Unlike the common view expressed these days that men are basically good, the Deists (being students of natural law) and the Christians alike believed that men, especially if given too much power, were basically evil.
What troubled me in Dave's letter was this common perception that our founders, like Thomas Jefferson, gave us the bill of rights and invented the idea of a constitution. This is not true.
Patrick Henry, Mr. "give me liberty or give me death", was a delegate to the Continental Congress from Pennsylvania which had just created their own new constitution that I believe introduced the idea of enumerating what rights the government was created to protect. Mr. Henry and his fellow delegates were given very specific instructions from their state not to allow the precious rights their new constitution protected to be compromised by a federal constitution.
Mr. Henry and his fellow delegates did NOT sign the Constitution that came out of the convention. What they DID do was to create The Pennsylvania Minority Report (PMR) which listed 14 flaws that they saw that threatened the rights they had secured by their new state constitution.
The Bill of Rights was created by the dissenters not by the Convention.
So this brings me to a pattern I see in history and that is the pattern of forced union. We saw in the Civil war how hard it was for the southern states to remove themselves from the union and we saw in Brexit how hard it was for Great Britain to remove themselves from the European Union and we see the natural glue that holds nations into the United Nations because if they leave they have no defense against possible sanctions the union may impose on outsiders.
This trend seems to now be pushing for a global new world order that all nations will be forced into eventually.
The PMR points out that no delegate to the Continental Congress was allowed to make amendments or alter anything in the proposed constitution. Things were fixed before the delegates ever got there. It was Yay, Nay. Henry and others smelled a rat and if you can find the full text of the PMR you will see there were many questionable shenanigans going on before, during, and after the Constitutional Convention pushing delegates to "take it or leave it".
Our pathetic government schools don't make our kids read the founding documents, much less the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers and much much less the constitutions of the original 13 colonies under the Articles of Confederation.
Very few people these days have any clue that there were many good constitutions before the federal one. The US Constitution didn't introduce this idea, it created a UNION. There are merits to a union of course but ours was to be federated which means that the federal government deals with other nations and the states, NOT the people or counties/cities directly. It would never have been ratified if this weren't the perception of the people at that time.
Now our federal government is a corporate socialist empire that constantly meddles with the affairs of individual citizens more so than it does with the states creating huge bureaucracies to manage dealing with millions of individuals and businesses and dictating what they can and cannot do from a central hub. The federal government holds our medical and financial records and monitors our every phone call and email - for national security reasons creating clear vulnerabilities to our privacy and rights.
This all came out of the union.
The good things that are now happening at the state level all over this union are because the states are beginning to realize that this union is way out of line and that push-back is a good thing. I for one hope we will see some states put in place some checks and balances needed to offset the totalitarian power of our federal government that is now so dysfunctional as to have no resemblance to the original ideas that created it.
BTW Why hasn't Biden even given a state of the Union address yet like every other president in our history has? And why hasn't our "watch-dog" media even noticed this fact?
