Daily Broadside | Did You Commemorate Constitution Day Yesterday?

I can hardly believe in three-and-half years of blogging about faith, culture and politics, I’ve never written about Constitution Day, which was yesterday.

Also known as Citizenship Day, Constitution Day is an American observance begun in 2005, honoring the day 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the United States Constitution. This historic date was September 17, 1787, 236 years ago.

Another important figure in the creation of Constitution Day is Louise Leigh. Leigh, after taking a course in Constitutional History with the National Center for Constitutional Studies, was inspired to spread her newfound love of the Constitution throughout the country. In 1997, she founded a nonprofit organization called Constitution Day, Inc. to help encourage recognition of the importance of this national holiday.

Through her efforts, Constitution Day became an official holiday alongside Citizenship Day in 2004 when, with the help of support from Senator Robert Byrd, the “Constitution Day” amendment to the Omnibus Spending Bill passed. In May 2005, the United States Department of Education backed the law when it announced that it would apply to any school receiving federal funds of any kind.

What is unique about the U.S. Constitution is that it is the only law passed by the People, and legislatures are therefore under the oversight of the People. In other words, the governments of this land, whether federal or state, are answerable to the People through the Constitution. We, the People, have the right and responsibility to demand that our “rulers” honor its authority and do not transgress it, as they are more and more inclined to do.

But to do that we need to know what it says. Here are some facts about the Constitution to get you interested in learning more.

  • James Madison, America’s fourth President (1809-1817), made a major contribution to the ratification of the Constitution by writing The Federalist Papers, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In later years, he was referred to as the “Father of the Constitution.”
  • The U.S. Constitution has 4,400 words. It is the oldest—and shortest—written Constitution of any major government in the world. (To be technically accurate, the Constitution contains 4,543 words, including the signatures, has four sheets, each 28-3/4 inches by 23-5/8 inches. It contains 7,591 words when including the 27 amendments.)
  • Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution.
  • There are 27 Amendments to the Constitution. The first ten are called The Bill of Rights and were ratified in 1791.
  • 39 men signed the Constitution. The oldest was Ben Franklin, who was 81, physically frail, and entered the convention hall in a sedan chair borne by four prisoners from the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia.
  • The youngest signer was Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey who was 26 years old.
  • George Washington and James Madison were the only presidents who signed the Constitution.
  • As Benjamin Franklin left the Pennsylvania State House after the final meeting of the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787, he was approached by the wife of the mayor of Philadelphia. She was curious as to what the new government would be. Franklin replied, “A republic, madam. If you can keep it.”
  • The word “democracy” does not appear in the Constitution.

If you’ve never commemorated Constitution Day, think about making an effort to understand the Constitution and then observing the day every September 17 by reading it.

Daily Broadside | Trump Indictment, Tennessee Insurrection, Twitter Censorship and Double Standards

Right off the bat is the news that for the first time in U.S. history, a former president is facing criminal charges. Donald J. Trump has been indicted by a grand jury on charges related to hush-money paid to Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign.

A Manhattan grand jury indicted Donald J. Trump on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to people with knowledge of the matter, a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.

On Thursday evening, after news of the charges had been widely reported, the district attorney’s office confirmed that Mr. Trump had been indicted and that prosecutors had contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to authorities in Manhattan.

The Democrats, the MSM, the RINOs and the NeverTrumpers (a quartet of repetition, I say) have been persecuting Trump for years, ever since he rode down the elevator in 2015 and announced that he was running for president, and especially during his time in office. There has never been so much hatred and animosity standing opposed to such great love and loyalty to a president as there has been with Trump. The persecution of Trump has been one of the most degrading and embarrassing eras in our history.

I’m not going to defend Trump’s behavior, especially since it seems like the “hush money” was paid and nobody disputes it. What is disputed is whether he actually had an affair with Daniels, and whether the money was an inappropriate use of campaign funds or is considered a contribution to his campaign that was improperly accounted for. What gets me is the absolute double-standard the Democrats and their allies have. They have used our institutions to prosecute a relentless war on Trump, searching for a crime with which they can take him out of the presidential race.

This brazen misuse of our laws and the disregard for our history and norms is pushing us closer to the unmentionable. Did you all see the “insurrectiony” takeover of the Tennessee Capitol yesterday? Did you see the police trying to prevent protesters from entering, but failing, and the protestors disrupting the People’s Business?

(It’s here that I’d link to a Twitter video, but I apparently hate women who shoot 9-year-olds and the Twitter Nazis have locked up my account.)

Do you think Merrick Garland and the DOJ and FBI will be rounding up protestors and holding them indefinitely in solitary confinement? Or nah? Did I mention the double-standards that the Democrats and their allies have?

Also, speaking of my locked Twitter account, I learned that it wasn’t just me. Apparently, many conservative opinion leaders found themselves locked out of their accounts. Here’s what Sean Davis, CEO and the co-founder of The Federalist, wrote:

I had high hopes for Twitter under Elon Musk’s watch. After all, how could the tech giant get any worse after banning the New York Post, which was founded by Alexander Hamilton himself, for the crime of reporting on possible corruption of the family of a leading presidential candidate in the middle of a close election?

We now have an answer: by banning conservative Christians for reporting on the horrific mass shooting perpetrated by an apparent “trans” person who hated conservative Christians so much she stormed a Christian school in Nashville, opened fire, and murdered three 9-year-old children and three adult staff.

[…]

Well, it happened on Monday at a quiet Christian school atop a hill in the middle of Nashville. And by Wednesday afternoon I was banned by Twitter from accessing my account for reporting on the shooting, for reporting on the Trans Day of Vengeance which may well have inspired the cold-blooded murderer, and for sharing a link to a news story from The Daily Wire, another conservative news outlet based in Nashville.

Twitter claimed my reporting violated Twitter’s terms of service and that I had personally threatened, incited, glorified, or expressed a desire for violence. Such a claim isn’t just false; it’s defamatory. Twitter published a notice on my feed (which I can no longer even access) stating I violated its rules. Again, such a claim is false and defamatory. Twitter has a right to ban me for whatever reason it wants, but it doesn’t have a right to viciously lie about me.

Here’s his diagnosis of what Twitter is doing:

What the people behind this censorship are truly worried about is the prospect of the American people understanding the true evil underlying transgender ideology and the danger it poses to the country and its survival. They don’t want you to understand how every major institution of power in this country bends its knee to the radical trans movement, tells its adherents they are victims, and tells them that anyone who utters the verboten truth that boys cannot become girls and girls cannot become boys wishes to commit genocide against the so-called trans community.

What do you think is the logical conclusion of telling delusional, mentally ill people being surgically mutilated and pumped full of hormones that Christians and conservatives want to commit “genocide” against them? That’s the question you’re not allowed to ask because they know how you’ll answer it because you watched with your own eyes what happened in Nashville on Monday.

Finally,

When a rage-filled and mentally ill “trans” person shoots up a school, the media blame Republicans, or the NRA, or gun makers, or anyone other than the shooter and her warped ideology. They turn the victims into villains, and they turn the murderer into a martyr.

Twitter responded no differently. It didn’t ban us and lock us out of our accounts for lying, but for telling the truth. Why? Because the facts of Monday’s mass murder are fatal to the left-wing narrative, and the only thing the left wing and its myriad institutions in government, business, and media care about is the narrative. The narrative must be protected at all costs, even if it means lying about the facts and those of us who report them.

He’s right, you know. We are now, without question, living in a country that censors free speech. It doesn’t matter if Twitter or YouTube or Google are private companies. They are being allowed to censor political, ideological and moral thought on their platforms under the guise of “safety.”

We’re living out Benjamin Franklin’s famous quotation: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

What is happening is that the goons who run the Left are pushing the Right toward desperation. Desperate people will take desperate measures. Let’s hope we have time to turn things around before we get to that point.

If the Democrats didn’t have double-standards, they’d have no standards at all.

Have a good weekend.