Politics & Power Quote by Gerald R. Ford

In the mouth of a president who arrived in office without a single national vote cast for him, "Our constitution works" isn’t a civics lecture; it’s a stabilizer. Ford is selling continuity at the moment Americans were least inclined to believe in it: post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, mid-crisis in institutional legitimacy. The line is designed to sound inevitable, almost mechanical. Not inspiring in a soaring way, but calming in a procedural one.

The subtext is blunt: the system just removed a president, elevated a vice president, and kept the lights on. That matters because Ford’s legitimacy was structural, not charismatic. He’s invoking the Constitution as a kind of quiet inheritance that outruns any individual’s moral failure. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the cult-of-personality politics Watergate made newly suspect. "Government of laws, not of men" frames Nixon’s abuses as an aberration that the machine corrected, and it nudges the public toward accepting accountability without tipping into nihilism.

There’s a second audience, too: elites inside government. The phrase reassures them that obedience is owed to rules and offices, not to loyalty networks. Ford is positioning himself as the anti-imperial presidency, a caretaker who will subordinate ego to process. The rhetoric works because it’s modest and almost austere; it doesn’t ask for trust in Ford the man so much as consent to keep playing by the rules even when the players disappoint.