I was inspired last week watching an interview by Piers Morgan with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. It was an interesting interview - Morgan asking questions completely from an ignorant standpoint - which can be a good thing - but one of his last questions was the one that got me thinking. To paraphrase: How are the Founders any smarter than the legislators that we have sitting in Congress today? Why should we take their ideas any more seriously than we take anyone else's?
Justice Scalia answered better than I could have - I almost fell off my chair when I heard the question. First, I believe, he said that no one today has the capability to wrote what the Founding Fathers wrote, and that if you read the Federalist Papers you could understand that. And that there were certain times in history where genius strikes, and the late 1770s-1780s was a time that it struck.
That got me thinking. I had a Constitutional law teacher some years ago who had suggested that we read one of the Federalist Papers each night since they are quite short. I should have listened to her.
So I propose here a "text study" of sorts. I hope that everyone here will participate. I want to start with the Declaration of Independence and then move on to the Federalist Papers. I would like to spend about a week on each text. I am including a link to the Declaration of Independence here. The idea is to start to fully understand what our country - through the founding documents - is all about. I hope that we can do that together. Please leave your comments and questions below.
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