A plea for Constitutional literacy on Constitution Day
I fear we as a nation have drifted too far away from an understanding and appreciation of the greatest governance document the world has ever produced. We have a president today who usurps power never given to him in the Constitution, a dysfunctional Congress so gridlocked that it can’t fulfill its mission as a separate-but-equal branch of government, and a Fourth Estate of media elites who cheerlead for a bigger, more intrusive government that unnecessarily addicts those struggling to escape poverty to handouts, rather than encouraging self-reliance.
Let me be clear. Rightly sized and empowered, government serves an excellent purpose. Our Founding Fathers knew that and created a perfect vision for a republic of independent states protected and served by a central federal government with strong checks and balances. Those checks on powers were essential to the framers, who established three equal but separate branches to ensure we always had a government “of the people, for the people and by the people,” as Abraham Lincoln so wisely said.
But today we have people who are simply over-governed — subjected to taxation, regulation, and intrusions by a massive federal government our Founding Fathers never would have tolerated. It wants to control what we eat, how we live and even how much we can earn. It values political correctness over freedom, codependence over self-reliance and redistribution of wealth over personal success.