On the recordSeptember 17, 2015
today, we celebrate the 228th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of the United States. Some elected officials talk about their love of ``the Constitution and the Bill of Rights''. That specific phrasing is interesting in that it somehow implies that the Constitution does not itself include the Bill of Rights, which of course it does. But it contains much more than those original 10 amendments. Each year, I remind Americans that we must celebrate not just the original Constitution of Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and the Founding generation but the whole Constitution, including its 27 amendments. This includes the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which many scholars have rightly described as our Nation's Second Founding. The Senate commemorated the Sesquicentennial or the 150th anniversary of the Second Founding earlier this year when the Senate passed a resolution raising awareness about this series of amendments, which provided the country with a new birth of freedom. Ratified by President Lincoln and his generation after the Civil War, these Second Founding amendments transformed our original charter--most fundamentally--by elevating the principle of equality to a central place in our constitutional order.…
