the exclusive business of the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Constitution is regularly assumed to be identical to the Court's interpretations of it. Politicians and journalists say that policies are "unconstitutional" when all they really mean is that the Court has held those policies to be unconstitutional. But there is an older understanding of the Constitution that holds that responsibility for its protection is shared. If Bush were to veto the campaign-finance bill as a violation of the First Amendment, he would take a small step toward restoring that sound, but now dormant, understanding.

The modern view has informed both sides of the campaign-finance debate. Supporters of the bill have said that neither legislators nor the president need worry about possibly unconstitutional provisions because the Supreme Court will sort them out. Opponents have rightly suggested that anyone who considers a bill unconstitutional should vote against it; but too often their argument that the bill is unconstitutional has relied solely on a prediction that the Court would strike it down. That argument is incomplete without any showing that the Court would be right to do so.

Andrew Sullivan provides a striking instance of the hold that judicial supremacy has on the minds of even thoughtful political commentators. Writing in opposition to conservatives who are urging a veto, he observes that these same conservatives want Congress to pass restrictions on abortion that they know the courts may well strike down. How, he asks, can they then demand that Bush veto a bill merely because it might "turn out to be" unconstitutional?

Note the quick, unexamined move from a discussion of the Constitution to a discussion of the courts. To frame the matter this way is to ignore the possibility that conservatives may act on constitutional judgments independent of the courts. Conservatives can try to ban partial-birth abortion because they know it is constitutional to do so, whatever the courts have said or may say later; and they can try to block campaign-finance regulations because they hold them to be unconstitutional.

Sullivan's argument works only if the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is -- so that, for example, the statement "this bill is unconstitutional" is equivalent to the prediction that "the Supreme Court will strike down this bill." That's an argument with a fine pedigree: Support for it can be found in the writings of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and (arguably) in the Court's 1958 case Cooper v. Aaron. But it makes unintelligible the notion that the Court can get the Constitution wrong, and thus also makes unintelligible dissents and overrulings.

The alternative view distinguishes between the Constitution and the Supreme Court's case law. Presidents and legislators swear an oath to uphold the former. But a constitutionalist political culture is hard to sustain if the Constitution is held to be the exclusive property of an unelected elite. In that case, lawmakers will not look to the Constitution when doing their jobs -- a phenomenon all too evident in the campaign-finance debate. A judicial monopoly on constitutional interpretation poses the additional danger of reducing the Constitution to a mere grant of judicial power.