Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Observations
just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens." Fortunately, Ms. Spears' naive reasoning was not shared by Thomas Jefferson, who had a better idea and suggested that rather than just sit back and allow a president or Congress or judges to arbitrarily alter the meaning of the Constitution, we must make only those changes that have popular consent and do so through the amendment process, which the Founders sensibly included in the Constitution. Not all amendments have been good ones, of course, as evidenced by numbers 16, 17, and 18 (which was repealed), but that process is far superior to what we have done and are doing to the first 10 amendments the other way. It is indeed sad to observe the embarrassing and shameful lack of knowledge and understanding of the founding principles of our country and how legions of Americans who don't know or understand them threaten our very survival as a free nation. But as bad as that is, it is far worse when our elected officials, who took an oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the United States Constitution, share in this ignorance. Or worse, if they ignore their oath in favor of not preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution in order to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" to meet some foreign ideological vision. Just how many of our 535 elected representatives in Congress and the hundreds of thousands of other federal employees including the president and his cabinet really understand the supreme law of the land, the United States Constitution, is unknown. But watching Mr. Obama's behavior and the behavior of the rest of the government suggests that number is horrifyingly small . Ignorance is bliss, they say. But not in our government.