Article VI of the Constitution | US government and civics | Khan Academy

Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy, and today I'm learning more about Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution. Article 6 is, as we'll soon see, kind of a constitutional grab bag. It covers debts, religious tests for office, and it establishes the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.

To learn more about what binds these diverse ideas together, I sought out the help of two experts. Kermit Roosevelt is a professor of law specializing in constitutional law and conflict of laws at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Michael Ramsey is a professor of law and director of international and comparative law programs at the University of San Diego School of Law.

So, let's start out talking about the debts portion of Article 6. Professor Roosevelt, why were the framers so interested in debt? What was the historical context that led them to explicitly address debt in Article 6?

"Well, debt is important generally because nations often need to borrow money. Specifically, with the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. government had been borrowing money to pay for the Revolutionary War. So, there was a question: We're moving from a sort of loose confederation, almost like a treaty between nations under the Articles of Confederation, to a single unitary country with a stronger national government under the Constitution. There's a question: Is it still the same country? Will the new United States pay the debts of the old United States? Now, there's a general principle of international law that a successor government undertakes the obligations of the predecessor, so you wouldn't necessarily think this would be a problem. But I think they were particularly concerned because the idea of a republic was a somewhat new one, at least in the 18th century, somewhat unusual. The change of a republican government might cause some worries in Europe, where this money was owed. So, I think they just wanted to reassure all of the creditors that even if they were changing their method of government, that wasn't going to affect any of the debts."

What might have happened had they decided not to pay those debts?

"If they decided not to pay the debts, then other countries would probably have been much less willing to lend money to the new United States because they might have thought, 'Well, you know, another change in government could occur.' There was substantial question throughout the world whether the United States would be able to survive in the face of all the challenges that they had after gaining their independence. So, in order to make it seem that the United States was a country that could be trusted, a country that could be expected to stick around and not collapse into chaos or revert to colonial status, one of the most important things for them was to show that the debts would be honored. Because a failure to honor debts would suggest that the country did not, in fact, have true sovereignty and was not prepared to be an actor on the international stage that could be trusted."

Another interesting thing to contrast this to is the treatment of debts after the Civil War, where, of course, the United States, the federal government, paid its own debts. But there's a provision in the 14th Amendment explicitly repudiating the Confederate debt. So, if you loaned money to the Confederate States of America, you're never getting that back because we didn't treat that as a valid government that would be continued going forward.

Another thing that it illustrates is that the Constitution, in some respects, was a visionary document that was concerned with the long-term future of the United States. But in other respects, it responded to very immediate practical problems that the framers faced in their day. They were thinking about not just the future of the country for the ages—and they were thinking about that—but they weren't thinking just about that. They were also thinking about reassuring France with respect to the debts that existed right at that moment.

So, there's a lot going on in Article 6, and specifically, it talks about the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. So, what's important about that statement?

"What's important about that is that it means the Constitution is our highest law; it prevails over any other kind of law in a conflict. So, one thing that that means is that the Constitution is supreme over state law, and then the Constitution actually goes on to talk about that a little bit more. But it also means the Constitution is supreme over federal law. So, everyone is bound by the Constitution: the states can't go against it, Congress can't go past it, the president can't violate constitutional restrictions. The Constitution is really the last word. It's the pinnacle or the keystone of the arch of American democracy, and that's why we can say that things are unconstitutional, that laws are unconstitutional and therefore invalid. Most importantly, it's why the Supreme Court can say that laws are unconstitutional and therefore invalid. It creates a superior law that limits the laws that can be passed by the other parts of the government. It creates a hierarchy of laws, and in doing so, it assures that we have a single set of rules that applies to all the states and to the federal government, and it can't be changed except by an amendment, which is relatively difficult to do. There's a procedure in the Constitution for how you can amend the Constitution, but until amended, the Constitution, as written, is our superior law. That was different from the way that the framers were used to under the English system, where they didn't have a written constitution. They had an unwritten constitution, but that constitution was subject to change by Parliament."

Has the supremacy of the Constitution been tested over time?

"There haven't been a lot of claims that the Constitution is not supreme. So, generally speaking, everyone gives at least lip service to this idea. What's been tested is more the question of who gets to decide what the Constitution means and when something conflicts with it. So, if you want the Constitution and federal law to be supreme, probably you would want to have someone in the federal government deciding when there's a conflict, say, with state law. The forms that resistance has taken over the years are more states saying not, 'We can go against the Constitution; we're above the Constitution,' but states saying, 'We don't think what we're doing violates the Constitution.' You, the Supreme Court, think it does, but you're wrong."

In the 19th century, just before the Civil War, the Supreme Court decided in the Dred Scott case that African Americans could not be citizens of the United States, even if they were freed slaves. President Lincoln believed that was wrong. He said that there was nothing in the Constitution that denied them the ability to be citizens, and he said that the Supreme Court had misinterpreted the Constitution, and he would not accept the Supreme Court's ruling in that regard.

Later, in the 20th century, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution barred segregation, particularly in schools in the Brown versus Board of Education case. But many Southern governors and other institutions throughout the South thought that the Supreme Court had gotten that one wrong, and they refused to abide by what the Supreme Court had said. The Constitution means what they said; it was not the Constitution that doesn't bind us, but we know what the Constitution means better than you. The Supreme Court, you're wrong; you're making this up; it's political; it's not judging.

Another thing that Article 6 talks about is religious tests. Why were the framers so interested in preventing religious tests in government? What sort of historical evils were they trying to prevent?

"This is connected to the basic idea of the separation of church and state. You separate church and state really to protect both of those things. So, you want to protect religion from being corrupted by political considerations, but you also want to protect your political system from being a battleground between rival religions. Where this comes from is that in England they had had a series of what they called test acts. What the test acts did was it required that for people to be eligible for government offices, people had to be members of the Church of England, and other religious groups were barred from holding government office. So, actually, many of those minority religions, many adherents of those, ended up coming to the American colonies to gain some measure of religious freedom. The Pilgrims were an example of that. There was a Catholic colony in Maryland, and just generally speaking, many of the colonists who came over were people who were not part of the main established church in England. So, you can see why they would not want to have something like the test acts, and they wanted to make clear that in the new national government, any religion or no religion would be allowed for government office holders."

Do you think it's true that we don't have religious tests or oaths in the United States? How about the practice of swearing on a Bible during the presidential inauguration?

"Well, the practice of swearing on a Bible is very interesting, as is the fact that when the president recites the oath of office, every president going back to George Washington has added on to the end of it, 'So help me God.' There's actually an oath in the Constitution that the president has to swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, but the Constitution doesn't say 'so help me God.' The presidents just add that on on their own, and actually, that sort of illustrates the way in which the Constitution treats religion, which is it can't be part of government in an official sense. But we know that members of government are also people, and they have religious beliefs that are important to them, and we don't demand that they exclude religion from their lives. We just demand that it be separated from government authority. So, you can swear on a Bible if you want to; you don't have to. You can swear on some other religious book. We had a member of Congress take an oath of office on a Koran. So, individual government officials are allowed to include religion insofar as it's about them personally. You know, what you think is appropriate to mark this occasion; what solemnifies this oath for you? You can do that. But we can't require it, and they can't make the exercise of their power religious in nature. So you can't, you know, as a government official, exercise your power on religious grounds."

Something that strikes me about Article 6 is that it addresses so many different things. Do you have a sense of why debts, constitutional supremacy, and religious tests are all in one article?

"Article 6, as you said, is a little bit of a grab bag; it's not entirely clear how these different pieces of Article 6 relate to each other. I think they were just things that the framers wanted in the Constitution and didn't know for sure where else to put them. I'm not exactly sure why the debts are there. If I had to say something about Article 6, it would be it's sort of the glue that holds the constitutional architecture together. So maybe the debts are in there to explain the continuity between the U.S. government under the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. government under the Constitution. Then the supremacy clause explains how all the different parts of the federal system are supposed to fit together, and what the supremacy clause is saying is the Constitution is above all of them. The Constitution connects them all; everyone has to abide by the Constitution, and it tells you, you know, the Constitution is the highest law. Then you've got federal law, and then below that is state law. So that if there's a conflict between federal law and state law, the federal law is going to win. Then the last part of Article 6 is sort of doing the same thing because, you know, what holds a country together? What binds people into a single people? In a lot of countries at the time of the founding, it was religion, right? Religion was the glue that held the society together. And if you weren't a member of that religion, you were an outsider; you were a second-class citizen; you would be shunned and not given equal rights. In some ways, the last clause of Article 6 says something sort of similar about America, except it explicitly says it's not religion that binds us together, right? No religious test can be required, but you do have to take an oath. What do you have to pledge to support? You have to pledge to support the Constitution. So, there again, it's telling you the Constitution is what we all have in common. That's what makes us Americans. That really is the glue that binds our society together."

So, we've learned that Article 6 is, as Professor Roosevelt put it, the glue that binds the country together. In assuming the debts from the era of the Articles of Confederation, Article 6 established the continuity of U.S. government. It also placed the Constitution, not religion, as the supreme law of the United States. To learn more about Article 6, visit the National Constitution Center's interactive Constitution and Khan Academy's resources on U.S. government and politics.