Free Republic

The Constitution of the United States - Broken down into its sentences and proofread. Several years ago, I posted the Declaration of Independence broken down into its sentences and proofread. (Jefferson, for all his praises and faults, was a great writer, and little proofreading was needed.) Earlier this year, I posted George WashingtonÂ’s Rules of Civility broken down into its sentences and proofread. Washington copied these from a book written earlier by someone else, and it required a lot of proofreading. Grammar of 270 years ago had capital letters in words in different parts of a sentence, at random it...

When you think of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, it’s likely because of his ill-advised, bad-weather kite-flying foray or his face on the hundred-dollar bill or possibly the pithy sayings from Poor Richard’s Almanack. Here’s another side of Franklin: swashbuckling swordsman. In its Sept. 20 “Important American Furniture, Silver, Outsider and Folk Art” sale, Christie’s is set to feature just that as they offer a brilliant silver-hilted small sword, made for Franklin by a neighbor in Philadelphia circa 1760. Thankfully, it won’t ruin your peaceable image of the portly American statesman; at the time, it was a part of a gentleman’s...

A few months ago, I wrote and posted a defense of Donald Trump entitled “Why Would We Elect as President a Guy Who...? In it, I attempted to point out that MANY of those we have elected to the White House (as well as the myriad men and women who occupy high positions) have been – like ALL of us – frail, flawed and fallen fellow human beings and, yes, sinners. My defense of Trump – but, more critically, the vital need to keep the most corrupt candidate to run for the office in my lifetime OUT of the White...

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) called the Founding Fathers of the United States “a little maniacal” in their focus on having a separation of powers during an appearance Thursday on Morning Joe. McCaskill, a Hillary Clinton supporter, said while criticizing Donald Trump that the country should not be divided and pointed to the rancor in Congress as proof of the problem.

Has America spent the last few hundred years misunderstanding the Declaration of Independence? That's what Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, believes. According to Allen, the paragraph beginning 'We hold these truths to be self-evident' has been misinterpreted thanks to a rogue period that was not in the original document. And that could completely transform our understanding of how the Founding Fathers viewed the role of government, The New York Times reported.

Many historians call the Founding Fathers "Deists," and many of them were not true Christians -- after all, Thomas Jefferson tore all the miracles out of the Gospels! But judging by the Declaration of Independence, our Founders were more religious than many think: our founding document mentions God no less than four times.This is not to say America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation -- the federal government has never had an established religion. But the Jewish and Christian understandings of God deeply influenced the founding generation, and that influence radiates from the Declaration of Independence.Here are the four...

If this 4th of July George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Rush and the rest of our Founding Fathers were to come back from the grave and testified against America for her national departure from our founding, the majority of American’s would NOT hear them and would fully reject them. I truly believe Americans would be fully enraged by their words of condemnation and rebuke and seek to destroy and slander them 24/7 on all the media news outlets and then have them stoned. We as a nation are too far gone morally to restore this nation and the majority of...

Today many in the United States are crying out to President Obama and Government (i.e., Washington D.C.) to do more and more to fix our national ills. The notion that Big Government has all our answers and the solutions we need in this very chaotic and unstable world is fairy tale. Our Founding Fathers wisely understood that the less power government possessed the better off we as Americans would be. Our Foundering Fathers fully comprehend that with the abandonment of Judeo/ Christian foundations and principles that our government would be transformed into an ever controlling monster with a tyrant as...

During the Revolutionary War, our new nation faced a financial crisis. The colonies had no money to pay for the war and the prospects of raising funds were dismal, at best. Colonial troops had not been paid the money due them, so protests ensued. Some officers even surrounded the Continental Congress and held it for ransom, trying to get what was promised the troops for years of hardship, struggle and deprivation. Our young country was very near imploding after all the years of bloodshed, sacrifice and valiant commitment to the dream of liberty. Enter Robert Morris: the richest man in...

The University of Miami has now announced a chair for the study of atheism. In another recent story, an atheist group is suing a sheriff because of his pro-God statements on his Facebook page (Constitution.com, 5/19/16). No one can deny the rise of the shrill atheistic voices of our time. But dare I say that the idea of state-sanctioned and in some cases state-mandated atheism is absolutely out of step with the traditions of America. Here are 10 reasons why: 1) At the time of our founding, 99.8% of the population was professing Christians. Ben Franklin, himself a bit of...

Have you ever seen an incredible talent who is destroying himself? An Elvis Presley, a Jimi Hendrix, a John Belushi?  A Marilyn Monroe, a Prince, an Amy Winehouse? What do you think when you look at someone who’s rich, famous, gifted and has the world at his fingertips after he just throws it all away? Well, America is in the same situation. We’re the greatest nation that has ever existed. We saved the world three times; we’ve helped hundreds of millions of people become free; we put a man on the moon and we stand alone with the world’s strongest...

A federal employee of the National Park Service who offers guided tours of Independence Hall in Philadelphia -- the birthplace of the Constitution -- stunned a group of tourists this week by telling them the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were the product of "class elites who were just out to protect their privileged status." Mary A. Hogan, a federal employee making in excess of $95,000 per year in salary and benefits, provided a tour Monday afternoon at Independence Hall laced with factual inaccuracies and disparaging comments about the Founders and the Constitution. Hogan, who goes by the...

Had you been in Philadelphia on Sept. 19, 1796 and picked up a copy of the American Daily Advertiser, you would have discovered a remarkable statement -- not on the front page, but on the second. It was from high-ranking and popular elected official who had no interest in keeping his office. "Satisfied that if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my services, they were temporary," he said, "I have the consolation to believe that, while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene, patriotism does not forbid it." When this farewell address appeared in what was...

During Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign visit to Liberty University, he told the students that our nation was created on racist principles. Students at a Christian-based university, such as Liberty, do not often hear the founders-as-racists argument. But it is featured at many other universities, as well as primary and secondary schools. Most often, the hate-America teachings are centered on the fact that slavery is a part of our history. What is left untaught is: Slavery was a routine part of human history. Blacks were the last people to be enslaved. Plus, our Founding Fathers struggled mightily over the issue of...

What kind of criticism would prompt a major publisher to withdraw from circulation a New York Times bestseller by a recognized scholar? One would think the objections would have to be weighty and the critics unquestioned experts in the particular field. In the case of "The Jefferson Lies", one would be mistaken to make those assumptions. In 2012, David Barton's popular analysis of Thomas Jefferson was pulled by the book's publisher, Thomas Nelson, based on what appears to have been an academic putsch designed to protect the now popular view of the third president as a secular deist and hypocritical...

In his weekly address released today, President Barack Obama said that Supreme Court Justices are supposed to apply “the principles written into our founding documents.” “The men and women who sit on the Supreme Court safeguard our rights,” Obama said. “They ensure that ours is a system of laws, not of men. And they’re given the essential task of applying the principles written into our founding documents to the most challenging questions of today.” …

There is a line from John Adams of which conservatives, particularly those of a moralistic bent, are fond: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people." The surrounding prose is quoted much less frequently, and it is stern stuff dealing with one of Adams’s great fears - one that is particularly relevant to this moment in our history. John Adams hated democracy and he feared what was known in the language of the time as "passion." Adams's famous assessment: "I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run,...

George Washington, our first president, is probably our greatest and most decent statesman. We celebrate Washington's Birthday each February. But March 16th marks the birthday of probably the second-most important and decent American, James Madison. Madison became our fourth president, but his presidency is not the chief source of his greatness. There would have been an entirely different America without Madison's enormous input and foresight at the contentious 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. There were 55 delegates to the convention. Like Madison, some had a formal college education, while others did not. From Madison's notes about the quality of the...

The Founding Fathers vision of a “citizen’s legislature” vanishes when the process of reelection enters the picture How many times over the years have you seen one group or another with a proposal to get Term Limits for Congress enacted? I’d say there were more of those than suggestions for Obama’s Impeachment which should be a slam-dunk. Well, more or not, this one initiated by Americans for Constitutional Liberty is the latest one to cross my desk and while I would like to see a realistic one put out there for a change. All the ones I have seen just...

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Or do we? At the end of a long, bitter political year, with a still grimmer one facing us, shall we take a look? The Founding Fathers' abstract commitment to equality -- reinforced by the Gettysburg Address -- vexes and perplexes Americans across the political sphere. We know we're "equal," more or less. But equal on what terms: nature's or the government's? "Equality" takes on the quality that 21st century politicians assign it according to vote tallies, with backing from the media's noisier voices. We hear about...