Transcription
Our founding fathers believed in self-government, but they also believed in rule of law and that at any given moment majorities can be a little crazy. Fads and mobs can be equally tyrannical. So when people say our democracy and their version of that is 50.001% of voters agree with what they want. That is not the way the founders thought democracy should operate in this country.
Hey there friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. John Pola here, and well, we are just eight days out from the birthday of this great country of the United States, the 4th of July. And I thought I would take this Friday and next Friday to dive into the two most important documents, the founding documents of this great country of ours, the United States of America, or how it used to be called, these United States. And you know, the funny thing about what is now, I believe, the oldest constitutional republic still standing, we, the United States, is that our founding documents are quite short. In fact, like I have this little, uh, this little book here, the, uh, Essential Liberty, tiny little book, tiny book. This is Nolan sitting ac over here. And and the funny thing is this has got a lot more than just the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In fact, the Constitution is only like 10 pages right in the middle. It's like nothing. It's like it's like this. Like you almost have to like squint, and it'd be even shorter if the pages weren't so small.
So, I thought I would take this Friday to actually talk about the Constitution, the law of the land, and some of the key provisions in a, in a dad-like way because I am not a historian. And well, I'm hoping that you can use this to help just talk about our founding and and our law with your kids. And before we dig deeper, just a quick reminder to hit that like button and subscribe to the channel. Less than half of you are subscribed, and doing so really helps us reach new people.
And now, right back to it. What are we talking about? What is this thing? First of all, when we say that we are a republic and that we are a nation of laws, the concept here is that pure democracy doesn't rule us. One of the, I think, in a way, most important things to remember and to teach our kids, especially if they aren't learning it in school, is that we, the United States, are not technically a democracy in the sense that that is the singular concept behind how we are governed. We are, in fact, a constitutional republic. This is something that my grandfather, Gino Polei, used to tell me all the time. "We're not a democracy. We're a constitutional republic." What does that mean? It means that we have a constitution. It is written down, and it actually binds and restricts our democracy, the elements of our government that is controlled by popular vote. And it defines how the pieces work, how they interact. When you ask the public, when you go out into the streets and ask them the most basic questions about the structure of this nation's government, you get revealed how bad our education system is because most people don't know. And so that's one of the things that's great about just going back to the original text. It lays it all out, and it is surprisingly short and surprisingly simple. In fact, one way to think about the beauty of the simplicity of our law at its base is that the more complex a problem, the more complex a system like a society, the simpler you want the laws to be, because the complexity of society married with the complexity of law, like for example, the massive bills we have today or the governance of places like the European Union, the more you just end up with essentially arbitrary rule that is neither democratic nor really law in any meaningful sense.
When we think about what law even is, I think one way to think about it is for something to be law in a way that's useful and in the way that sort of the Greeks and the great philosophers of political science have often talked about it. It should be something that everyone is capable of knowing so that they can abide by it. If it's, if you're not capable of knowing what the law is, it calls into question whether it's in fact really law in the true sense, or if it's just kind of the way for leaders to point somebody out and say, as Stalin did, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime," because all of us are committing three felonies a day, which was a book that came out years and years ago and unfortunately is still true. We're all committing felonies every day because of the complexity of our law. But at the base of it is this simple, beautiful document. This expression of essentially the enlightenment of the, the thinkers, the, the principles that culminated at this moment in the late 1700s that gave birth to the American republic.
So let's start off with the preamble. It's quite short. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." And right off the bat, we have embedded in here a, a phrase that has been stretched beyond all reason and accountability in our progressive era. And that is this idea of "promotion of the general welfare." This has been used and called upon to basically say that anything we want to do might promote the general welfare. Because if I can make the argument that it's good, well, then it must promote the general welfare. This is one of the first challenges with trying to debate the Constitution and how it might constrain government today. Um, we confront language that is simple and that isn't saying, "By general welfare, we mean literally, we actually don't mean anything. We just mean sort of a broad sense of like, it's not chaos." This has been abused, in my opinion, to promote all manner of essentially unlimited government power, including things like eminent domain and all the rest, like the government literally stealing from people to do things that are in very narrow people's interests, but claiming it's for the general welfare. Um, but right out of the gate with the preamble, there's, there's been controversy over the past 250 years.
In some ways, though, I think a good way to think about what the preamble does. It attempts, I think, to capture the motivation behind the document. You know, when we write contracts, you usually have sort of an early declaration of the objectives, like what is it that we're here to do? In, in as plain English before we get into all the details, you know, "We're getting together to do this project so that we can make some money or whatever." I, I think that's a reasonable way to interpret what the preamble is. It is, it is indeed a preamble. It is not. That's why the use of the general welfare to justify all manner of things that are otherwise prohibited by the Bill of Rights, uh, is a problem.
What is laid out in each article is the structure of our government. And I think it's noteworthy that in Article One, we get the establishment of the Congress. The founders believed that fundamentally, the Congress was to be the most important part of our government, as crazy as that sounds today. Uh, but that's what our founders understood. They wanted self-governance. And I, this reminds me actually, right off the bat, of something pretty incredible, and that is the Bill of Rights, which was a set of addendums, amendments to our Constitution. There was initially 10 ratified, but 12 were put forward. Today, we think of the First Amendment, of course, as "Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech," etc., which I'll come back to. But that wasn't the first one to be proposed. In fact, the first one reads this, and pay close attention because it's actually pretty dramatic: "After the enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, as in 100 representatives, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred representatives, nor more than one representative for every fifty thousand persons."
So, so what does this mean? What would have happened if this was actually the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution? It would actually be a radical transformation because as we sit here today, there are currently 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. This is the most directly, or it used to be the most directly, um, representative body of our government. The House of Representatives, named for obvious reasons, the most representative body. The Senate was not initially in the original Constitution, uh, directly elected. They were actually appointed by state legislatures. Which was better? And I'll come back to that. 435. Well, there is currently 340 million Americans. So, what does that add up to? 340 million divided by 435, there are roughly 781,000 people in this country per member of the House of Representatives. So, each House representative represents three-quarters, over three-quarters of a million people. A large city, not the largest city, but a large city. Our founders, inspired by the Greeks, inspired by the Romans, didn't think that was a functional polis, as in the, the political body. They wanted to make sure that the House of Representatives, each representative had a chance to have like a meaningful, sort of three degrees of separation type of relationship with the people they represented. And so that first amendment was designed to keep it that way. Now, what would it mean to have no more than 50,000 people per representative? How many representatives would we have? Well, I'll tell you. We'd have 6,800 representatives. The House of Representatives would be enormous. Would it be functional? It's not clear. Would this have survived? I don't know. But I think what it points to is just how large a society we have become and how far from the kind of representation that our founders were seeking initially to preserve in our Constitution. It is, it's a really interesting, lesser-known, the hidden amendment. The secret first amendment of the U.S. Constitution would have meant nearly 7,000 members of Congress and a lot more Americans actually genuinely knowing their congressmen, and maybe our feelings about Congress would be higher than they are now, which are in the basement.
So the Congress is comprised of a House of Representatives, which was meant to be again, the more populist, popularly elected group, and then the Senate, the more deliberative, the narrower, the more, let's say, um, elite body, again, modeled after the Greeks and Romans to help make the House of Representatives more representative and the Senate more deliberative, more immune from the passions and the fads of their time. The House of Representatives is up for re-election every two years, while senators hold a six-year term. Now, again, I realize this is like civics 101, but considering the state of civics in this country, I figured I'm doing a public service by going over these basics. So, that's one thing. Right out of the gate, even inside of the, the Congress itself, which was considered again to be the most important, the central body, the central actor, the determiner of policy. There was a kind of separation of powers by the, between the two bodies, the bicameral legislature.
One of the most important things that got lost in the progressive era was the way that more deliberative body, the Senate, works. Because in the name of both being the least democratic people, actually people like Woodrow Wilson, who believed in sort of elite technocratic rule by white lab coat experts. But that, that progressive moment wrapped itself in the idea of democracy and so did away with the original structure and the original election of senators. And that is worth reading because here is how it originally was conceived: "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote." Chosen by the legislature. Why did they do that? What was the idea here? And why even have this un, this sort of even number but uneven in representation amount of senators, because there's highly populous states and very sparsely populated states. So a tiny state today like say, Vermont, gets two senators, and so does Texas or California or New York or Pennsylvania. Why do that? Well, again, this was about trying to create constraints on democracy, on mob rule. Our founders understood that the more populous states in a purely democratic system, where simply majority rules would just run roughshod over the smaller states. And moreover, the founders were so worried about centralized power that right from the start, they were like, "How can we make it that the more elite, deliberative body of the Senate was actually doing the work of the states and accountable to the states?" Because their re-election would be a function of the state legislators, the people elected in the state, not the state population itself, but the actual legislators of the states. This was an attempt to bake in one of the most important innovations of America in governance, and that is federalism. The idea that power was essentially distributed to the states, that we were these United States, a collection of sovereign states, brought together under a union, but still left with most of the power and authority locally. And the Senate was meant to be protective of that.
So, one way to think about the movement that brought about direct election of senators is when it came about and what else was put into place. Namely, it happened in 1913 alongside of several other huge progressive, progressive reforms, namely the establishment of the income tax, which was not a power granted to the federal government in our original Constitution, and the creation of the Federal Reserve, the least democratic institution in our society. So, amid this, the stew of progressive centralization of power came the 17th Amendment, the direct popular election of senators, and I think that tells you a lot about what was understood to be happening and why it changed when it changed. It was about centralizing power in Washington. Whereas the original Section Three of Article One of the Constitution that establishes the Senate was about decentralizing power and ensuring that states had a say, that states and the state governments specifically had skin in the game and had a role to play in the way the federal government worked. And I think this is actually a reform that we should restore. I think that this is an area where democracy has gone too far in the United States. We have too much centralized power in Washington. And if you happen to be a Democrat and watching the show, which I hope there's some of you, I know there are. I know there's actually quite a few Democrats that watch the show, but you should want this too because you don't like President Trump. And so, you want him constrained more by the powers that are vested in the other institutions. And that is what we will always want because power will always swing back and forth. The factions fighting factions, as the founders would talk about, will continue to happen so long as we have a country. It's always unpopular to want constraints on power when you're in power, and more popular when you're out. But the founders at the outset were trying to put as many constraints in place as possible, and this was one of them.
There's so much else in here. I think the other piece of the puzzle in the body of the Constitution itself that is striking is the presidency because the presidency is quite small. It is a narrow executive. In fact, Article Two of the Constitution establishes our president, and a lot of it is spent laying out how he will be elected. What his powers are, his or her, let's say, powers are, uh, are not that enumerated and are not that vast. They're quite small. So, "Section One. The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected as follows." And it proceeds to lay things out, including the Electoral College, which again, was an attempt to regulate pure democracy. The electors were established to essentially be a buttress to protect the Constitution and the structure of the society from unknown popular whims. This is how it works. It survives to this day, much to the chagrin of whoever loses and wishes to overturn it. But it is another check on power and check on pure populism. One of the things today is we have a rising sense of populism, and the, the U.S. Constitution and the structure of our government is simultaneously deeply populist in that it is highly skeptical of central power and authority, and anti-populist in that it recognizes that the majority can act like a mob that will regret what it's done when the fever breaks, and therefore shouldn't be allowed to just run with whatever fad happens to be popular at the moment. And so it is, it is a populist and anti-populist, federalist and anti-federalist force always at work in the American separation of powers.
But let's just look at what the president is allowed to do. "Section Two. The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States." Commander-in-chief. Straightforward enough. "He may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment." So he can't pardon himself. "He shall have Power by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law. But the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments." In other words, the president has to seek approval for just about everything, for appointments, for everything. He has to really get the Congress to let him, let him do stuff. Let him hire people. Here's this one little gap that has been put to use quite a bit. "The, the President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session." So this is the recess appointments trick, and it is a way to get potentially unpopular people that you want to nominate into positions, into their position. And you wait for the Senate to go on recess, and then you say, "All right, I appoint you people that I don't think will pass muster with the Senate, especially if it's held by the other party, uh, into position." They'll ultimately eventually have to face the Senate, but not until the next session.
All right. "Section Three. He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time to which the same shall be adjourned; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the Officers of the United States." Here's kind of the amazing thing about the presidency. This one line here: "He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the Officers of the United States." This is it. This is the sum total of the, of the presidency. Most of Article Two, which is quite short in general, is about how the president will be elected. The vast powers that our president wields to essentially draft what seems like legislation in the name of executive orders or establish whole cloth new agencies, which has been going on forever, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which Richard Nixon just sort of magically invented, or the Department of Education, which Jimmy Carter just magically invented. There's nothing about that in the Constitution. There's nothing saying you can do that. In fact, it's pretty clear that you can't just decide that the federal government suddenly cares about education, something which the Constitution never mentions, and create a whole department dedicated to education or the environment. The Constitution makes no reference to either of these concepts. If I hit command F and say "education," not found. Not found. It's not in there. How about "environment"? Environment. Not found. How about "healthcare"? Or how about just "health"? The word "health" is not in the Constitution of the United States. And what does that mean? That means that more than two-thirds of all of the spending the federal government does is on things that were not conceived as being its responsibilities at the time of the founding. That being said, because the Congress was given a fair amount of latitude to pass laws, that is what they did.
Did you talk about the Supreme Court? Why not? "Article Three. The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office." So there will be a Supreme Court, and the Congress can establish lower courts. "Section Two. The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority; to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls; to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction; to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party; to Controversies between two or more States; between a State and Citizens of another State; between Citizens of different States; between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States." So basically, anytime you have anything interstate or involving the country as a whole, the Supreme Court is the final say, except it's also not, because whatever the Supreme Court rules can then be kicked essentially back to the Congress and the president within the constraints of the Constitution to change the law.
There's a couple things about the, um, the establishment of the Supreme Court in the Constitution that are pretty striking and that might come as a surprise. One of them is the number of members of the Supreme Court is not specified in the Constitution, and neither is the methodology for the court to actually follow in how it interprets its job. In fact, the notion of striking things down that are unconstitutional at is is functionally just implied in the fact that the Constitution is established as the law of the land. But it is not stated explicitly that the role of the Supreme Court is to judge on the basis of whether laws are in compliance with the Constitution or not. That concept technically is simply implied by the fact that the court is created by the Constitution itself. So that is pretty interesting to me, the lay reader of our founding document, and it is part of why the battles we have over these institutions are the way they are. As specific as the founders tried to be, they were also quite sensitive about not being too specific and not being too prescriptive in the design of these institutions. And so it has been a process of evolution that has led us to where we are today. We didn't always have nine members of the Supreme Court. In fact, I believe we began with six and it settled at nine in the late 1800s. In fact, the, the desire to try to pack the court, which happens again whenever the party out of power, uh, isn't happy with the way the court is operating. I mean, technically, the size of the Supreme Court is not specified. This is just an interesting reality of our founding documents that they leave a lot of room for "we the people" to get things right or wrong as we progress through our 250 years.
And one last piece of this very much dad review of the Constitution before we move into the Bill of Rights is Article Five. Because one debate that shouldn't be a debate is whether or not the document is a living document or not, which is to say, should the current issues of the day be interpreted on the basis of what is in the Constitution and its amendments, or by a kind of voodoo in which we imagine new things like the right to privacy, for example, the right to abortion? These are things that have no basis in the Constitution directly. Can we just push it around? Can we say that, well, "general welfare" includes making sure people have unemployment insurance because that's how I'm interpreting "general welfare" today? The reason why that doesn't hold water for me, and really shouldn't hold water in general as a legitimate argument, is because one of the things the Constitution does provide is a way to keep it alive legally, and it is called amendments. And in Article Five, it lays out this process: "The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress: Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State without its Consent shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate." It's laying out a process by which a super-super majority of the whole country and all of its governments agree to make a change to the rules of the game that has been laid out by this document. That is how this works.
To go back to those House, uh, progressive era days of the early 1910s, good old 1913. As much as I despise most of the legislation that came out of the progressive era, particularly prohibition, the income tax, the Federal Reserve, and the popular election of senators, they were super popular. They were super majority popular. They were popular enough to become the law of the land, to get added to our Constitution, ratified by three-quarters of the governments of this country. We got to deal with that. The case was being made successfully that those were things worth having. And if we want to take them back, if we want to restore the prior consensus, we will have to build that consensus with a lot of work, or perhaps in the aftermath of something quite terrible, like a total fiscal collapse. Either way, the Constitution is a living document through the process of amendment, not just random judge or random politician deciding they think the words mean something different because this is modern times. That's, that is unnecessary. We have a process. Why is it so steep? Why is it so difficult? Because again, our founding fathers believed in self-government, but they also believed in rule of law and that at any given moment, majorities can be a little crazy. Fads and mobs can be equally tyrannical. And so they made it really hard to change the rules unless almost everybody agrees. So when people say our democracy and their version of that is 50.001% of voters agree with what they want. That is not the way the founders thought democracy should operate in this country.
And that brings us to the Bill of Rights because the Bill of Rights was a kind of compromise during the debates that led to the ratification of the Constitution. There was a fundamental debate about whether the Constitution adequately protected individual liberty and state sovereignty while creating a stronger central government than had existed under the Articles of Confederation, which were generally seen to have been too weak to hold the young country together from all sides. One of the central debates was whether enumerating specific rights protected by the Constitution in the form of this first wave of amendments, whether that would suggest that these are the only rights the public has. This is how much our founders were worried about government power infringing on the free exercise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and/or private property by the American people themselves. They were worried that if we lay out the rights that the public has, future politicians would say, "Those are the only rights people have, and we can do whatever we want so long as we don't trample on these." Well, the first, ultimately 10 amendments to the Constitution, considered the Bill of Rights, tried its best in a compromise to make it clear that that is not the case.
Let's go through a couple of the big ones. I already talked about what would have been the first, namely ensuring that the House of Representatives was actually representative, even if it became enormous. That one didn't make muster. The original second amendment actually was this. And this is also kind of amazing, and should, and should immediately ring like, "Why didn't they pass this one?" Ready? "Article the second. No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened." In other words, the second thing that was proposed and unfortunately shot down in a way that would be a harbinger of what was to come, was that the Congress can't vote itself a pay raise. Like, I, this was, you know, in the "give me liberty or give me death," "we will have a revolution over taxes and taxation without representation." You see that personality play out right here in the second could have, should have, but wasn't amendment to the Constitution.
And so there you have it. Uh, the first two were actually kind of great. We should have passed them. But I, I think we should all be happy that through historical accident, our first amendment, as, as adopted, turned out to be this: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The First Amendment of the United States, officially. I'm happy this turned out to be the First Amendment because the spirit of it, especially as we sit here in 2026, 250 years later, is so important to the kind of society we are and stands in such stark contrast to the nations that we came from as a people, namely the United Kingdom. Great Britain, who currently, as we sit here, is arresting 12,000 of its own citizens every year on the basis of using "hurty words" on the internet that is expressly prohibited by our First Amendment. We have in this country the strongest protection for freedom of speech and expression of any country on this planet. This is a birthright. If there is a creed in this Constitution and Bill of Rights, this is among its most important provisions. It is also a challenging one because it gives such wide berth to speech that we can and do and see free speech in our country for the destruction of our country. We have entire universities and entire departments and disciplines who have been quite explicit in wanting to tear all this to shreds and burn it to the ground. And we not just tolerate that. We protect it. As Voltaire said, "I disapprove of what you say, but we'll defend to the death your right to say it." It is an example of how the U.S. Constitution is an embodiment of enlightenment values. And they're good values. They are values that rest on a set of assumptions, one of which being a culture that will preserve them, that I think has come under greater and greater pressure. And so, "a free society, if you can keep it, a republic, if you can keep it," remains the reason why America needs saving.
I think quickly after the first, of course, is the second, and this is perhaps the amendment and the protection that also protects all the rest. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Now, the formulation of this sentence in our present day leaves it open and has left it open to being interpreted in a bunch of different ways. So, let's just read this one again slowly. "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," and then another comma, though it feels like it's starting something new. "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." So the argument against the individual right to keep and bear arms, to have a gun, in part rests on whether or not this notion of a "well-regulated militia" are the people in question. Is the Second Amendment saying that the people of a well-regulated militia shall not have the right to bear arms infringed? Or is it saying, as it says plainly here, except in its full context, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"? Now, once again, America stands pretty unique, though not singularly, in our protection of the individual right to bear arms, certainly among, uh, the First World West. Again, our, our friends in Britain, our former rulers, you know, they're now chasing down people with swords in the streets, but there's not a lot of guns because they aren't allowed to have them. The same with most of the English-speaking world, although Canada actually has quite a bit of guns. We have pretty consistently, and especially more recently with the Heller case, fallen down strongly on the side that the individual American has the right to keep and bear arms. And I think what has been proven out by the broader Western world, and certainly by the experience of the German people with the rise of the Nazis, is that when you disarm the public, it is the path to tyranny. And a well-armed public is a break on the tyranny of the state. That's a fact. That's how much the right to bear arms serves as a defense against state tyranny. And that is what the Second Amendment is very clearly talking about, which is the other part of the Second Amendment. It does not say the people in order to protect their home from invaders have the right to bear arms. It says, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State." That is really important. It's quite clear that the Second Amendment understood plainly that the reason to keep and bear arms was to be protective against tyrannical government. The kind of tyrannical government that this document was freeing its people from, that the Declaration of Independence was pushing back against. That is what we're talking about with the Second Amendment. It is not self-defense. Self-defense is not here. There's no talk of self-defense. There's no talk of petty crime or murderers.
There is, however, in the Third Amendment, again, talk of government. "No Soldier shall, in time of Peace be quartered in any House, without the Consent of the Owner, nor in time of War, but in a Manner to be prescribed by Law." So again, this speaks to the tensions during the founding, which I'm going to talk about more next week with the Declaration of Independence, that the fact that the King was stationing troops by force in the homes of the colonists. People didn't like that. That was a taking. That was taking command of people's homes for the service of the state. So when you look at these two together in context, it even further clarifies who we're needing to be protected from with our right to bear arms. It is from soldiers. It is from the state.
The next one, and is also super important. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Well, in one sense, this is a defense of private property. It is also, you could argue, a defense of personal privacy, but what it is explicitly a prohibition on is a general warrant or broad surveillance of the public. So when Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was essentially collecting and searching the personal effects and papers in the form of telephone calls and internet traffic of functionally the entire population. That was a violation of this amendment to the Constitution. That was plainly wholly unconstitutional behavior. That was criminal. The government does not have the right to just come in and snoop on us. It does not have the right to go to AT&T and demand all of their records, all of them. The search power of the state is narrowly constrained. You need to get a warrant. You need to have probable cause. So, you need to, you need to have proof that you have reasonable expectation that what you're looking for might be there. You're not just doing "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" Stalin-type stuff. This is an extremely important protection for the American people, and one that our government, particularly in the digital age, violates with such reckless abandon that it should turn your stomach, except it's all done in secret, often under threat of heinous destruction if you even let the public know that you're doing it. So, one of the things again, in our smartphone, internet-connected digital age, that has happened repeatedly is that federal law enforcement and the security state has sought to violate this and also told the people that it's seeking to do general searches that they are not allowed to let anybody know. That is absolutely heinous. And the tools put together to try to put the patina of legitimacy on this are secret courts like the FISA court. And well, I can go on and on about this forever while still not fundamentally being the kind of expert I wish I was, but suffice to say, this is the, among the most important amendments in our modern times for the things that we touch and use every day, including the platforms you're using to watch this video right now.
I'm going to jump ahead to what became the Ninth and Tenth Amendment because they speak again to the debate that was being had at the time of the ratification of the Constitution and the concern about enumerating rights. The Ninth and Tenth Amendment, taken together, make it crystal clear what the Congress and the government shall not do. "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Crystal clear. Just because we're calling out some rights in this document does not mean there aren't plenty of others. And the Tenth, the underutilized power of the Tenth Amendment. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People." And that was the, "just in case we weren't perfectly clear, let it be known that this is it. These are the prohibitions on government power, and everything else that's not prohibited explicitly is prohibited de facto and granted to the states or to the public." And that is where the founders shook out at the birth of the nation proper. That is what they believed set up what they hoped would be a republic, if we could keep it. A free society, a society that had a strong enough government to protect itself, but no stronger. Its powers to tax were quite limited. Its powers to legislate were quite limited by all the things that "Congress shall pass no law abridging." And its power to search and intimidate and threaten the public were strictly, strictly limited. This is what it means to be a constitutional conservative. To lionize our Constitution. It is to say to embrace essentially a metaphysical assertion that we the people have rights that they are endowed by the Creator. This is the Declaration of Independence. They are there and inherent in us, in and of themselves, that we are an end unto ourselves. That we the people should not ever be treated as a means to someone else's end. And I think the great challenge as we move into the second 250 years is a lot of the shared values that went into this document, the faith, the culture, the experiences, and also just the environment, the constraints of the late 1700s and early 1800s, the kind of world that was, we will never be back there. And so preserving the things that are truly universal in this document, the importance of constraining power, the, the wisdom that is underneath that, which is embodied in Lord Acton, who said, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." These stand in direct opposition as a, as a mode, as an understanding of the nature of humankind, to the progressive era, which would come a hundred years later and, and be embodied in Woodrow Wilson, and who basically kicks this period off under which we still live to this day, in which the state becomes the expert above all experts, in which there is no matter too small for government to intervene. That is not how our founders understood what our relationship to government should be. You can't read our Constitution and see that kind of government in the words of the original ratified Constitution and Bill of Rights. Which is why people like Woodrow Wilson decried this document, said it was outmoded. And when I, when I come back to Wilson, because Wilson is the pivot point in the path of the United States, Wilson and that progressive era took us into a new phase. That new phase, that phase of top-down, essentially unlimited authority, is probably going to come to an end one way or another. Most likely through something like bankruptcy. But I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, I'm certain that we don't. As I sit here, the "Saves America" part is about this. It is about the, the, the principles that are truly universal and survived the test of time as we look back on this document 250 years later. We can preserve this. We can restore the parts of this that were literally undermined quite explicitly by the progressive era. And we can do it in a way that doesn't return us to the things that needed to be changed. The universal rights for all men and women protected now, but not fully protected then.
And it's worth noting that the great hypocrisy of our founding, that we sought to maximize individual liberty in terms of government power while still having slavery. It's really noteworthy that slavery is very nominally referenced in 1791, when this document is ultimately fully ratified with its Bill of Rights. There is very little reference to slavery in our Constitution, except here in Article One, Section Two, with regard to the counting of votes. And its states: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons." And so slaves were counted as three-fifths when it came to the proportion of taxes and representatives. Now, when you read that, it's grotesque because you're saying for the purposes of law, the slaves were three-fifths of a person. One other way you could look at that is that for the apportionment of power, slave states don't get to count their slaves fully, which diminishes their power relative to what it would have been if they could fully count them. And so right from the start, even in this three-fifths clause, you have the tension that is baked in to the founding of the United States and its creed and its claim, and its most famous founders, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom were slaveholders. This is the tension that when we are harangued today, 250 years later, long past full suffrage and two terms, 20 years ago, of our first black president, when we're harangued about failing to confront slavery in this country, I think that that rhetoric looking backwards really lacks all context because even the three-fifths apportionment was a kind of undermining of the slave states right from the start, and there was well-documented discomfort even with Jefferson himself regarding slavery, this discontent, this desire for abolition among many founders, and many of the many of the important cultures of the American founding, like in my home state with Pennsylvania, the Quakers. That speaks to something that I think we as Americans need to take full stock of. And that is that 75 years after the founding, which, as we sit here, is not that long, we abolished slavery. And we did so through an incredibly painful and bloody Civil War that led to 600,000
Americans giving their life to the cause. Now obviously many of those 600,000 were in fact southern fighters, but the fact that hundreds of thousands of free people in the north went to their death in a civil war whose cause wasn't singularly slavery, but what that was the central cause, ultimately that speaks to the the true founding of the United States, the true moral core of our creed that all men are created equal.
Such that this thing which persisted for all of human history, slavery and subjugation, and which a tiny percentage of Americans participated in even then, and which the United States, the US colonies at the time that were slave states, represented a tiny tiny fraction of the slave trade globally. I just think today, at this moment, 250 years later, it's time for us to only tell the story fully that America was this uniquely horrible slave state. Has to just come to an end, cuz it's false. It has to come to an end. It's false. We were not that. We were actually together with Britain, who really in a way led the charge globally, were the forces of emancipation. Our emancipation proclamation was actually more consistent with the founding of the country 250 years ago than it was with any of the rest of the slaveocracy that represented all of human civilization and continued to persist. Particularly in places that now, uh, have a rising amount of influence over our progressive movement here today, namely the Arab world.
This is the fuller history of our country and of slavery in our country that we as parents need to know enough about to talk to our kids about because they're just not going to get it most of the time in school. They're not going to get it in popular culture or in most of popular discourse. We can do two things at once. We can be repulsed by racism, by any form of tribal supremacy and of slavery and the owning of other people, and recognize that the owning of other people goes all the way back to Moses and was universal and was broadly considered to be perfectly acceptable. In fact, one of the criticisms of the Bible is its failure, even with the Apostle Paul, to renounce slavery because it was a book of its time. But we did. We did. America did. And the British Empire did. And for that, we should be proud. We should celebrate. We should be grateful for the inheritance of that and for the culture that fed into it that made it possible, which was broadly a Christian enlightenment culture. That is what our country was founded in. That was the waters in which our constitutional boat was built to float. Christian enlightenment values. Even our freedom of speech and religion had in it an assumption that this would be a country in which the religions had tolerance of others baked into them. And so the grappling with the potential for there to be faith traditions or ideologies that wholesale reject the core creed and that those could full have a full flourishing expression in our society, I think wasn't really accounted for. They accounted for the possibility of Tories and monarch loyalists. They weren't quite accounting for the possibility of communists and Sharia law.
And so as we try to grapple with those forces which are explicit in their desire to overthrow our constitutional republic, I think the most challenging question we face as a civilization is how to preserve that which makes us unique and American in a way that actually is durable in the face of those challenges. And I don't have a perfect answer for that because I think that that is the hardest question I grapple with personally as I sit here trying to think how this dad can try to help save America. But let me know what you think. Was this a helpful sort of flyover of our founding document, the Constitution? Did you learn something? Was it good to just be reminded? Uh, let me know in the comments. Head over to dadsamerica.com where we'll put some links to some of these kind of things because they're great pocket constitution. If you love what we're doing, you can support us over there as be becoming a member or donating because we are a nonprofit. And of course, you can celebrate America by buying our merch at the shelf down below, like this mug. And as usual, have a great weekend.