On Sept. 17, 1787, George Washington and other members of the Constitutional Convention signed the document that was to be the foundational law of our land, the Constitution.
In this year of America’s 250th birthday, it is especially incumbent upon us to mark important patriotic holidays and refresh our memory with the words and deeds of our greatest forefathers. Take the time today to read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that the Founders added to it not many years later. The last thing many of our elected officials want is for us to understand and hold them to the standard of the Constitution, but that is exactly what We the People should be doing.
In our modern day, schools, politicians, and influencers love to focus on the weaknesses and imperfections of the Constitution (although many of them don’t seem to have read the document, as, for instance, they are unaware that the word “slavery” is not in it and that it never restricted voting based on sex or race). No one, including the men who originally signed it, ever said that it was perfect, because no political document can be that. The question is whether or not it was a brilliant, historic, and nation-shaping document with many original and admirable propositions for forming a uniquely free society? And to that question we can answer, most emphatically, yes. President Donald Trump rightly called it “the most righteous political document ever conceived.”
Indeed, if our government actually followed the Constitution now — and the overwhelming majority of both parties and all branches of government do not — we would be a great deal better off as a nation.
Related: Trump Proposes Smithsonian Tributes to George Washington, ‘America’s Greatest Hero’
President Trump declared in his official proclamation for today:
On September 17, 1787, the Founding Fathers assembled at Independence Hall to summon the courage of the American Spirit and boldly proclaim, in a single governing document, their resolve to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for our national defense, ensure the welfare of all our citizens, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. The 39 patriots who signed it, many of whom had risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for Independence just years before during the Revolution, immortalized the essential principles of the rule of law, the separation of powers, and federalism as the cornerstone of our Republic.
In the picture below, which I took in Independence Hall on July 2 of this year, you can see that the room is set up for the Constitutional Convention, with George Washington’s chair in the middle up on the dais, as he was the president. The story that all the docents love to tell is that Benjamin Franklin — who had been in that same room to vote for the Declaration of Independence — would look at that chair during the debates of the convention and wonder if the decorative sun on it was a rising or a setting sun. With the signing of the Constitution, he had great hopes it was a rising sun.
And indeed, as the sun heralds a new day, the Constitution heralded the dawn of a new nation.