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In honor of Constitution Day, we present the preamble to the U.S. Constitution and its first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights:
The Daily Progress
Forging the new Constitution was an arduous task, one conducted in relative secrecy and completed only with several critical compromises to win support from delegated representing states with large and small populations. But ultimately those attending the Constitutional Convention emerged with a document, signed on this day in 1787 by those delegates, that remains the governing charter for this nation. Readers already well versed in these details should pat themselves on the back, because it turns out they are a minority of Americans, according to polling by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The Princeton, N.J., based organization, which helps cultivate leaders in higher education, government and other fields, released figures in February reflecting a woeful national ignorance about the U.S. Constitution and the nation’s origins.
The Virginian-Pilot
American history is a story about warring factions as much as it is about national unity. But even after the most corrosive factionalism between free and slave states, which erupted into a bloody and fratricidal Civil War, the Constitution was still there to provide the framework for the 13th and 14th Amendments ending slavery and enshrining due process and equal protection under the law. “The constitutional project can be understood as a way to save representative government from its own democratic excesses,” wrote Jay Cost, author of “The Inconveniences of Democracy: The Constitution and the Problem of Majority Factionalism,” which pointed out that constitutional mechanisms represent an uneasy compromise between majority rule and individual rights that is always in tension. But “the U.S. Constitution is the longest-running, written instrument of government in the world today, and undoubtedly, the United States would not be as prosperous and powerful a nation without it,” Cost added.
Free Lance-Star
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