Our political leaders have forgotten about the spirit of 1776
PHILADELPHIA–Here, 225 years ago, on a day just as sweltering as today, George Washington, James Madison, Gouvernor Morris, John Adams and others hammered out the Constitution in what we now call Independence Hall.
Visiting there last month—incidentally, on the anniversary of the Constitution’s ratification—I heard the park ranger remind the tourists hailing from Alabama to the Ukraine that the document the Framers created was only four pages—four pages that built that greatest nation the world has ever seen. In the end, many were not completely happy with every aspect of the proposed final version. But in a rousing speech urging the convention to approve the Constitution, Ben Franklin, in his densely persuasive way, said, “I am not sure, that it is not the best.” That was all the delegates needed to hear.
As the tour moved on, I stayed back a few seconds, staring at the empty black chairs and the green desks with quill pens, positioned as they were back then. I tried to envision the Framers sitting, arguing, pacing, writing, maybe even struggling to stay awake in the intense heat as they tried to forge a nation. But it was tough to see them as real humans in my mind. All of those characters are so familiar to us as Americans, yet, when you try to picture them actually talking with each other in that room it’s not easy. We know them so well, yet we don’t know what Washington and Franklin sounded like. Even in my imagination, I can only see them as giants, as legends of world history, as unmoving statues in a wax museum. I could even picture them as bobbleheads but not as human beings.
But we do know what they believed in, what they were willing to fight for and die for. Standing there in Independence Hall, surrounded by the ghosts of the Framers, all I could think about was the future of the country. The document forged that summer has lasted us a long while, but we’ve abused it and ignored it too often. And now, with thousand-page legislation like Obamacare, we are losing the freedoms the Framers tried to enshrine. Our current president has no regard for the Constitution. He doesn’t talk about it, he doesn’t cite it, and he definitely does not feel limited by it.
The President and members of Congress should, of their own initiative, visit Independence Hall now and then, just to sit there in silence, and think about the free society they have been entrusted with governing. Let everything else just fade away for a minute, and remember the spirit of 1776 and 1787. Forget about the trappings and the platitudes and Yankee Doodle and remember the purpose of the Revolution and the Constitution: To free a people from a government that interfered with their lives, to allow Americans to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as they see fit.
It’s called Independence Hall for a reason: Those men did not sit there presuming to solve every problem of the world; they did not try to craft a plan that would help them achieve permanent power; they did not propose anything that would make people dependent on government. They had an almost sacred respect for the rights of the people and institutions of America–inviolable rights, as they called them. Inviolable! Not subject to any exceptions–not even in the name of a federal Health and Human services mandate! These were the nonnegotiables as they negotiated to form a governing document that could protect the freedoms for which patriots had shed blood.
Imagine a hundred years from now, a group of tourists visit the backroom where Obamacare was hammered out. Would they have the same sense of awe experienced by those breathing in the air of Independence Hall? Would they get chills, standing in the shadows of those who created a new American constitution otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act?
Of course not. And maybe by then, we’ll be calling the Capitol Building by a new name: Dependence Hall, the place where our liberties were lost, because we failed to be vigilant and decided to quit being independent, chooing to surrender liberty for government handouts. As Franklin said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”