Concise to the point of vacuous. It says practically nothing. It describes only the barest outlines of government, and effectively all of the actual implementation has been a matter of legislation, judicial decisions, and tradition. Individual words are scrutinized as if they will somehow be unambiguous if we stare at them long enough, or bring in enough cherry-picked outside context.
The section on the courts is especially hilariously short. It basically says "We should have one". Everything after that -- included the vaunted ability of the Supreme Court to "interpret the constitution", is a matter of them deciding that it was something they were going to do and everybody else going along with it.
Is that not the whole point? "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
So the federal government is essentially taxing the state's citizens, then giving some amount of it back to the states in exchange for rowing the boat in the right direction. States that increase their own taxes to compensate for refusal of federal funds would become noncompetitive to other states who don't.
The framers were well before the Industrial Revolution; if they intended a right-libertarian bias, the economy they wanted unchecked was a smaller and tamer beast than this one. But anyway, they did give us the Commerce Clause.
A lawyer once said that "show me a contract that's one page, and I won't be able to break it. Show me one 20 pages long, and I'll break it."
You are missing the point. The point is comparing it to a hypothetical constitution that is 20 pages long, instead of 1 page long.
So, the 20 page long constitution, is probably easier to break, despite you misleading focus, on the irrelevant point, of the exact way the statement was phrased.
The founders understood the nature of power, and thus the importance of decentralization and diversity.
edit: Sarcasm should be obvious. Point is if enough key parties want to ignore the law it gets ignored and upheld.
But also consider that nobody has yet been put in jail for harshly criticizing the President. And you can still buy a gun.
You call out Article III, for example, so I'll focus on that. It doesn't say "we should have a Supreme Court and other courts Congress may establish." It says the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in them, and that judges shall be appointed. It isn't magisterial or clerical power. It clearly establishes the United States as a common law system. That's further reinforced by the use of the term jurisdiction — literally the power to say what the law is. It's clear that any and all courts established by Congress are "inferior" to the Supreme Court, which is a significant protection of judicial independence. It's also clear that Congress can't reduce their pay as retribution - ditto. And that's just the first section.
It's a much richer document than your previous comment gives it credit for.
Congress should not get to seat its own checks and balances, and it doesn't particularly matter if Congress is only allowed to establish and ordain inferior courts to that of the Supreme Court, if they already effectively establish and ordain the Supreme Court's delegations - and thereby its power.
Is it that you don't see the linkage between the text of Article III and Marbury's famous line, "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is"? Because jurisdictio literally means "to say what the law is"
