So we're beginning the national nightmare of having our soldiers (and soon, anyone from America working there) killed on a daily basis in Iraq. British troops are dying. A British jounalist was just shot and killed. How did we end up in this mess? Why should many who supported the war feel shame and guilt over it? Because they pay more attention to game shows and sit-coms than following the news and events that shape our country and government? They have no sense of history nor care to study the very democracy they are charged with governing. An election rolls around and they wake up from their self-induced sleep for five minutes to see who looks best like an actor playing president on TV and whose commercials deliver the best sound byte while attacking the other candidate.

A few thoughts on America today from various patriots who do care about our history, government and nation.

ROBERT BYRD
U.S. Senator from West Virginia

Nathan Hale volunteered to go behind the British lines in response to a call for volunteers by General Washington. He was discovered and arrested as a spy. That was on Sept. 21, 1776. The next morning he was hauled up before a crude gallows, and they said, "Do you have anything to say?" He said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

So here was Nathan Hale, who was willing to give everything he had. And yet we're not willing today in the U.S. Senate—the Senate passed that resolution shifting the power to declare war from the Congress to the President of the U.S. That was a shame, and only 23 Senators voted against shifting that power. When it came to the Senate, and we didn't cast a vote that demonstrated courage and not intimidation, we should have been reminded of Nathan Hale.

If the Founders had seen just that one vote, they would have been ashamed of us. We politicians have a duty, and we in the Senate have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution. The Constitution says Congress shall have the power to declare war. Yet we stood that right on its head, turned right around and shifted that power over to a President who was not even elected by a majority of the American people.

PAULINE MAIER
Author, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence; currently working on a book on the ratification of the federal Constitution

What's wonderful about John Adams is his attitude toward the deification of the Founders, which was one of immense skepticism. The reinterpretation of the Founders as somehow a special species of human beings akin to religious figures came in after the War of 1812, but John Adams lived to see it, and being an outspoken man, he criticized it. He said, "You know, I don't recognize these people." He particularly execrated the cult of Washington. The idea was that they were human beings, not religious figures. He had the grace to say to a young American, "I'll let you in on a big secret: I don't think my generation was any better than yours."

[Yet] these were the people who laid down the basis for the institutions under which we now live. They managed to carry off a revolution that ended not in more carnage but in peace and in a constitutional order. This is a historical wonder.

How do you think they would take to a country in which the Supreme Court chooses the next President? In their craziest fantasies, the anti-Federalists never thought this would be possible—that Congress doesn't assiduously guard the right to declare war. They would find what came of the institutions they defined bewildering.

BERNARD BAILYN
Author, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders

The founding fathers matter today because they changed the course of history. In devising the forms of our public institutions, they thought long and hard about the problem of power—the power of the state, of the government—and how to protect the individual's liberties from the necessary powers of government. It came up first in their resistance to what they believed was the growth of autocratic power in Britain and in justifying rebellion against it. It came up in the writing of the first state constitutions. And it came up above all in writing and ratifying the Constitution.

The debate on the Constitution, which lasted for almost a year, was one of the greatest struggles over the principles of power and liberty ever recorded. And the result of that debate was that you could not properly have a bill of powers (which is what the Constitution is) without joining to it a bill of rights. That balance between the two—between powers and liberties—is the heart of their thinking, and if there is anything more relevant to our problems today, I don't know what it is.






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