Attestation Clause

Responding to commentators who’ve read the Attestation Clause “as a straightforward attempt by the Founders to import the spirit and values of the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution” and arguing instead that the Clause, read in the context of legal practices of the time, instead “conveyed a much more nuanced and far less radical set of signals.”

Arguing based on the records of the Constitutional convention and the practices of the Founding era that, rather than representing “the closing act of the Constitutional Convention,” the signing of the Constitution represented “the opening act of the ratification campaign that followed in the Constitution’s wake.”

Arguing that the Constitution reflects the theistic beliefs of the Declaration, in part, because the Attestation Clause “directly attaches” the Constitution to the Declaration of Independence.

Arguing based on the Clause’s “dual dating” through references to both “the Year of our Lord” and “the Year . . . of the Independence of the United States of America” that this links the origins of Christianity with the origins of our Independence, tying the Declaration’s themes into the very foundation of the Constitution.

Arguing that the Declaration of Independence is incorporated into the Constitution and citing the Attestation Clause as a key piece of evidence for this proposition. “One should never lose sight of the fact that the last words of the original Constitution as written refer to the Declaration of Independence.”

Arguing that the reference to the Declaration alongside the Christian year in the Attestation Clause shows that the Declaration is incorporated into the Constitution and that “[t]he Declaration marks a novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages.”