'Course, I may be wrong, but...

I think Faldage was being a model descriptivist and just 'splainin' the joke. (After all, why let him speak for himself?)

;-)

As a rhetorical matter, it is extremely unlikely that the omission, if there was one, was deliberate, and that the framers chose to present it as a close appositive so as to leave no doubt that "we" *are* the people . . . but possible.