|
Townhall
Finance
Endangered:
The Constitution
by Mark Baisley
This
article is the first in a
series on the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution. My purpose in posting this
exposé is to do my
part in calling Americans back to their spawning grounds of liberty. Based on recent trends, I
fear that if we don’t
frequent our founding principles then Ronald Reagan’s warning could be
realized, that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from
extinction.”
The
primary motivation for
constructing a Bill of Rights was citizen apprehension over the
formation of a
centralized federal government. The
United States existed as a sovereign nation beginning with the signing
of the
Declaration of Independence from England.
Each of the 13 original states owned a
distinct culture and set of
values, sharing the common priority captured succinctly in Thomas
Paine’s
pamphlet, Common Sense: “But
where says
some is the King of America? I'll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and
doth
not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain... that in
America
THE LAW IS KING.”
A
full eleven years passed before
the colonies ratified the United States Constitution.
This formalizing of the union was a hard
sell, as every state valued their freshly earned sovereignty. Founding Fathers Alexander
Hamilton, James
Madison and John Jay wrote 85 essays, now known as the Federalist
Papers, to
promote the idea of uniting the union under a common constitution.
The
greatest fear of committing to
a constitution was what mathematicians may refer to as an Axiom of
Abstraction;
that codifying a set of rights could be interpreted as the complete set
of
rights. So while
the Constitution grants
the federal government its powers, many felt it necessary to augment
this
framework with a minimal set of rights preserved for the citizens.
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
Finance
|
