Tag: constitution

I’ve been reading Common Sense…

by Thomas Paine, and I’ll quote from it in this post. But hey, I just quoted Angelica Schulyer! Here she is, with her sisters, and other members of the Hamilton company, at the White House.

Now to quote T Paine himself. There’s a wonderful passage from toward the end of Common Sense. Here’s the setup.

We ought to reflect, that there are three different ways, by which an independancy may hereafter be effected… By the legal voice of the people in Congress; by a military power; or by a mob

And here’s the payoff.

Should an independancy be brought about by the first of these means, we have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Feel free to share your own favorite quotes from Thomas Paine, Lin-Manuel Miranda, or…

If I Were a Patriot, Invited to the White House

If I were a Patriot, I’d be proud, but uncertain about how to reply to the invitation to the White House. The word Patriot here refers to the Superbowl-winning New England Patriots. I’m not a Patriot in that sense.

So, if I were a Patriot, what would I be thinking? I believe Tom Brady’s statement: Everybody has their own choice. I’d respect each teammates’ individual decision, whether it be Brady’s decision to go this time, or the decision of several others not to enter the Trump White House.

I’d go. I’d take a gift for the 45th President: a book on the constitution. Given the recipient, it shouldn’t be a tome. I’d go with The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution. The pages are neither large nor numerous (a little over 200 of them). The type is not small.

Constitutional scholar Richard Beeman adds annotations and a few short chapters to:

  • The Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson’s second paragraph describes governments as “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.
  • The Constitution itself.
  • The Amendments. I might highlight the first amendment, which of course is about freedom: of religion, of speech, of the press, of assembly, and of petition.
  • Three of The Federalist Papers: 10, 51, and 78. The last of these is Alexander Hamilton’s essay on the importance of protecting “the weakest of the three departments” of government: the judiciary. I think that the judiciary will prove less weak than Hamilton feared, or than Trump seems to hope.

What would you do, if you were a Patriot, invited to the White House?