[jeffersondem]

“What document has every president of the United States used to govern by since Lincoln overthrew the Construction.” (sic)

Answer: the new, synthetic constitution.

The rock-ribbed Lincolnite Garry Wills in his biography of the rail-, side-, and nation-splitter explained how it went down at the address at Gettysburg.

Lincoln, he recounts, “performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.”

[Bull Snipe]

“Answer: the new, synthetic constitution”

the “new synthetic constitution” has been in effect for 155 years. Over twice as long as the old one. We seem to be getting along rather well under it.

[DiogenesLamp]

Lincoln, he recounts, “performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.

He made the Declaration of Independence into a statement on the issue of slavery instead of what it actually was, which was an assertion that states had a right to be free and independent of a larger government which they saw as oppressing them.

He flipped the meaning almost 180 degrees, and used it to justify the very opposite thing which the Declaration said.