Friday, March 6, 2020

PHI 406 - Reading Response 4


               When I was 16, my grandmother and I travelled to Washington DC for a union conference.  While there, we visited The National Library.  Situated in a rotunda, enclosed in a case of bullet-proof glass and argon gas, lay the original documents that founded our country.  My grandmother stood behind me as I read the original words of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, encouraging me to connect with our ancestors who founded Jamestown, and fought as patriots of this nation.  Thomas Jefferson stated, in the Declaration of Independence, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments, long established, should not be changed for light and transient Causes.”  The founding fathers did not take the creation of our country lightly. 

“We the people,” begins the document that guides the three branches of our Federal government.  Laid out, in plain, are the words of our founding fathers as they formed “a more perfect union.”  With 26 amendments, the United States Constitution is a meaty read, but an important one, especially with the current political climate. 

I sometimes feel as if this President has ripped those precious documents to shreds and imposed his own will, rather than that of the people who created this country and the documents they left behind.  He seems to forget that he swore to uphold the constitution in his inauguration.  Our constitution gives him limits; limits he seems to ignore every day.  He enabled interference in the 2016 elections, he used his office to try putting pressure on his political opponents, he flouted the system of checks and balances by dictating the terms of his own impeachment and he is interfering with the justice system now, by pardoning political supporters and tweeting official policy. 

What would our founding fathers have thought about this interference?   Of a President who makes policy on Twitter and flouts the checks and balances that enabled this 245-year-old document to survive the test of time?  It’s hard to know, but I believe that the answer potentially lies in The Federalist Papers, which I encourage all Americans to also read.


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Grade: 9/10
Professor Comments: (highlights the last sentence) Given how few Americans have even read the Constitution, this may be hoping for too much.

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