Roscoe Bartlett: “You mentioned our Founding Fathers. It might be instructive to seek their counsel and to look back at how we got here…”

“You mentioned our Founding Fathers. It might be instructive to seek their counsel and to look back at how we got here and their dreams for this country. Our Founding Fathers came mostly from the British Isles and the European continent. If you think back in your history, almost all of them came from a country that was ruled by a king or an emperor who claimed and, incredibly from our perspective, was granted divine rights. What that says is that the rights came from God to the king or the emperor. They were divine rights. He would give what rights he wished to his people. When our Founding Fathers came here, in that Declaration of Independence, they made a very radical statement and we read it and seldom reflect on how radical it was. They said there that all men are created equal. The country they came from did not believe that because they thought the king and the emperor was created more equal, if we can use the term from Animal Farm. And that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And what our Founding Fathers wanted to establish was a very limited government. They did that by writing into the Constitution, and I always carry a copy of it, in article 1, section 8, and these are just the words between my two thumbs. That is not much. This describes all of the powers that they granted to the Federal Government.”