Letters from an Ohio Farmer

The American Conversation

2012-09-17T10:15:16-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: It is Constitution Day again. Two-hundred-and-twenty-five years ago, on this day in 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Independence Hall in Philadelphia signed the document which, when ratified by the people, would become the "supreme Law of the Land." This act was the culminating episode in the historic drama begun in the same hall 11 years earlier when the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," proclaimed to the world the experiment in self-government being inaugurated by the newly sovereign American people. In 1776, the American Revolutionaries had...

Security and Limited Government

2012-09-11T09:45:12-04:00

To My French Friend: In my previous letter, Jean-Luc, I promised I would write to you again about the necessity of limited government. I thought I would do so not by reiterating my concerns about our budget deficits and national debt but by discussing security. It may seem odd to do so, since even the most ardent advocates of limited government acknowledge that government must provide security for its citizens. This is true but what this means now and in the future must change, I submit. To persuade you of this, let me offer some history. Throughout America's history, concerns...

Justice and Limited Government

2012-09-04T11:14:03-04:00

To My French Friend: Thank you, Jean-Luc, for the report on the re-emergence of state run enterprises, or state capitalism, as it is called. I had thought this phenomenon restricted to China, France, and a few other "backward" places, but now I see that it is widespread, a growing trend in Latin America and parts of Asia even beyond China. And it is not at all considered backward but the newest way to wealth and happiness. I discover that it is you and I who are backward, attached as we are to the idea that individual effort and responsibility are...

E Pluribus Unum

2012-08-28T11:01:36-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: In August 1790, Moses Seixas, Warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, wrote a letter to President George Washington, welcoming him to the city. "Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens," Seixas wrote, "we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People—a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship:—deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language...

Taxation and a Republican Constitution

2012-08-21T09:52:10-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: The Supreme Court recently held the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to be a valid exercise of Congress's constitutional authority. Surprisingly, the Court did not find the Act constitutional under the Commerce Clause as the law's proponents had argued, but under the taxing power. Perhaps no Supreme Court ruling in our lifetimes will be as heavily scrutinized as this one, so serious citizens will want to think about it and come to their own conclusions. As I noted in an earlier letter, progressives for the past century have justified expanding federal regulatory power over...

Revolutions and Freedom

2012-08-14T09:19:08-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: When you go to Mount Vernon, the guides in the main house proudly point out an amazing piece of history in the front hallway. There, so close you could touch it if it weren't behind glass, is the key to the Bastille prison – a gift to George Washington from the Marquis de Lafayette, who had served with Washington in the Revolutionary War and then himself played a role in the French Revolution. The key recalls Bastille Day, July 14, 1789, when the people of Paris stormed King Louis's hated prison. It was supposed to symbolize...

America's Constitutional Story

2012-08-07T12:24:00-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: We Americans have a constitutional history going back further than we usually think. It is an instructive history. We were a constitutional people long before we became a nation. For nearly 170 years, England's North American colonists lived and prospered under the English (later British) constitution and thus enjoyed the rights and liberties of Englishmen. They had colonial charters, of course, and they learned to cherish representative government. But the wellspring of their rights and liberties, as they understood them, was the English constitution itself. Unlike our present U.S. Constitution, the English constitution is unwritten. In...

Democratic Government and Good Government

2012-07-31T17:03:40-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: The American experiment, as these letters have argued (here and here), is a never ending experiment. It is the experiment of every generation to prove again, as our Founders set out to prove, that democratic government can be good government. Political philosophers have been debating the meaning of good government for centuries. It is safe to say that two requirements, defending against foreign aggressors and avoiding insolvency, are probably not sufficient for achieving good government but are absolutely necessary to any conception of it. No matter what else a government may achieve, if it allows the...

The Distributive Constitution and the Election of 2012

2012-07-24T10:51:17-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: In recent letters (here and here), I reflected on the views of some of our learned fellow citizens on the left. According to one of them, a professor at a public university, democracy requires that citizens enjoy material security. Without material security, no one has the independence to be a citizen. Without such security, a citizen lacks the self-respect to stand up for his rights. A market economy does not provide material security. It is too unpredictable in its support and leaves citizens at the mercy of a corporate oligarchy. Since material security is necessary for...

Franklin's Fourth

2012-07-03T13:48:48-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: Benjamin Franklin snatched lightning from the sky and scepters from the hands of tyrants, a contemporary once said of him. The lightning snatching refers to Franklin's famous kite flying in a thunderstorm to prove the connection between electricity and lightning. As for snatching scepters from tyrants, this might refer to a number of Franklin's activities. The one most fitting to recall on July 4 is Franklin's connection to the Declaration of Independence. The principal author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, sent Franklin the draft, asking for his opinion. Franklin made several editorial suggestions, one of great...

A Statesman in Congress

2012-06-26T11:01:07-04:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: This Friday marks the 160th anniversary of the death of Henry Clay (June 29, 1852). With only a few years excepted, Clay served in the House of Representatives and the Senate from 1803 until his death almost 50 years later. When he died, he was the most famous American of his day and received many, many eulogies. One of them came from a little-known, former one-term Congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, who eulogized Clay as "my beau ideal of a statesman." In calling Clay a "statesman," Lincoln chose his words carefully, and...

Material and Spiritual Security

2012-06-19T11:47:25-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: In an earlier letter, I described and criticized the view that our Constitution gives the government the power and duty to provide us with material security because such security is necessary for democracy. In fact, as I argued, economic insecurity does not deprive any one of their rights or prevent them from exercising them. In addition to being wrong, the argument that to ensure democracy the government must ensure our material security is paradoxical. To even attempt to provide material security, the government would have to have such power over our lives and livelihoods that the...

Our Constitution is Color-Blind

2012-06-13T11:27:03-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: A prominent theme of these letters is that—to inherit and pass on to the next generation the legacy of freedom bequeathed to us—Americans must understand and take to heart the idea of political freedom that has been at stake in all the great episodes of American history. Today is a fitting time to reflect on one of those episodes. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a train in New Orleans bound for Covington, Louisiana. When the conductor saw his ticket, he demanded that he move. When Plessy wouldn’t, he was arrested, tried, convicted, and fined...

The Distributive Constitution

2012-06-05T11:01:23-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: From my first letter, I have spoken of the need for attention to the Constitution if we are to continue to enjoy the blessings of limited government. Now the call for constitutionalism has been sounded on the left, in hopes that Americans will come to enjoy the blessings of government without limits. Well, this is why we're having the national conversation we are having. In a leading journal of leftist opinion, a widely published law professor at a major university recently criticized those who see the Constitution as a document that limits the power of government....

Liberty or Soft Despotism

2012-05-22T10:00:00-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: In an earlier letter, I remarked that Alexander Hamilton's view of a commercial republic has, for the most part, prevailed in the United States. Hamilton believed that such a commercial republic was the best means of protecting the natural rights of its citizens to their lives, liberty, and property, which constitute the very basis of prosperity. Hamilton's view was largely adopted by the Whig Party in the 1830s and was the cornerstone of the economic program advocated by Henry Clay, whom Abraham Lincoln, an ardent Whig during his early political career, called his "beau ideal of...

Equality and Race Continued

2012-05-15T16:54:42-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: In a recent letter we discussed the challenge of making republican government succeed in a racially plural republic, a challenge most Americans before 1860 considered insurmountable. One of the long arcs of American history since then is the growing recognition that while sustaining such a nation was daunting, all the alternatives to it were impossible. Thus, America would have to find a way to make it work as well as it could be made to work. The beginning of this arc can be seen in Abraham Lincoln’s experience. He had become a nationally prominent politician in...

To Provide for the Common Defense

2012-05-08T09:57:57-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: In a previous letter I commented on our self-regarding character as a people, arguing that this character was the only secure foundation for a constitutional government, a government of limited powers. As we respect ourselves, we will take care of ourselves and those around us. In doing that, we will have less need of the heavy hand of government. We will more fully enjoy the blessings of liberty and the happiness that is their fruit. The self-regard of the people is essential not just to their happiness, however. It is also essential to their safety. Consider...

The Reason of the Public

2012-05-01T09:21:16-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: Every year, a lot of people think up all kinds of new constitutional amendments. Politicians and intellectuals propose them often enough: one professor, for example, recently suggested 23 new ones. It’s been 20 years, however, since America ratified the last amendment on May 7, 1992. Is that a good thing? It seems worth reflecting on that question in our continuing effort to equip ourselves to inherit and pass on (or even enhance?) the great American heritage of political freedom. Thomas Jefferson hoped that the entire Constitution would be changed or re-ratified every 20 years. We should...

Equality and Race

2012-04-24T12:58:50-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: Recent controversy over the killing of a black teenager in Florida reminds us that America’s racial dilemmas did not end with the election of our first black president; they evolved. The episode is the latest intersection of equality, the general principle of democratic politics everywhere, and race, the particular issue that has been the greatest political challenge throughout America’s history. Abraham Lincoln, who thought more profoundly than any figure in our history about the intertwined questions of equality and race, took the questions up in 1857 in a speech criticizing the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision....

We the People

2012-04-17T14:43:07-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: Our Constitution begins with the phrase "We the people." The people precede the Constitution. They, through their representatives, wrote it and then voted to adopt it. Following generations amended it. Since we can amend the Constitution, ultimately we cannot depend on it unless we ourselves are dependable. The people are the foundation upon which the legal edifice of the Constitution rests. No matter what the Constitution says, no matter how clever its provisions, it will never be sound and constitutional government secure, if the people are not sound. We often hear another account of the relationship...

Taxation and Unlimited Government

2012-04-03T10:29:38-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: Throughout history, most political regimes have been what professional categorizers of such things call "extractive." We have no objection to the term. It is accurate enough and even vivid. Extractive regimes—that is, most regimes in most places in most times—protect the political and economic power of the ruling class by taking wealth from others. In the realm of international affairs, states and empires conquered others and extracted wealth from the defeated populations. Domestically, rulers imposed taxes on their subjects in order to fund the rulers' enterprises, especially foreign wars. On the surface, the extraction of wealth...

Men Are Not Angels

2012-03-27T10:52:58-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: It's widely understood that America's Founders took a realistic view of human nature. In designing a political framework for the new nation they expected that people would more likely be self-interested than self-sacrificing, and they tried to structure the government so that the consequences of self-interested behavior would be, on balance, more beneficial than harmful. In a famous passage in Federalist 51, James Madison calls "government itself … the greatest of all reflections on human nature." We are not angels, acting with pure and disinterested motives, he contends, so we do need to be governed. But...

Constitutional Letter and Constitutional Spirit

2012-03-20T13:32:37-04:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: From my first letter, I have spoken of the need for attention to the Constitution if we are to continue to enjoy the blessings of limited government. It was gratifying, then, to hear the Attorney General say in a recent speech that "our actions must always be grounded on the bedrock of the Constitution." The particular action the Attorney General was referring to was the execution of an American citizen without trial, solely on the order of the President of the United States. On the face of it, nothing could seem less constitutional...

Against All Reason and Justice

2012-03-13T11:49:42-04:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: I concluded a recent letter by reminding my fellow citizens that "[i]f we have any hope of restoring the Founders' vision of limited, constitutional government, we must regain their understanding of the right to property." The House of Representatives took an important step in that direction by voting to pass the Private Property Rights Protection Act, which denies all federal economic development funds for a period of two years to any state or locality that commits eminent domain abuse. The bill also gives property owners a legal recourse to fight economic development takings....

To Secure These Rights

2012-03-06T10:59:40-05:00

To My Fellow Citizens: Rights are at the heart of American politics. Anyone wanting to understand our experiment in self government must grasp what we meant when we began that experiment by proclaiming, as self-evident truths, "that all men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," and that it is "to secure these rights" that "Governments are instituted among Men." In our last letter, we reflected that the phrase "among these" is evidence that the authors of the Declaration of Independence, when listing three rights any...

Among These Rights

2012-02-28T10:11:59-05:00

To My Fellow Citizens: "No Taxation Without Representation!" was a great rallying cry of the American Revolution, but it's easy to forget why. To tax a person without his or her representatives' consent violates what the Founders understood to be one of the most sacred of our natural rights, the right to property. The right to property is one of the pillars of limited, constitutional government. The Declaration of Independence says that we are endowed by our Creator "with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." "Among these" tells us that this list...

The Particular Glory of This Country

2012-02-21T09:59:56-05:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: Of all the freedoms protected by our Constitution, none is more cherished – and sometimes more difficult to think through – than religious freedom. We have been reminded of this in the Obama administration's recent decision to require church-backed employers to provide employees with insurance coverage for contraception. After religious organizations protested that this rule would force them to act against their conscience, the administration changed its rule and reached what the President called an "accommodation." This may or may not have solved the immediate problem, but it definitely did not answer the...

Certain Unalienable Rights

2012-02-14T11:55:22-05:00

To My Fellow Citizens: Do we have a right to health care? In the debate over President Obama's health care law, we've heard a lot about costs and constitutionality, but we haven't heard enough about this more fundamental question, which underlies the whole health care debate. Those in favor of the law join President Obama in insisting that health care "should be a right for every American" and that the federal government must secure that right for all. Those on the other side have usually avoided the larger question in favor of economic and legal arguments: "It will cost too...

Free Speech and Free Politics

2012-02-07T10:46:59-05:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." Two years ago the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that important features of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 violated this First Amendment ban on laws abridging the freedom of speech. (As you know, this federal law is more commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act, after the two senators who sponsored it.) McCain-Feingold prohibited labor unions and corporations, both for-profit and non-profit, from broadcasting "electioneering communications" that mentioned political candidates by name less than...

Preserving the Constitution and the Nation

2012-01-31T16:25:17-05:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: These letters hope to find, in the continually arising, pressing political questions and choices of the moment, those principles or observations that have always been and will always be necessary to our deliberations as a free people. We think there may be a good occasion for this in the President's recent decision to sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). For some of the voters who were most enthusiastic about Barack Obama in 2008—those who have since then been disappointed by the President's decisions about enhanced interrogation, the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and...

Progressives and Regressives

2012-01-24T11:55:20-05:00

To My French Friend: You raise lots of good questions, Jean-Luc, about my previous letter on the speeches of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama at Osawatomie. For the moment, let me comment on just one. I think you are right to say that Mr. Obama drew a false parallel in his speech, when he compared himself to Roosevelt as he did. Just as Roosevelt argued that the government had to have more power to counter the centralization in corporations of the wealth and power created by the industrial revolution, so did Obama argue that the government required yet more...

Enlightened and Patriotic Councils

2012-01-17T11:03:54-05:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: As we search for ways to restore constitutional self-government, our attention gravitates to questions of war and peace. Nothing is more urgent for a country than such questions, and yet what the Constitution says about war powers has been a source of controversy for almost as long as America has existed as a sovereign country. The controversy seems to be rooted in the nature of the war power itself. What kind of power is it? The political thinker John Locke, often consulted and quoted by the American Founders, wrote that "legislative power" is...

Our Promissory Note

2012-01-10T10:16:07-05:00

To My Fellow Citizens: Next Monday will mark the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. With the opening of his monument on the National Mall, Americans now have a day and a place to honor King's public life and legacy. We can benefit ourselves on this occasion by taking a moment from our busy lives to call to mind King's most famous address, the 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It has many memorable thoughts and phrases, but all of them are framed within the context of the opening lines, which declare:...

Prosperity and Freedom

2012-01-03T10:10:01-05:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: In the past few years, America's best minds have said about everything they could conceivably think of saying about the state of the economy. But they don't seem to have achieved a meeting of the minds, and the economy still has a mind of its own, so maybe a few words can still profitably be said on the subject—in particular, about the relation of the economy to America's national security. What is the relation of our prosperity to our freedom? In a speech he gave at West Point a couple of springs ago,...

Promises and Politics

2011-12-27T10:32:02-05:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: "The Pledge," in most political news stories today, refers to the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, promoted and monitored by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). This group, headed for the entirety of its 26-year existence by Grover Norquist, invites candidates around the country—for the U.S. House and Senate, governorships, and the state legislatures—to promise to oppose any and all tax increases by signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Only six Republicans in the House of Representatives and seven GOP senators have not signed it, compared to exactly three of the 246 elected Democrats on Capitol Hill...

The Shades at Osawatomie

2011-12-20T10:19:19-05:00

To My Fellow Citizens: On August 31, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt gave a revolutionary speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, and a couple of weeks ago President Barack Obama visited Osawatomie and wrapped himself in the mantle of Roosevelt's revolutionary progressivism. Thomas Jefferson saw it coming. Jefferson did not predict that Roosevelt would make a speech at Osawatomie. He merely predicted the subject of Roosevelt's speech. Jefferson feared that at some point social and economic change would call into question the character of the American republic, portending a revolution that would change it fundamentally. He feared this because he talked to a French...

Equality and Opportunity

2011-12-13T11:34:07-05:00

To My French Friend: Yes, Jean-Luc, I did read the President's recent speech. And I did notice that he referred to the same statistics from the Congressional Budget Office that I did in my last letter to you. But did you notice the sleight of hand? The President said that "over the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent," as the report indeed notes. But then the President said "over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent." In other words,...

Caesars or Presidents

2011-12-06T11:35:08-05:00

To My Fellow Citizens: We have noted in these letters that the modern presidential campaign has become a long, long job interview, which favors applicants who are good at running for president but not necessarily those who are good at being president. A vetting process that favors those who are good at electoral politics over those who are merely good at governance is obviously detrimental to America’s republican experiment. Serious as that problem is, it seems to me that the danger to constitutional government from modern presidential politics goes even deeper. We are about to observe the 100th anniversary of...

One People

2011-11-29T10:53:46-05:00

To My Fellow Citizens: Many advanced democratic countries have a big problem: stagnant or declining populations. Birth rates have dropped and the average age of citizens has risen. Unless something is done, the economic and financial strains on society could be disastrous. One possible solution is immigration. But countries in Europe and Asia have struggled with the idea of immigration because they are not sure that they can take people from other parts of the world and still remain, for example, Danish or Japanese. Is America any different? In the days after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, a television commercial aired...

Rule by Experts

2011-11-22T11:25:22-05:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: Progressives originally wanted more democracy; now they’d like less of it, if you don't mind. We have had occasion in these letters to mention President Obama's former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag. Orszag left the administration last year for the more lucrative position of Citigroup's vice chairman of global banking. During moments of leisure from tightening the shackles forged by international capitalism, Orszag enjoys writing articles in his capacity as an adjunct senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. We know of nothing that will oblige our...

A Commercial Republic

2011-11-15T10:55:46-05:00

To My Fellow Citizens: The United States was founded as a republic, but there was a spirited debate concerning the kind of republic the new country would be. Thomas Jefferson advocated an agrarian republic based on self reliant yeoman freeholders. He believed that domestic manufactures engendered dependence and corruption, both of which would undermine the virtues necessary to sustain republican government. Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, argued for a commercial republic. Only such a system, he thought, could provide the necessary conditions for the security, prosperity, and liberty of American citizens. Over the years, many have argued that the...

Equality and Wealth

2011-11-08T08:44:17-05:00

To My French Friend: It was good to talk to you again, Jean-Luc, and to hear that you still have not given up. You may be right that this is only because your stubbornness exceeds your good sense. But I find it admirable that, against all odds, you keep trying to start a business in France. Your perseverance is admirable in itself but even more admirable is the great good you will do, if you succeed. New businesses create new jobs—all the new jobs between 1980 and 2005, according to one report I read recently—and that is what we need...

Presidents and Presidential Debates

2011-11-01T10:30:09-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: The 2012 presidential election is still more than a year away, and the Republicans seeking their party’s nomination have already held – well, no one's quite sure anymore how many debates they've held. Governor Rick Perry of Texas was, for a few weeks after he declared his candidacy, ahead in many national opinion surveys and described as the front-runner in news stories. His performances in the debates since he got into the race, however, have been widely regarded as unimpressive and harmful to his prospects for the nomination. Perry himself conceded after one performance, "Debates are...

One and Many

2011-10-25T08:38:00-04:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: Many thoughtful citizens think that Washington is broken – that the federal government is not working as it should. It is not working, in part, because it is working too much. It has gone beyond the Constitution and reached too far into what is properly the business of the states. A couple of weeks ago, I speculated about some possible reforms that might help begin to return the federal government to its proper scope. But no single policy proposal will bring federal-state relations back into balance. For that we must recover something of...

Constitutionalism and Credit

2011-10-18T12:03:31-04:00

To My Fellow Citizens: In my first letter, I spoke of the need for a constitutional conversation. I called upon citizens as much as our elected representatives to reflect on “the limitations and principles of the Constitution.” Perhaps the most important requirement for such a conversation is the recognition that the Constitution is itself a limitation on the actions of the people and their government and that such a limitation is good. The Constitution is a limitation because it establishes the border between legitimate and illegitimate political action. It specifies what we may or may not do in our political...

Federalism--and Cheese Factories on the Moon

2011-10-11T11:34:21-04:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: I considered last week how liberalism depends on crisscrossing dollars blackening the skies above the fruited plains—how under liberalism the federal government takes money from Peter to send it across the amber waves of grain to Paul, and all Paul's cousins, aunts, uncles, and nieces, and back again to Peter, and invites them all to believe that in the process the dollars have somehow magically increased in number. In truth, however, this liberal poker game cannot help being a zero-sum game: the dollars you start with will be the same as the dollars...

Federalism--and the Liberal Poker Game

2011-10-04T11:51:19-04:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: People understand that when six friends call it a night and get up from the poker table, some have won and some have lost but the total number of dollars in all six wallets is exactly the same as when they sat down. Liberalism needs people to believe that what is true in a living room becomes magically inoperative in a nation—that when over 100 million households, as opposed to half-a-dozen individuals, pass an enormous but still finite number of dollars back and forth, somehow everyone can come out ahead. In our last...

Federalism and the Constitution

2011-09-27T11:47:25-04:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: Governor Rick Perry, shortly before beginning his quest for the presidency, told one audience, Our friends in New York passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That’s New York, and that’s their business, and that’s fine with me. That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business. Discussing abortion with some journalists a few days later, he reiterated, “You either have to believe in the 10th Amendment or you don’t. You can’t believe in...

Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver

2011-09-20T10:11:16-04:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: The country has quietly acknowledged another Constitution Day. September 17 is much less vivid in the American imagination than its political soul mate, the Fourth of July. On the Fourth, as we familiarly call it, we get jubilation: hot dogs, fireworks! On the Seventeenth—and no one would presume such familiarity as to call it the Seventeenth—if we observe the occasion at all, we get sober reflection (if we are on practically any college campus, federal law actually compels us to observe the day, as if it were punishment for our civic transgressions). But...

Congress and the Constitution

2011-09-13T10:05:49-04:00

To the Members of the 112th Congress: Constitution Day approaches, the day on which we annually commemorate the signing of the Constitution on September 17, 1787, in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Americans—constitutional people that we are—should celebrate. After declaring our independence in 1776, the first action that "We the People" took was to give ourselves constitutions in our various states. Then we created our first national constitution, the Articles of Confederation. A few years later we replaced the Articles with the Constitution we still have today. We are not the oldest country in the world, but our written Constitution has...