On Sunday, former Secretary of State under George Bush, and purported Conservative visited with Christiane Amanpour on the Sunday news show This Week. Powell made some interesting comments about America’s founding fathers and compromise.

The Declaration and the Constitution have been thrown out the window by the Obama Administration.

There’s no doubt that these are two of the most impressive and influential documents in history.  The founding fathers of our country provided a framework for democracy that has stood the test of time. And yet when it comes to actual governing, that framework seems to have been forgotten.  It deserves to be revisited.

On our most recent episode, Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, asserts, “Our government needs to have a different character than it does today.” In the interview, Larry Arnn evaluates whether or not Paul Ryan’s plan and George W. Bush’s foreign policy decisions would be considered “constitutional” from a technical standpoint. And he expresses concern that the quality of our government is diminishing with each passing second.

What do you think?  Should politicians strictly abide by the principles laid out by the Declaration and the Constitution? Is the President?  What about your favorite candidate – are his or her positions in adherence to our Constitution?

To hear Larry Arnn’s interpretation of modern politics and more, watch the full interview below.

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In their recent Politico article, “Constitution is inherently progressive,” John Podesta (former chief of staff to President Clinton and current president of the Center for American Progress) and John Halpin argue that the “values” of the Constitution are progressive, not conservative, and that conservatives should stop claiming that progressivism is at odds with the Constitution. “Since our nation’s founding,” the authors claim, “progressives have drawn on the Declaration of Independence’s inspirational values of human liberty and equality in their own search for social justice and freedom.”  The progressive “framework” of public-private cooperation, they continue, is “the essence of the constitutional promise of a never-ending search for ‘a more perfect union.’”  In short, the progressive “vision” of the Constitution best represents the American tradition. This argument, which is part of recent progressive efforts to rehabilitate their constitutional bona fides, might come as a surprise to the real founders of progressivism, for while some contemporary progressives might preach a Declaration-based faith and try to get right with the Constitution, early progressives had little use for either document.

According to Woodrow Wilson, what he called the “preface” of the Declaration of Independence—the part about “self-evident truths,” “unalienable rights” given to human beings by the Creator, and the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—was not the “real Declaration of Independence.”  If you want to understand that, Wilson said, “do not repeat the preface.”  For Wilson, the point of the Declaration—and the Constitution, too—was not the permanence of any principles.  “No doubt,” he wrote, “we are meant to have liberty, but each generation must form its own conception of what liberty is.”  The Founders, early progressives held, wrote for their own time in our first documents, but not for future generations. For Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, Frank Goodnow and other founding fathers of progressivism, the Constitution of the American Founding was an obstacle to be overcome.  Insisting that the Constitution must be interpreted in view of the new but increasingly dominant Darwinian model of constant change, progressives pronounced our Constitution a “living” document.  The Constitution, they believed, is as malleable as human nature itself.  The Founders’ old ideas about separation of powers could be discarded in favor of new and improved notions of “enlightened administration.”

Podesta and Halpin allege that conservatives “often mask social Darwinism . . . in a cloak of liberty,” but in fact it is progressivism whose roots run deepest in the political ideology of Darwinism.  The fittest among us, it turns out, are the bureaucrats, empowered by a Constitution whose original restraints, like federalism and the limitations imposed by enumerated powers, have been stripped by progressives in favor of a more “dynamic” model.

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Liberal pundits are panicking over constitutional conservatism. They shouldn’t, because every child—whether the parents are liberal or conservative—will benefit from constitutional conservatism’s ascendency. If America elects a constitutional conservative president and Congress in 2012, we’ll move forward as a freedom-loving nation.

Several outlets on the Left—such as The New Republic—are raising an alarm about this disturbing new term, saying that it’s secret code for “absolutists” and “zealots” on economic issues, overturning Roe v. Wade, and implying that constitutional conservatives are segregationists bent on creating a theocracy.

As two constitutional conservatives who wrote a new book on the issue, Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America, we’ll correct the record on defining constitutional conservatism, how it now dominates Republican politics, and why America needs it so desperately.

Constitutional conservatism is the system of government the Founders gave to this country. They set out a series of principles on the rights of man and the role of government in the Declaration of Independence, including that God creates us equal and gives us rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit (not guarantee) of happiness, that government exists to secure these rights, and that the people either consent to this government or have the right to change it.

After years of trial and error, the country then adopted the Framers’ proposed Constitution to be the Supreme Law of the Land to fulfill the Declaration’s purpose. This Constitution strictly defines the federal government as one of enumerated powers, giving it authority over specific areas of our national life, splitting its powers between three branches that check each other, and leaves the states sovereign on all other matters. They also declared certain individual rights. Knowing that they were fallible human beings, the Framers also included an amendment process so that when the Constitution was found lacking, a complex supermajority could change it (and have, twenty-seven times).

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“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he will fight, nothing that is more important than his own personal safety is a more miserable creature and has no chance of ever being free unless by the efforts of greater men then himself. “

-John Stuart Mill

I read this quote in the past couple days and it struck me square in the face. The ideology of modern western thought was forged on the American continent from the effort and struggle to survive that imbued us with a fierce sense of independent thought and rugged individualism culminating with the DECLARATION of INDEPENDENCE and the birth of a nation. This is what the Declaration of Independence was talking about in the first paragraphs. All people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”. It is so obvious the writers of this document had deep values precious to them and worth capturing on paper.

At this point in history, monarchies monopolized governments in countries around the world. And our colonies were ruled by leadership more than 3,000 miles away …. But everyone has their limit, right?

The early Americans had been taxed and humiliated by unjust laws and ignorant leadership. Colonial Americans knew what was being done to them was wrong and they felt ANYTHING was better than what was happening to them. So, they chose to stand for a simple notion: Man is in control of his own destiny.

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A recent paper, published by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, claims that “exposure to Fourth of July at an early age” makes young people more likely to later vote Republican.

So before venturing out to the local Independence Day parade today, you may want to consider how your kids will cope with “exposure” to this nasty contagion.

If you’re in a red state, you should be extra wary, for as the co-authors assert (without any evidence backing their claim), “Fourth of July celebrations in Republican dominated counties may thus be more politically biased events that socialize children into Republicans.”

Turn around the minivan, and put away the hot dogs—the Independence Day parade might be “politically biased”!

If you do go, you should know that your kid will end up like Dick Cheney. Fireworks can have that effect. Don’t worry, however: Harvard’s here to help.

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Today, 21 March 2011, marks the 150^th anniversary of Alexander Hamilton Stephens’ delivery of the Cornerstone Speech in Savannah, Georgia. On 20 December 1860, the state convention called by the legislature of South Carolina after the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency had voted for secession from the Union. By the beginning of February, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, George, Louisiana, and Texas had followed suit. And on 7 February 1861, these states joined together to form the Confederate States of America. Soon thereafter, Jefferson Davis was elected its President, and Stephens, its Vice-President.

In his Second Inaugural, looking back, Abraham Lincoln observed that, on the eve of the Civil War, “one eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern half of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”

After that conflict, southern apologists, such as the renowned classicist Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, would insist that “the cause we fought for and our brothers died for was the cause of civil liberty, and not the cause of human slavery.” But the facts support Lincoln’s claim.

At the time of secession, for example, the state convention in Mississippi announced, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” and asserted, “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union,” noting that “the hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory” and grew stronger in the succeeding decades.

No one, however, made the southern case with greater eloquence and force than Stephens, who had opposed secession in Georgia on prudential grounds and then rallied to its support once the decision had been made. When he returned to Savannah to address the George convention on 21 March 1861, this is what he said:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us; the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

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Written into the Declaration of Independence is a simple imperative, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Our nation was built on this concept, but the Obama administration is using its power to write regulation to circumvent the will of the people and advance its own agenda.

Three recent examples of this over reach are shocking and all Americans should demand an end to the practice and a reversal of what has already been done.  Citizens need to think, whether they agree with the reasons for the circumvention or not, about what is at stake.  Using regulation to specifically subjugate the will of the people to the agenda of any president is nothing less than tyranny.

The New York Times and Fox News, an unlikely combination, recently reported that the Obama Administration is taking advantage of a rule in the final version of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“Obamacare”) that authorizes Medicare coverage of yearly physical examinations.  The new rule says Medicare will cover voluntary advance care planning to discuss end-of-life treatment as part of an annual visit.  The mandate for end-of-life planning, commonly referred to as death panels, was specifically legislated out of Obamacare because of the uproar by the majority of Americans.  Most recent polls show 60% or more of the electorate wants Obamacare repealed, but this particular mandate was rejected by the people before the law was passed.

Using this embedded rule, one of the hundreds of Obamacare surprises that will be revealed over time, the Obama administration is able to achieve its policy goal through the regulation-writing process.  In this case, doctors will be encouraged to provide information on how to prepare an advance directive, stating how aggressively patients wish to be treated if they are so sick that they cannot make health care decisions for themselves.  Regardless of the merits, this is not what the people want.  If this seemingly harmless step is allowed to be taken, what else can be written into regulations that will further circumvent the will of the people?

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A talk Before a Tea Party rally sponsored by the Cecil County (Md.) Patriots in Elkton, Md., 10/23/10

Twenty months ago, on February 19, 2009, business reporter Rick Santelli of CNBC took to the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to deliver his famous rant against government bail-outs, and call for “a Chicago tea party.”

Santelli may have sparked the Tea Party movement. But he only tapped into outrage that had been growing in many of us for decades.

For too long, you and I have watched helplessly as a clique of politicians, intellectuals, activists, and bureaucrats from both parties have tried to obliterate our Constitution, our capitalist system, and our personal liberty. This “bipartisan Ruling Class”—as scholar Angelo Codevilla describes it—sees itself as a moral, cultural, and intellectual elite. Codevilla says that “Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.”

Oozing sanctimonious arrogance, viewing the rest of us as coarse, unsophisticated rubes who cling bitterly to guns and bibles, this class seeks to impose its own supposedly superior values and visions upon the rest of us, by force of law.

As we know too well, the ultimate goal of our Ruling Class is power. They exist—not to produce, not to invent, not to create—but to manipulate and master others. Ronald Reagan memorably summed up the Ruling Class’s governing outlook this way: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

By contrast, the rest of us Americans seek power over circumstances, but not over each other. We acquire our personal sense of identity and self-esteem through productive work—not through imposing our will, values, and visions on our neighbors. We accept a “live and let live” philosophy.

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Scott Rasmussen now predicts that the Republicans will pick up fifty-five seats in the House. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia still has the pick-up at forty-seven but says that, if forced to tweak the numbers right now, he would increase his estimate of Republican gains by single digits – which is to say, he agrees with Rasmussen.

There are pollsters out there who are playing games, as a glance at the polls for the Senate race in West Virginia should make clear – and, of course, it is easy to play games. If one wants to encourage the Left and discourage potential Republican voters and donors, all that one has to do is to base one’s poll on the presumption that the percentage of self-described Democrats within the voting public in 2010 will be equal to the percentage in 2008.

Sabato and his associates and Rasmussen are not, however, among the gamesters. Both are aiming at accuracy. Sabato and company have a reputation to uphold (and, in the academic world, that is all-important), and Rasmussen is a nonpartisan pollster who attracts clients by way of demonstrated precision. Neither outfit can afford to make a fool of itself.

I nonetheless think that both are greatly underestimating the size of the Republican surge. Both have reason to be cautious. For understandable reasons, neither is going to climb out on a limb; and both are basing their estimates on recent electoral history. If something is in the offing that exceeds the range of political oscillation in recent decades (including, notably, 1994), if we in American live in something other than normal times, they will miss the size of the surge.

It is good to remember that not a single Sovietologist predicted the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet regime. History has a way of lulling us into sleep. What has been in recent times we tend to think will be in the foreseeable future. Then, every once in a while, suddenly, out of nowhere, a political earthquake arrives – and only in the aftermath do the experts notice that there were ample warning signs.

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Julie Murphy is only seven years old, but she embodies the classic American zeal for entrepreneurship.

She learned about lemonade stands after seeing one in a cartoon.  She got excited and wanted to open one of her own.  And so Julie’s mother worked with her to get everything together and set up shop at a fair in Northeast Portland, Oregon.

20 minutes after opening, a government official approached and asked for their $120 occupational license.  Of course, they had no license.

And so 7-year-old Julie, the budding entrepreneur, was told to shut down her lemonade stand or face $500 in fines.

Julie and her mother were encouraged by others to keep the stand open and ask for donations instead.  Business picked up, and the regulators returned.  This time they made Julie cry.  They also got their wish:  Julie’s mom shut down the lemonade stand.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case of licensing gone wild.  Rather it is a classic example of a national problem that affects countless people in America every day.  Institute for Justice President Chip Mellor wrote this week in the Washington Times:

Mired in a nationwide jobless recovery, state and local governments have the power to create jobs and transform communities if they do one simple thing: Get out of the way of aspiring entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately for small businesses, however, laws restricting economic liberty are becoming more commonplace in America. Consider that since the 1950s, the percentage of occupations in the United States that require people to obtain permission from the government in the form of a license before they can pursue their chosen occupation has grown from a mere 5 percent to more than 30 percent.

Consider a few recent IJ cases:

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Pollsters Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell, both Democrats, took on President Obama in a column in the Wall Street Journal last week, criticizing him for not being true to his campaign promise to unify the country.

“Rather than being a unifier,” they say, “Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class, and partisanship.”

They don’t see Republicans as any better. They claim that Republicans have just followed the administration in trying to exploit hot buttons of race and class.

“….the Republican leadership has failed to put forth an agenda that is more positive, unifying, and inclusive.”

Although it seems so warm and cuddly to consider the idea of national “unity”, what does this really mean? Particularly, what does it mean in a free country?

Isn’t the whole point and beauty of freedom that we recognize differences among us as natural and that we view debate, differences of viewpoint, and dissent as healthy? Doesn’t the idea of “unity” – of uniformity – conjure up images of exactly what this country is not about?

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Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

What followed was a list of grievances that made the case for separation from the mother country, and this part was fiery. Jefferson was a cold man who wrote with great feeling. He trained his eyes on the depredations of King George III: “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns. . . . He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compete the work of death, desolation and tyranny . . .”

Members of the Congress read and reread, and the cutting commenced. Sometimes they cooled Jefferson down. He wrote that the king “suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states.” They made it simpler: “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice.”

“For Thomas Jefferson it became a painful ordeal, as change after change was called for and approximately a quarter of what he had written was cut entirely.” I quote from the historian David McCullough’s “John Adams,” as I did last year at this time, because everything’s there.

Jefferson looked on in silence. Mr. McCullough notes that there is no record that he uttered a word in protest or in defense of what he’d written. Benjamin Franklin, sitting nearby, comforted him: Edits often reduce things to their essence, don’t fret. It was similar to the wisdom Scott Fitzgerald shared with the promising young novelist Thomas Wolfe 150 years later: Writers bleed over every cut, but at the end they don’t miss what was removed, don’t worry.

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Once again, this weekend, Americans will gather with their families to “celebrate” the 4^th of July.  What are we celebrating? What stirs us on this day? How much time will be spent reflecting upon its relevance to our way of life? Is it, as it should be, a celebration of the founding of this Republic, and its independence as a nation? Will many Americans talk with one another or with their children about the impossible dream made true by a handful of remarkable men?  Will many of our fellow Americans even think about the new concept of government they created for us, one based upon the adoption of a Constitution, which established the principles of self-government and the limitations on the powers granted to that government?

Unfortunately we fear that the answer to the rhetorical questions posed above, increasingly, is “no”.  If somehow our national government were to set aside that day as “National Take a Day Off from Work Day” little would change.  Families would gather for a mid‑summer day of hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecue and good old fun.  Yes, the 4^th of July features flags and parades but they often seem divorced from what it is we are all celebrating. They provide a sort of faux patriotic pageantry with an abundance of food, sparkle and noise.

Actually the 4^th of July, by its correct name, is Independence Day.  It signifies the true meaning of what was declared on July 2, 1776 and affirmed by the Continental Congress on July 4:  the document known as the Declaration of Independence.  This simple document lays out the fundamental meaning of America and it touched off a bloody revolution and several years of war to establish that all our citizens have the right to an independent life, to the liberty that allows for the freedom to exercise one’s own judgment and to the right to pursue one’s own path, career, associates, friends, etc., e.g. the pursuit of happiness.

John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail, correctly predicted that the day (he referred to the actions of July 2 not July 4) would be celebrated for as long as the American experiment in government continued.

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This past April, an undated photo of two slave children was found at a moving sale in Charlotte, North Carolina, accompanied by a document detailing the sale of  “John” for $1,150 in 1854.  (John is presumably one of the children).  The photo was purchased by collector Keya Morgan for $30,000.  As a father of a little boy, this photograph reaches out to me in a distinctly personal level for I cannot imagine ever being separated from my child and the unbearable anguish I would suffer having him literally sold out from under me and taken away never to be seen again…left always to wonder about the son I lost to the horrors that was American slavery.  The two forlorn children in this photo stare back at us through the chasm of time. They are the ghosts of an ugly national past.  The victims of a monstrous injustice that would take the violent deaths of 620,000 Americans to rectify.

Still, I am struck by the breathtakingly steep arc of moral ascendency we have seen in this great country since the horrible bloodlettings that occurred on the battlefields of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and over six thousand others to determine once and for all what kind of country we would become.

That we have gone from a nation in which three million fellow Americans were held as slaves literally in chains and shackles, with no more legal rights than a goat, to a country that elects a Black man to the highest and most powerful office in the land says much about who we are as a people.

There will be those on the left who will predictably use the upcoming Independence Day holiday to highlight the hypocrisy of the Declaration we celebrate.  They will mock the document of a slave state that had the brazenness to announce to the world our vision of a better nation founded in the conviction that such basic human rights as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come not from governments or royals, but from a higher power than ourselves: Divine Providence.

But these cynics will miss the point.

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As he prepared “Notes on Government” for publication in 1791, Congressman James Madison wrote a note to himself. “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part [of the people] instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers.” He drew a telling conclusion: “The Southern States of America,” very much including his native Virginia, “are on the same principle aristocracies.”

As an architect of the new Constitution, Madison knew that Article IV, Section 4 says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” He knew, therefore, that the American regime contained a self-contradiction. With most Americans of his generation, he hoped that the eventual removal of slavery would remove this potentially fatal flaw. In fact many states did abolish slavery in that first, founding generation. But his “Southern States” did not. It took civil war and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to continue the liberation that the founders had begun.

Lincoln came to the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg to say in public what Madison in prudence could not say some seventy years before. In declaring their independence, their self-government, in 1776, “our fathers,” the founders, “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Conceived, brought forth: this is the language of fertility, of childbirth. It is a paradoxical conception and childbirth—the work of fathers not of mothers. Somehow the signers of the Declaration of Independence were fathers and mothers, men who conceived and gave birth.

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