September 11th and the Constitution

September 11, 2001: The most devastating attack on American soil occurred. Planes struck two World Trade Center towers, collided with the Pentagon and crashed in Pennsylvania. This horrible tragedy—the worst attack on American soil in history—was perpetrated by a small band of radical Islamo-Fascist terrorists bent on waging significant damage against America.

As we reflect upon that catastrophe six years ago this week, we should consider what it is the terrorists were trying to do: damage the economic state of America and intimidate us into changing our ways and converting to Islam. In that latter reflection we should further reflect on what makes our country great and why the terrorists hate us—considerations which should lead us back to the United States Constitution.

On May 25, 1787, fifty-five American men assembled themselves in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention. At this meeting the men we now think of as our “Founding Fathers” chose to do away with the failed Articles of Confederation, America’s first attempt at a united government, and replace it with the new United States Constitution.

Immersed in these heated deliberations were numerous people we now look upon as heroes, individuals who were, in fact, as I discussed in my August 30 column, committing an act of treason against the United States under the Articles of Confederation. The issues were wide-ranging and controversial. How would the government be structured? What powers would be delineated to the government? How would the issue of slavery be dealt with? Would there be a bill of rights included? And the very basic question, what type of government would we have? When asked such a question as he left the Convention, Benjamin Franklin gave his answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Debates over these issues continued to rage on even after the Convention wrapped up on Sept. 17, 1787, as the “Federalists” and the “Anti-Federalists” were pitted in an epic debate over the many issues posed by the Constitution. Three Founding Fathers—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay—produced the Federalist Papers, written under the alias Publius. The articles, totaling 85 in the end, were published in New York State to counter Anti-Federalist opposition in hopes of convincing the people of that critical state to support the ratification of the Constitution.

One of the charges laid against the Constitution was the concern over factions, which in essence were defined by Madison as groups of individuals united by a common interest of passion which is adverse to the community or the rights of others. Critics asserted that this government type opened up the possibility for factions to become powerful enough to obtain a “tyranny of the majority,” especially in a large republic, but Federalist No. 10, written by Madison, provided a powerful response to the critics making these claims, arguing that factions cannot be eliminated, but rather its effects can be controlled.

To cure the “mischiefs” of factions, Madison suggested that we could either remove the causes of factions—which was improbable because it would involve either the destruction of liberty or “giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests,” which would take away what is “essential to political life”—or control its effects. The causes of faction cannot be removed, he argued, and therefore it would be necessary to control its effects.

Madison argues that the ability to control factions is intrinsically part of the structure of the republican form of government the United States has in that the U.S. would be a large republic, and such a republic would better secure the dangers of factions than smaller republics would. Unlike a democracy, republican government consists of a representative system which enables it to control a large area. A large republic in particular implies that more citizens will vote for each representative and that representative will therefore have to take into account the thoughts of the greater number of individuals, which ends in better government. Larger republics like the United States, he believed, provided for greater diversity of people and ideas than in a smaller republic, which inherently contributes to better government as well.

The United States Constitution provides us with a phenomenal system of government that, by its very nature, protects the American people from both an overreaching federal government and the potential for a small plurality of people to establish a “tyranny of the majority.” There are so many other great things about this country and its Constitution, given all the rights we have and the systemic ways in which they’re protected, and as we think back on that fateful day in Sept. of 2001, we should all reflect on what it is that the terrorists were trying to do, why they were trying to do it, and how great it is to be blessed with the Constitution of the United States of America.

The 2007 Colorado Constitution Day Celebration

          On December 8, 2004, Congress passed Public Law 108-447, which included a provision mandating that all levels of education receiving federal funding educate their students about the U.S. Constitution on or around Sept. 17, the anniversary of the signing of the document known as Constitution Day.

          To expand upon what the schools are doing, the national organization Liberty Day, which spreads information and educational materials about the Constitution and Declaration of Independence across the country and is headquartered in Colorado, is putting on a statewide “celebration,” organized by Andy McKean, President of Liberty Day, and myself, at the University of Colorado at Denver on Saturday, Sept. 15 with the express purpose of “educat[ing] students on the contents of the Constitution, the greatness of our government system, and our rights and responsibilities as Americans and [inspiring] them to action in a fun, interactive, and engaging manner.” It is intended for teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18.

          The event will include several parts: two seminars, breakout sessions, and activities, with a mock student Supreme Court Oral Argument presentation, voting machine demonstrations, and more. I think we’ve developed a structure which should succeed in both educating the students on the Constitution and maintaining interest throughout the day.

          “The Constitution Day Celebration program and line-up of speakers is quite impressive!” Colorado Commissioner of Education Dwight Jones praised in a letter of support he sent to me. The speakers include, but are not limited to, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, State Senator Nancy Spence, Benjamin Franklin (played by comedian Jimmie Viles), and motivational speaker Mark McIntosh, cohost of 9News’s Colorado and Company. It will also include a student debate on the Constitution and a debate between former State Senate President John Andrews and a Democrat who has yet to be determined.

          The Constitution itself is not a partisan document; rather, it’s the interpretations and ideas surrounding the Constitution that can be partisan. It’s meant for everyone. Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative—it doesn’t matter. Therefore, our goal with the Constitution Day Celebration is to put forth a nonpartisan experience to ensure a complete education, and so we’re doing our best to reach out to all major political parties to achieve that goal. We have great participation and support from Republicans; however, we do not have the same participation yet from Democrats but are asking for their support and participation over the coming week.

          Our objective is to achieve 50-200 student attendees. Those students who participate in the event will be eligible for one credit hour of transferable UCD credit; all they’ll have to do after that is pay the school a $50 fee and complete a paper. One whole college credit for just one day of an event, a paper, and a small fee? Talk about a bargain!

          This experience promises to be a great constitutional experience for teenagers, and I strongly encourage all teens to come and experience it for themselves and ask that all schools and educators inform their students about this excellent opportunity. It is certainly not an opportunity to pass up.

Celebrating the Constitution: The Bill of Rights

The date is October 27, 1787. Three of our nation’s most famous founding fathers—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—publish the first of a series of essays that would later become known as The Federalist Papers, written under the alias Publius. The articles, totaling 85 in the end, are published in New York State in hopes of convincing the people of that critical state to support the ratification of the Constitution.

The Federalist Papers came on the heels of the Constitutional Convention, which churned out a new document that would become, by 1789, the “Supreme Law of the land,” and comprised a forceful rhetorical response, doused in political philosophy, to the claims of opposition against the charter.

The Federalists, those in favor of a stronger national government and therefore the ratification of the Constitution, were the wealthy, elite, landowning merchants. The Anti-Federalists, or those who were strongly adverse to a stronger central government and therefore opposed to the ratification of the Constitution, were the average Americans—the farmers, the debtors, the shopkeepers, and the laborers.

Intellectual debate raged on between those two groups over a whole host of topics, some of which will be examined in my next column, but one of the most contentious issues was actually over the Bill of Rights.

While it seems foregone to us that a bill of rights should be included in the Constitution, debate over the issue was in fact intellectually intense. In what has been labeled Anti-Federalist No. 84, Robert Yates, under the pseudonym Brutus, put forth the defining argument in favor of the inclusion of the Bill of Rights, becoming the counter to Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 84.

“Those who have governed,” Yates argued, “have been found in all ages ever active to enlarge their powers and abridge the public liberty. This has induced the people in all countries, where any sense of freedom remained, to fix barriers against the encroachments of their rules.”

In essence, the Anti-Federalist movement felt that, without the Bill of Rights in place, there was no real assurance that citizens’ rights would be protected, and therefore their inclusion was necessary in order to prevent against an overreaching federal government.

Hamilton, however, took a sharply different view in his essay. Federalist No. 84, written to counter Anti-Federalist grievances, was an intellectually astute response in which he argued that a bill of rights was not only unnecessary, but dangerous as well.

In terms of a bill of rights being superfluous, Hamilton argued several points. First, numerous protections of rights were already contained in the document. For instance, religious tests for office are forbidden, the insinuation being that individuals have the right to practice their own faith. The writ of habeas corpus can only be suspended during a time of rebellion, and all people, according to the original Constitution, have the right to a trial by jury. Finally, treason is explicitly defined as “levying war against them, or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort,” thereby foiling any government attempt to define treason in another way as criticism of the government or some other such definition.

Second, Madison argued that the specific enumeration of the government’s powers removed the need for new safeguards against what it already did not have the power to do.

Madison goes on to argue that bills of rights “are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous.” In essence his argument in this portion of the essay is that, if the government is prohibited from doing certain things but isn’t prohibited from doing everything it isn’t expressly told it can do, then the danger is in its implications, namely that the government can do anything it’s not expressively forbidden to do.

In the end, in an effort to appease opponents to ratify the Constitution, the Federalists promised to ratify amendments that would in essence be the Bill of Rights, a promise which they kept, as the ten amendments were ratified in 1791.

In retrospect, all Americans recognize the greatness and significance of those amendments and are grateful for them, as their impact has been considerable. The United States has always been known as a land of opportunity. No matter what your circumstances in the beginning, you have the right to live and experience life and to become your own individual. In America, you can do something with your life; each and every one of us has the potential to live the American Dream. Everyone can rise from rags to riches; it’s been done before, and it can happen again. In America, you have rights that enable you to build something that becomes greater than yourself.

Isn’t it time we celebrated those rights? Well, if you’re a teen age 13-18, you can at the 2007 Colorado Constitution Day Celebration. This outstanding nonpartisan event—organized by me on behalf of Liberty Day—is a fantastic opportunity to earn a college credit and learn about the Constitution from insiders like Sec. of State Mike Coffman, former State Senate President John Andrews, Benjamin Franklin (played by comedian Jimmie Viles), and more! I highly encourage all teenagers to take advantage of this excellent opportunity; it will be great. Visit www.libertyday.org for more details.

American Failure: The Articles of Confederation

On September 17th, 1787, forty American men convened to sign a treasonous document. Among these traitors were George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. They signed what is now the United States Constitution.

Hard as it may be to believe, our constitution was once a betrayal of America herself. They were committing an act of treason against the Articles of Confederation, America’s first attempt at a united government.

The Articles of Confederation was a logical result of the Revolutionary War, for the leaders of the fledgling nation feared that a strong central government might lead to another tyrannical regime like that which they fought against in the rebellion. A loose confederacy, they determined, was the right way to go. Yet in their aspirations for a weak central government and strong state governments came a document that was both ineffective and doomed to failure.

The document was plagued with problems, and so the Philadelphia Convention was convened on May 25^th, 1787 to revise the Articles. The delegates to this convention did not, however, revise the Articles. Instead they met in secret, making every effort to maintain that secrecy, and rewrote a brand new system of government, excluding all outside influence. Furthermore, the Constitution specified that only 9 out of the 13 original states needed to ratify the Constitution for it to go into effect, which was a remarkable difference from the required unanimous consent to amend the Articles. In truth, those states which first ratified the Constitution seceded from the Articles.

In retrospect, though we do not tend to see this as an act of treason, we view the Philadelphia Convention as inherently good, just as we view the Declaration of Independence, and rightfully so. The Articles of Confederation was a system of government under which the national government was too weak to function in any serious capacity. Under the Articles the government could not levy taxes and therefore raise revenues unless the states, adverse to national taxation, were willing to provide such funds, which they typically were not. Congress could raise an army and a navy, but only with the support of the states; it was in essence only able to call upon the states to send their militias. The states were not required to comply with Congress’s requests for military forces and revenue, and they were reluctant to do so much at all, causing Congress to seek other routes, such as the Northwest Ordinance, to raise funds.

These flaws within the Articles of Confederation led directly to a number of incidents in which the national government was impotent. Perhaps the most spectacular event showcasing the failures of the Articles was Shays’ Rebellion. In the year 1786, Massachusetts farmers rebelled against land foreclosures carried out by the courts on behalf of creditors. Daniel Shays, a Yankee captain of the Revolutionary War, led the uprising, staging a number of armed attacks on courthouses to prevent the foreclosures from continuing. The Massachusetts governor called upon Congress to send military aid to the state, but they were unsuccessful in their attempts to raise a militia that could halt the advance of Shays and his followers. The lack of national aid in this crisis increased the dissatisfaction with the Articles, for it had become apparent that Congress was powerless when it came to lending a much-needed helping hand.

Congress’s inability to regulate commerce created a number of problems regarding the ability to form a coherent national economy and produce foreign trade agreements at a national level, and the fact that it couldn’t raise revenue from the states caused it to revert to disbanding the army and printing worthless money, among other risky measures to fund even its most basic functions. Furthermore, the Articles could only be amended given unanimous consent of all 13 states, which was virtually impossible. The Annapolis Convention was held in September 1786 to revise the Articles, yet only twelve delegates from five states attended, preventing any changes from taking place. 

That is, until the Philadelphia Convention, the meeting suggested by the Annapolis delegates to modify the Articles. Yet it was impossible to repair, so it had to be scrapped entirely and replaced with a new, fresh document.

Thus, in the failure of the Articles of Confederation came perhaps the most important document in American history: the Constitution. This charter, while keeping the revolutionary principles of smaller national government alive, increased federal power in a way that would greatly improve upon the failings of the Articles and lay the foundation for the best system of government in existence.

Why America?

“Give me liberty or give me death!” proclaimed Patrick Henry prior to the Revolutionary War, and his declaration seems to be ringing around the globe today.

As many as 6 million Mexicans take the risky trek through the heat of the desert to enter this country illegally each year.

Nearly 98 thousand Cuban refugees risk their lives annually to flee the tyranny of Fidel Castro’s regime and come to the US.

Tens of thousands of Americans have put their lives on the line and died in battle for their country.

Why is that?

There is only one answer as to why these people would risk their lives in one form or another for America: She is the premier land of freedom and opportunity. There is no other like her. Since the Constitution first went into effect in 1789, the United States has had a reputation of being “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” and it is well-deserved.

Our Constitution grants us rights unseen in other countries, yet we don’t think about the benefits that this country has to offer, the rights that we have that are denied to Cubans in their country, to Iranians in theirs, and to the news network that was shut down in Venezuela for opposing dictator Hugo Chavez.

While our government is criticized by foreign nations as being “oppressive” in its “spying” and “censorship,” American citizens continue to enjoy more personal freedoms than the majority of other countries on the planet. We constantly see headlines in the newspaper about the government engaging in “illegal wiretapping” and “torturing” of accused terrorists, issues which are entirely debatable. And while headlines rage negatively about our civil rights, we don’t compare the right of Muslim schoolgirls to wear hijabs in the US to the prohibition of that, and other religious garb, in France, coincidentally our biggest Western critic. We in the US have the right to freely exercise our religious faith, or lack thereof, as granted to us by the Constitution.

We can also look at the US in comparison to the UK. We are blessed to have a Constitution which, at least in the amendments, spells out our rights as citizens – rights which the courts, overall, do a decent job protecting, even if the judgments are sometimes disputed. Those disputes aside, we have certain rights that cannot be abridged. The British have rights, but they’re not spelled out on paper. They’re subject to change without a Constitution guaranteeing those rights to their citizens.

The United States is by far the most privileged nation on Earth. We do not experience poverty like those of other nations. Our poor (consisting of only 12% of the population) often own a home, have a car, and posses a computer with internet access. That is poverty in this country, and we are lucky not to know what poverty is in other countries. For example, 480 million people live on less than two dollars a day in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, yet the number of people in such conditions in the US is so infinitesimal that they’re not even included in reports.

Our GDP per capita is around $44,000, and our GDP PPP is around $13.13 trillion. Our unemployment rate is at a mere 4.4%, lower than the average of the previous four decades. This economic prosperity was made possible by, yes, American hard work and ingenuity, but also by a government system and citizen-granted rights which enable for a thriving economy to occur. 

It’s hard to imagine a United States of America without the Constitution. We could potentially see Muslims denied the right to practice their faith because of a small band of radical jihadists bent on destroying America. We could see a 15-year-old accused of murdering a neighbor locked in jail for life without trial, liberal Democrats locked away for opposing Bush administration policies, and the New York Times shut down because the government opposes it. Heck, I could be denied the right to publish this column because I’m “too young.” The list goes on and on for what reality in this country would be without the Constitution.

Our rights are also protected in the very nature of our government structure. This document laid the groundwork for a phenomenal system of government which, despite its flaws, has worked extraordinarily well over the past two hundred years. In three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), in addition to the people, we have checks and balances as well as separation of powers. In separate branches of government we find the powers of one branch checked by the others; in the people we find a stopgap against the tyranny of government; and in a republican government structure we find preventions against the tyranny of the majority.

 We are blessed, as Americans, to have a constitution which so clearly establishes and protects our rights as citizens in as many ways as it does. The document enables us, the most privileged people on Earth, to have many personal freedoms and protections of those freedoms that we take for granted. 

This – a deep recognition and sense of pride for this country, the ideals on which it is based, and the wonderful benefits given to us by the Constitution – is what is driving me to organize the 2007 Colorado Constitution Day Celebration on Saturday, September 15^th, a celebration of this outstanding charter for teens aged 13-18. It is what motivates me to create such a celebration, and I hope it motivates you all to do your own part to celebrate it as well.

Welcome! Please read.

Welcome to the official blog for the Liberty Day 2007 Colorado Constitution Day Celebration. If you are registered for the Constitution Day event you may inquire as to how you can post your own blog entries by e-mailing me at constitutiondaycelebration@yahoo.com.

I look forward to your posting myself and reading yours!