[NJ_gent]

"The Constitution is not a suicide pact"

*sigh* Not this again...

"Let's think about this for a moment - a group of farmers, lawyers, and businessmen sign their names to an open declaration of treason against the Crown, which controls the largest empire and the most powerful military the world has ever seen, and whose punishment for treason is generally death, and it's *NOT* a suicide pact?! I just love that one. Had the revolution turned out the way that any logically thinking person would have expected (it certainly hadn't completely succeeded just yet - see: War of 1812), every man whose name appeared on that Constitution would have been executed to serve as an example of what happens to traitors. These men put liberty far above their personal safety in the face of nearly certain death - but hey, it's not a suicide pact or anything." - NJ_Gent (2004)

[Valpal1]

You are conflating the Declaration of Independance with the Constitution. Documents that were written a decade apart with a war intervening.

While the Declaration may have been a suicide pact in that if the war failed they would surely all hang, but the Constitution, written after a victorious rebellion and after the first attempt at self government via the Articles of Confederation most assuredly was not a suicide pact.

You are blowing smoke out your ass.