Will you risk it all?

GLENN BECK (via email/hat tip: Carolyn Webb), 7/5/2010 - [...] Most of us think of the 4th of July as the day when we declared our independence from England and began building the greatest nation the world has ever known. And while it’s true, that notion feels very much like the end of something… British rule, oppression, being subjects to a king instead of to one another. But when you stop and think about it, the 4th of July wasn’t an ending at all—it was just the beginning.

While we declared our Independence on July 4th, 1776, we had to keep fighting to defend that declaration until 1783, over seven years of bloody struggle and ultimate sacrifice. And while those who fought in the Revolutionary War knew what they were dying to protect, “we the people” didn’t adopt our Constitution until 1787, more than 11 years after those 56 men gathered in a room and signed their name to a piece of parchment that said there’s a better way for men and women to live:

In freedom.

The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The fight to live up to those 36 words continues to this day, as an ever expanding government is threatening to suppress the very freedoms our founders fought for. And while July 4th, 1776 was a major victory, let the date serve not merely as a day to remember how it all started - but also that freedom is fragile and vigilance is needed to preserve and protect it. Each and every one of us is responsible to make sure that freedom doesn't vanish on our watch. This 4th of July, think about what the founders risked to make sure they and future generations lived free - their lives, the fortunes, and their sacred honor. And ask yourself, are you willing to do the same?

God bless you, your family, and the United States of America

Glenn Beck Read More......

Progressives vs. Founders

RENEWING AMERICAN LEADERSHIP Progressives vs. Founders by Matthew Spalding - “Are you serious?” ∴ That’s how a visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied when a reporter dared ask where the Constitution grants Congress authority to require individuals to buy health insurance. ∴ This vexed response from the House’s top Democrat last fall reveals the extent to which the intellectual, cultural and political elites have blithely abandoned the principles of America’s founding as outdated, defective and of little relevance to modern governance. ∴ How—and why—did this come to be? Read more at ReAL...

"Progressives insist the modern world is so complex and problematic that we need an activist government to manage political life and human affairs."

Read More......

IBD: A Debt The Founders Wouldn't Believe

INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY/EDITORIALS, 6/26/2009 by Sen. Judd Gregg - In a 1789 letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The earth belongs to each of these generations, during its course, fully, and in their own right. The 2d. generation receives it clear of the debts and encumbrances of the 1st. The 3d of the 2d. and so on. For if the 1st. could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not the living generation. Then no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence." ∴ What would Thomas Jefferson think today, as the Obama administration puts this generation on a path to drive the debt sky-high, effectively leaving our children and grandchildren to foot the bill? Read more at IBD... Read More......

Book: Party Time

Smear tactics, skulduggery, and the début of American democracy.
The New Yorker, September 17, 2007 - By Jill Lepore

The year is 1800. Americans go to the polls to elect a President. Which Founder do you favor? The Federalist incumbent, sixty-four-year-old John Adams, or the Republican [not today's Republican Party] challenger, fifty-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who, awkwardly enough, is currently serving as Adams’s Vice-President?

Consider your vote carefully. This is the most important election in American history. What Jefferson dubbed “the revolution of 1800” marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. (Before that, whoever placed second became the Vice-President, which is what happened to Jefferson in 1796.) It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College. At the time, many people, not all of them members of the Adams family, thought that it might spell the end of the American experiment. As Edward J. Larson observes in his new book, “A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign” (Free Press; $27), “Partisans worried that it might be the young republic’s last.

”To size up the candidates, what you need, for starters, is the word on the street—or, since the United States in 1800 is an agrarian nation, the word on the cow path. Adams: a Harvard graduate and Massachusetts lawyer who helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and served two terms as Washington’s Vice-President before his election to the Presidency in 1796. Distinguished, disputatious, short, ugly, hot-tempered, upstanding, provincial, learned (president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences). Very clever wife. Suspected of wanting to be king. Loves England. Thinks his diplomats have to tread carefully with Napoleon. Signed into law the Sedition Act in 1798; depending on your point of view, this was either so that he could have anyone who disagreed with him thrown in jail or so that he could protect the country from dangerous anarchists.

Jefferson: former governor of Virginia, onetime Ambassador to France, Washington’s Secretary of State. Eminent, brilliant (president of the American Philosophical Society), surpassing prose stylist, author of the Declaration of Independence (with help from Adams), unrivalled champion of liberty, slave owner, grieving widower, rumored to have fathered children by one of his slaves. Tall, humorless, moody, zealous, cosmopolitan. Artistic. Loves France, not so worried about Bonaparte. Ardently opposes the Sedition Act. Reputed atheist.

Are you still on the fence? You’re out of luck: there will be no Presidential debates, and precious few speeches. (In 1800, Americans considered politicians’ putting themselves so far forward to be unforgivably tacky.) No campaign managers, no Web sites, no television ads, no YouTube interviews, not so much as a Horse and Cart Across America tour. When Adams took a roundabout route through Pennsylvania and Maryland on a ride from Massachusetts to the nation’s new capital city, one Jeffersonian newspaper editor asked, “Why must the President go fifty miles out of his way to make a trip to Washington?” Continued...

Read More......

Citizenship & Immigration

The Claremont Institute, Posted March 12, 2007,

The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration: Principles and Challenges in America (by Edward J. Erler, John Marini, and Thomas G. West; published February 2007) is a volume in the Claremont Institute's series on Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. The series attempts to address issues of contemporary importance in terms of America's founding principles, a kind of resort to first principles. The underlying premise of the series is a belief in the continuing vitality of the founding principles.

In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison remarked that "he wished to maintain the character of liberality which had been professed in all the Constitutions & publications of America. He wished to invite foreigners of merit & republican principles among us. America," he concluded, "was indebted to emigration for her settlement & Prosperity." It was clearly understood by Madison and the rest of the framers that control over immigration was a matter of sovereign prerogative and that regime principles should dictate the prudential decisions as to the kind of immigrants—if any—that would benefit the regime.

Those of "merit" would, of course, be most useful to the country and a vital component of their merit would be attachment to republican principles and the capacity to live an active life in accordance with those principles. The current debate about immigration is vitiated by the fact that our policymakers no longer believe that there are regime principles or that questions of merit and character have anything to do with immigration.

Ever since the Progressives advocated racially based immigration policies—claiming to have discovered scientifically provable superiorities and inferiorities among races—any attempt to introduce the issue of character or merit into the immigration debate has been dismissed as racist. The Progressives were wrong in their advocacy of race-based policies and their theories have been discredited. But the Progressive legacy lives on, making genuine debate about immigration issues almost impossible. The issue of the character of potential citizens is not a racial issue; it is a regime issue.

Character—the capacity to live a life befitting republican citizens—is, as Madison indicated, crucial to the debate about immigration. This volume seeks to revive the issue of republican character in the current immigration debate and to elucidate the constitutional foundations of American citizenship.

Edward J. Erler
Series Editor

Edward J. Erler is professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute.

The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration: Principles and Challenges in America (Order here) Read More......